On Sat, March 26, 2011 9:20 pm, David H. Bailey wrote: > Why is it that people get upset when Americans pronounce foreign names > and words with Americanized pronunciations, yet I never read or hear of > people getting upset at others, say the French, for pronouncing American > names and words with French pronunciations?
It probably goes hand-in-hand with hyperurbanism, an overcorrection of a perceived error (such as saying "hifalutin" as "high-faluting" or saying "between you and me" as "between you and I"). The American tendency to overcorrect especially applies to foreign placenames, perhaps out of a sense of respect, political correctness, or fear of embarrassment. But keep in mind that there are two tiers of placename pronunciation, the famous (Paris, Rome, The Hague, Germany, Egypt, Italy, Japan, Hungary, China, etc.) and the unfamiliar (most everything else). With the familiar we don't say "Paree", Roma, Den Haag, Deutschland, Misr, Italia, Nippon-koku, Magyarország, Zhōngguó, etc. On the other hand, some people don't try to come close with easily pronounced names -- such as saying Eye-Rack and Eye-Ran -- while other pronunciations are nearly impossible here either through complexity or lack of the sound in English (Eyjafjallajökull, Qatar). Other countries simply have their own names for places (Cologne, Colonia, Köln; Liège, Luik, Lüttisch; Aachen, Aix-la-Chapelle) that change with war and migration. So it seems that anglicized names like Lima, Cairo, Calais, Versailles, etc., sound particularly odd to us today as a more international culture ... as if we couldn't get it right back then. But old Ben Franklin helped drive the "u" out of words like color and behavior to exorcise the colonial scourge. Things change, things get changed. Anybody remember the Chicago spelling reforms? :) For all our apparent simplicity and directness, we are sometimes a complex people. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
