At 8:07 PM 03/13/03, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote: >This is a lot of fun to talk about, especially when considering how hard it >is to transcribe material for singing. I have some choral scores that used >some bizarre vocalization scheme in parallel with the actual English words >... I forget what it was called, but I believe it has mercifully died >out... Anybody remember it?
I saw something like that in a pop reduction of a song from "The Hunt for Red October". (I never saw the movie.) I remember the second syllable of "teper" came out as "pierre"! >And you might recall the CNN tussle over how to pronounce Qatar. In one of >the more amusing results of this, a native reporter told Wolf Blitzer that >it was hard to pronounce, but most closely resembled the English word >"cutter". With her accent, she said "cutter" with very clear t's, not the >softened d sound of spoken English. But the reporters started saying "In >reports from Cudder today..." This is complicated by the fact that Arabic accents themselves vary considerably. On the other hand, I've actually heard a few people on TV say the "Q" sound properly. >Not to mention Xosha... :) Um, I think you mean Xhosa. The "x" is a lateral click and the "h" makes it aspirated. Except that in many languages the click has been softened almost to a "k". I used to know which ones preserved it, but I've forgotten. All of the clicks are originally foreign to earlier Bantu, and were adopted more recently from exposure to Khoi-San. [answering me] >>As a practical matter, I like a tight transliteration -- that is, one which >>has a strongly logical correspondence to the LETTERS of the original >>language, as opposed to the sounds -- and then from that the reader can be >>taught the sounds. > >It can be useful if you actually want to make sense of the language from >its transliteration. (Do you think a lot of folks really do that?) Yes yes yes. I don't know if they would do it on their own, but I know that I sure want them to. I'm an opera chorus director (amateur singers in the chorus) and I fight daily to try to get them to understand what they're saying. The closer they get to real words, as opposed to random syllables, the better we are. I'm not truly fluent in anything other than English, but in all the basic opera languages I know enough to parse a sentence logically and recognize which word is which when given a translation. I think that makes a huge difference. If you're reading Russian in IPA you can't even use a dictionary to look things up; with a good transliteration, plus a rudimentary knowledge of the grammar, you can. >But as in the Cudder/Qatar example, it's only an occasional name or a word >most folks will care about. With respect to Shi'ite, then, the mark is >useful (whatever the objections to the etymology of the anglicized word) >because it distinguishes it in a way that was lost in, say, the common >pronunciation of "shiitake" (shih-tah-kee). A divided ii survivor is >"skiing". (There are a handful of separated technical words.) So likely an >unseparated "shiite" in the public press (not a journal, but a publication >like Time, which was my first example) will end up being pronounced "sheet". > >The use of the turned comma (vs. an ordinary apostrophe) is a >tip-of-the-type to the character's academic representation, I suppose. If the only purpose here is to divide syllables, then a regular apostrophe would do. (And by that logic, the apostrophe should be included in "Saudi" as well.) Flipping it over is an affectation, I think. I'm referring to the use of occasional names in English text for a lay audience. For any sort of scholarly text, I like the full transliteration with all the markings. -- Warren Heck wrote: >I have to concur. Without opening a can of worms, as one who is some >fluent and >literate in both Russian and Arabic, I find that transliterated text is well >nigh impossible to read without first parsing every character in a word in >order >to divine its meaning. Well, to be honest, if I'm making a choral edition, I'm more interested in being helpful to the 98% who aren't fluent than the 2% who are. But I think the result is the same. In brief, the closer you can get to the real alphabet, the better. mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
