In the late 1980s and 1990s, Oxford University Press published three books of names: The Oxford Dictionary of Surnames (Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, 1988); A Dictionary of First Names (Hanks and Hodges, 1990); and A Dictionary of English Place-Names (A.D.Mills, 1998). Then in 2002, OUP decided to reissue all three volumes under a single cover as The Oxford Names Companion. I am naturally disappointed that they did not include a fourth title: The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (G.E.Pointon, 1983), as this would have nicely complemented all three.

Unfortunately, they did not take this opportunity of updating the volumes to make them consistent.

I don’t think I’m unusual in this: when I got my copy of the Companion, I looked up my own name. It’s there, in both the Surnames and the Place-Names sections, but the entries do not correspond.

Surname:

Pointon English: habitation name from a place in Lincs., so called from OE Pohhingtūn ’settlement (OE tūn) associated with Pohha‘, a byname apparently meaning ‘Bag’ (cf. POKE). Var.: Poynton

Place-Name:

Pointon Lincs. Pochinton 1086 (DB). ‘Estate associated with a man called Pohha’. OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

Poynton Ches. Povinton 1249. ‘Estate associated with a man called *Pofa’.  OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

Poynton Green Shrops. Peventone 1086 (DB). ‘Estate associated with a man called *Pēofa’. OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

(DB = Domesday Book; * before a name means it is not attested)

So we have three places from which the Pointons/Poyntons may take their name, not one. How can we decide which is the most likely in any particular case? University College London and the National Trust have come to our aid.

There is now a website, http://www.nationaltrustnames.org.uk/, which tracks the distribution of family names in Great Britain in 1881 and 1998.

This gives the absolute frequency of a name, and also its relative frequency (occurrences per million of the population) and ranking (where its frequency stands in relation to all other family names). There is also a map which shows the areas where the name appears most frequently. In both 1881 and 1998 there were heavy concentrations for both spellings in Staffordshire and Cheshire. Allowing for some of the south Staffordshire families having moved there from Shropshire, it seems clear that the Companion has got it wrong in stating categorically that Pointon originates in Lincolnshire - the least likely origin of the three possible ones for the vast majority of Pointons, who live in north Staffordshire and south Cheshire. Hanks and Hodges seem to have been beguiled by the spelling, which is clearly arbitrary, and to have ignored the evidence in their own research for the alternative (Poynton).

I don’t often disagree with John Wells, but I have to make an exception in the case of his blog entry for yesterday (St George’s Day 2008 - 23 April). He says:

“In the respelling systems I designed first for the Reader’s Digest Great Illustrated Dictionary (1984) and then later for the Encarta World English Dictionary (1999), with their spin-offs (pictured), I introduced the idea of making use of doubled consonant letters.”

No, he didn’t introduce this idea - the BBC has been using double consonant letters in its respelling system since the first edition of Broadcast English I: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding Certain Words of Doubtful Pronunciation (1928). The system in use by the BBC now is rather more sophisticated than that, which was devised by Arthur Lloyd James, but the principle remains the same. Here are a few examples from that first publication, with the traditional orthography in brackets:

áddults (adults), bárraazh (barrage), bássolt (basalt), bíttewmen (bitumen), éppilogg (epilogue), répplikka (replica), wésslĭan (wesleyan).

John must have been at least subconsciously aware of the BBC system - which he was presumably already familiar with from the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names, which uses what the BBC calls its Modified Spelling alongside an IPA transcription - when he started work for the Reader’s Digest.

Where I do agree with John is his initial statement that most users of dictionaries fail to read the introductory material, material that is just as important as the alphabetical entries when it comes to interpreting the editors’ intentions.

Traditionally, since the days of Arthur Lloyd James and Kenneth Lee Pike, languages have been divided into two broad types: syllable-timed and stress-timed. French was considered the archetypal syllable-timed language (Lloyd James called this ‘machine gun rhythm’), in which each syllable had a similar duration, and English, probably the language whose rhythm has been studied most intensively, and mostly by native English speakers, the archetypal stress-timed language, in which stresses occur at approximately equal intervals of time. Doubt has been cast on this classification, because the measurements taken by phoneticians using ever more sophisticated machines have shown that neither syllables nor stresses are truly isochronous.

