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 remember when the Olympics were held in Nagano, my boss of the time,
>who was of distant Japanese descent, complained to me that the American
>announcers were mispronouncing "Nagano" and that they should learn to
>pronounce it correctly.
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.
>"Absolutely," I said, "and the Japanese announcers should be sure to
>pronounce 'California' correctly." He was not amused.
Believe me, I can relate. Finnish shares some of its pronunciation with
Japanese, and it certainly wasn't fun learning to pronounce English
properly, back then. Especially those damn native American place names...
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.
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
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