> From: Sampo Syreeni [mailto:decoy@iki.fi]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2001 11:32 AM
> On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Ayers, Mike wrote:
>
> >I'm willing to bet that most of them have at least one
> person on staff
> >who can do exactly that - however, far too little of the
> audience would
> >be interested.
>
> Well, naturally. Putting a lot of effort into "getting it
> right" would not
> be sensible. However, I still think slipping the original
> Arabic form into
> background graphics or the like would not take too much work,
> and would
> please the pedantic among us. Not to mention Arabic immigrants.
I don't disagree with you, but I do have to wonder how many people
would call and email in wanting to know what the funny word was...
> Place names are a bit different, since people are often accustomed to
> hearing them in some variant, native language mutation. I
> don't think many
> would be thrown off if CNN from the beginning decided to
> report Osama's
> dealings using the correct pronunciation or spelling.
Had the spelling changed, people would have wondered if it was the
same person. The same rules that apply to place names tend to apply to the
names of famous people.
> However, I think it would not be entirely out of the question
> to demand
> the proper Latin form to be shown somewhere beside the katakana
> transliteration.
Errr, first you'd have to explain to the Japanese that katakana
don't correctly represent English words. Most Japanese believe otherwise.
If you've never had the experience of struggling to understand some Japanese
spoken by someone who was quickly getting impatient with your inability to
understand it, only to realize that it was supposed to be Englishm, then
lucky you.
People tend to harbor the belief that words can be moved between
languages unchanged. In truth, it is the exception, not the rule, that this
can be done. This is especially true bringing words into English, which,
despite its use of so many sounds, has no phonetic spelling to constrain
those sounds. No matter how you spell the word, the pronunciation will vary
widely amongst English speakers.
Just a thought,
/|/|ike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Oct 03 2001 - 15:15:33 EDT