Phoneticians need to consider the case of music, which is, like language, a form of “organised sound”, and which also consists of variation in pitch, timing and intensity. Drum machines create mathematically exact rhythms, which humans cannot do. Human performers, on the other hand, produce interpretations of musical works which are not mathematically precise, but are still, nevertheless, rhythmical. Bach is considered to be one of the most scientific of composers, but electronic renderings of his music, while rhythmically precise, are lifeless. Performances by a human interpreter, however, can move the listener deeply. Composers using ‘Sibelius’, or one of the other suites of music software, find that they have difficulty using a (piano) keyboard to play in the rhythm that they want to be recorded, because the software recognises the minute differences of duration between the notes, and transcribes what it “hears”, leading to tiny fractions of beats being notated when they are not intended.

It is perhaps no accident that many phoneticians through the years have also been proficient musicians. As phoneticians, we need to learn more about the way in which we hear musical rhythm, and apply that knowledge to how we hear language. It has often been reported that interlocutors take up each other’s rhythms in a conversation. How can they do this if there is no rhythm to take up? Measuring durations of sounds in milliseconds will not work: rubato, accelerandi and rallentandi cannot be accounted for in such terms. Instead, a more impressionistic approach is needed, that will allow for the nuances of expression that are conveyed by rhythmical variation.

It may well be that there are more than the two types of linguistic rhythm, or that there is a gradient from extreme syllable timing to extreme stress timing, but I believe that it is our ears, not our machines, that will decide this in the long run.

Angshu, in a comment on my ‘Afghanistan’ post, has been critical of my reasoning for recommending the English pronunciation of Afghanistan even to Mishal Husain, who uses a variant that may or may not be an Afghan (whether Dari or Pushtu) pronunciation.

Angshu appears to be saying that a bilingual French and English speaker should pronounce the capital of France in the French way when speaking English. Presumably I, in the same way, should continue to pronounce London in the English fashion when I am speaking French (even though I am not bilingual), and ignore the fact that French has a perfectly good version - Londres. Most English speakers know that Germany is called Deutschland in German. Are newsreaders to say “In Deutschland this afternoon …”? That way madness lies.
When Mishal Husain is speaking Punjabi, or Urdu, or whatever her other language is as a bilingual speaker, then I would expect her to call England by whatever it happens to be in that language, and not “England”. Likewise, when she is speaking English, it is mere pretension to affect a Punjabi/Urdu pronunciation for a South Asian place name, when there is a well-established English version.

The debate over the pronunciation of Pres. Sarkozy’s name rumbles on. John Wells today seems to be advocating middle syllable stress as the obvious one for English speakers, but he is ignoring the predecents of Mitterrand and Pompidou. He suggests that only an out-of-touch pedant would advise the Hungarian stress, but neither Mitterrand nor Pompidou had this justification for initial stress, and yet they tripped off the English tongue just fine, while MitTERRand and PomPIdou would have sounded bizarre. Names from other languages often have final syllable stress transferred to the initial syllable in English: Khrushchëv and Gorbachëv are two Russian names that immediately spring to mind.

John’s comments are prompted by Marcel Berlins’ column in yesterday’s Guardian. Mr Berlins has, as they say, ‘previous’, in complaining about the BBC Pronunciation Unit: about ten years ago, he wrote a piece in which he claimed that a member of the Unit had told him he was mispronouncing his own name. I wrote him a polite letter saying that it was most unlikely that any member of the Unit should have suggested such a thing, as policy was always to recommend the version preferred by the bearer of the name. In fact, no member of the Unit recalled having even spoken to Mr Berlins, let alone having discussed the pronunciation of his name with him. Instead of writing back to me, Mr Berlins returned to the topic in his column, and (one assumes jocularly) threatened legal action for doubting his word. As a good BBC employee, I let the matter drop at that time, but it is clear that he enjoys attacking those who cannot answer back in kind. I find it difficult to believe that any current member of the Unit could write a “snide, sniffy and defensive letter”, as he says.

Rather than just assert this to be the case through his column, he should publish the offending words, and let us see for ourselves just how unpleasant the current members of the Unit are, so that we may all know how to treat them in future. Perhaps Mr Berlins should take the trouble to visit the Unit, and meet the three highly qualified, and very personable, linguists, and develop a personal relationship with them rather than making “snide” and “sniffy” comments about them from afar.

Athel Cornish-Bowden in Marseille asks about the final -s in some French place names, and French versions of non-French place names (e.g. Douvres, Londres, Cornouailles).

