On Thu, 4 Oct 2001, Miikka-Markus Alhonen wrote:
>What about bi-/multilingual place names like "Dublin" vs. "Baile Átha
>Cliath", "Turku" vs. "Åbo" or "ירושלים" vs.
>"القدس" (= Jerusalem)?
I wouldn't know. It's a good thing neither Osama nor his network are
likely to have acquired stable Gaelic names.
>Some people have different variants for their personal names, too, e.g.
>many Westernized Chinese outside China and in Hong Kong have a proper
>"Chinese" name but in addition a "Western" given name which is to be
>used in other linguistic contexts.
Well, sure. If someone has a Westernized name, use it -- that's what it's
there for. Print both for extra PC credit. Somehow I doubt this is much of
an issue with Osama, either.
>The correct spelling on CNN? Do you mean like this:
>
>"The leader of القاعدة organization اسامة بن
>لادن has said..."
To a degree. It would likely not be sensible to use the foreign forms
exclusively, but if the possibility presents itself, why not print them
somewhere? That's why I referred to still background photography, logos
and alike, which after all are present in most televised news broadcasts.
If you're out to catch the most wanted man on Earth, it would seem only
sensible to at least once spell his name the way he and his friends write
it.
>Also the "correct pronunciation" might be something unachievable for most
>newsreaders not specialising in linguistics, e.g. the phonemes /q/ and /ʕ/
>in "al-Qâ`ida", tones in Chinese names (cf. the provinces 山西 and 陕西,
>which are both pronounced [ʂanɕi], just with different tones), long/short
>consonants and vowels in Finnish (e.g. Mika vs. Miika vs. Miikka) etc.
I'd say "getting it right" when dealing with phonemes unpronounceable in
the native tongue of the speaker/listener is more about getting it as
close as possible. There are likely optimal renditions of the terms in
English, but for some weird reason, news presenters do not seem to be able
to settle on them. What I was suggesting was that none of them has
bothered to think too hard about it in the first place.
Besides, one can always practice the pronunciation of lone nouns. To do
that is not that rare, either -- if I'm not entirely mistaken, we have
quite a number of foreign phonemes in use in English e.g. for accented
French loans. Then, even if the two terms at issue here do have some
articulatory nastiness attached to them as far as English speakers are
concerned, we're hardly speaking about features as alien as the Chinese
tones.
(This is getting seriously off topic, too.)
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Oct 03 2001 - 18:41:43 EDT