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Germanic Lexicon Project
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Author: William
Date: 2005-10-20 21:12:17
Subject: Re: Dialectal pronunciations
Thank you, Sean.
What I'm more curious about is whether the original pronunciation has to be maintained in theory (an 'r' ending remaining an 'r' ending rather than mutating into a 'y' ending, or some such). At what point does a word or name officially become a NEW word or name? Or can this even been determined?
By the way, I'm not an Imperialist, but I refuse to say "pa-tee'na" (patina), even if it is Latin. For me, it's "pat'na" or nothing (preferably nothing).
William
> > Thanks Sean.
> >
> > If I may change the subject, are there any rules regarding the "correct" pronunciation
> > of names? Especially across national lines? I've always assumed that the name-holder has
> > the right to decide how the name should be pronounced.
> >
> > William
>
> Your question seems to be getting at how things ought to be. I don't have any good answer for that, but I can say the following.
>
> Whenever a word is borrowed from one language to another, the pronunciation is brought into conformance with the restrictions of the borrowing language. Borrowed names work just like any other loan word in this respect. True, you'll find individuals who carefully pronounce loan words or names according to the pronunciation in the donor language (such as English speakers who carefully pronounce a velar fricative in "Bach"), but this is a special, conscious effort to avoid the normal process of making loan words conform to the constraints of the borrowing language.
>
> I one had an argument with someone who insisted that it was "imperialist" for English speakers to nativize loan names into English such as "Chicago" or "Wisconsin". I explained that this is a process that goes on in the same way regardless of the political relationship between the speakers of the donor and recipient languages. For example, if speakers of Dyirbal, an indigenous language of Australia, were to borrow the place name "New York" in their discussions about that American city, they'd nativize the pronunciation of the name to their language according to exactly the same broader linguistic principles that an English speaker nativizes "Chicago" or "Wisconsin", even though Dyirbal speakers don't exactly have a history of imperial dominance over English-speaking North Americans. I'm not at all denying the reality or wrongness of imperialism, but I just don't think that we can sustain the idea that nativizing the pronunciation of loan names is something deliberate which speakers do to oppress others. Speakers cannot do otherwise.
>
> --Sean