The final -s in these names is often the final remnant of the Old French masculine nominative singular case, which in turn is the left over of Latin final -us in masculine names. Old French retained two of the Latin six cases: the nominative, and the accusative (called in Old French the oblique). Masculine nouns seem to be perverse in this form, in that the nominative singular ends in -s, while the plural does not, and the oblique singular has a zero ending, while the plural ends in -s. As the two case system “decayed” into the no case system we have today (except for the pronoun declensions), the nominative was the form of most nouns that disappeared. Not always, however, and those names that retain the final -s are the last survivors of the Latin case: Charles, Georges, Gilles are three boys’ given names that retain -s - and note that in two of these cases so does modern English (Charles and Giles). Many place names also retain this final -s, and in English we have kept more, it seems, than the French themselves. Marseilles (English) or Marseille (modern French) is just that. Until at least the Second World War, Marseilles was pronounced /mɑːr’seɪlz/ in English, and the final -s (or /z/ sound) was dropped when we English started to realise that the French don’t say it that way - just like the change in Lyon.

Athel makes one very common slip in his lists of names: while Algiers is spelt with final -s in English, Tangier is not. In French, neither name has a final -s.

In fact, French names cause all sorts of problems for English speakers, not least of where to put the stress. French, of course, has no lexical stress, but it would be impossible for an English speaker to avoid stressing at least one syllable in a name. Where should that stress go?

The names of Presidents of the Fifth Republic provide a fair sample.  De Gaulle was no problem: two syllables, the first has a neutral vowel in both languages, so the second was the natural choice for stress. But then Pompidou was the first of three to have three syllables. The nearest to a stressed syllable in French would be the last, as phrasal stress falls there. That would lead to Pompi’dou, and also Mitte’rrand, and Sarko’zy. None of these sounds natural in English, but interestingly, while the first two lend themselves to initial stress in English (and this was the BBC recommendation in both cases): ‘Pompidou and ‘Mitterrand, the current President seems most comfortably stressed on the second syllable: Sar’kozy. In fact, as we know, Sarkozy is not a French name at all, but Hungarian, in which language it would have been stressed on the first syllable. However, the BBC recommendation is to stress the final syllable, with the predictable result that many journalists, who are not obliged to follow the Pronunciation Unit’s advice, ignore it, and go with Sar’kozy, which is neither French nor Hungarian, and sounds the least French-like to me.

Interspersed between these three, we had Giscard d’Estaing, who fits quite well as ‘Giscard des’taing, and Chirac, whom most people stressed on the first syllable (which was the BBC recommendation), but a few who “knew better”, on the second. Americans, mindful of the fact that these are foreign names, almost invariably pronounce the letter A as a long one, so /ʃirɑːk/. They also have a tendency to stress all shortish French names on the final syllable, so mostly /ʃi’rɑːk/.

On a lighter note, Pompidou caused some childish hilarity in Norway, as “pomp i do” in Norwegian means ‘bottom in toilet’.

Now we get to the difficult ones.

The fourth way of turning a foreign name into your own language is to look at it, and think, well it’s spelt Łódż, so I’ll call it /lɒdz/. This makes no attempt to imitate the original language, but simply takes the basic letter shapes and gives them their English (in this case) pronunciation. I once heard the French town of Béziers pronounced /bǝˈzıǝz/ in a French car park by a British family who had just come from there, but had made no effort to listen to how the local people said it.

It is often thought that we pronounce Paris, and that we used to pronounce Lyons (/ˈlaıǝnz/) on this principle, but it is not true. Read the rest of this entry »

The discussion about Beijing and/or Peking rumbles on, and leads to the more general question of how we can decide what to call geographical locations in foreign countries. This doesn’t just apply to English, but to any language.

So far as I can see, there are only five ways of naming, and this post will not have room to deal with all of them.

The most arrogant, colonialist, way is to ignore the native name, and impose a new one. This  happened with Mount Everest, Ayer’s Rock, and many other places outside Europe in countries that Europeans “discovered”, mainly from the 15th century on. In some cases, of course, the native name may not have been known, and there may even not have been a name. Did Greenland have a name before the Vikings went there? Did the Inuit have a name for it?

The second way is to translate the name into one’s own language. Obviously this only works if the name is already transparently a vocabulary word or phrase. For instance, the English name Greenland is a direct translation of the Old Norse. Similarly, New Zealand is called Nouvelle Zélande in French.

The third way is to borrow the name from another language. So in English, the German city of Köln is Cologne, borrowed from French.

The other two ways derive from the language of the “owners” of the name, and I shall discuss these in my next post.

syz takes me to task for wanting people to follow the BBC (and John Wells’) recommendation for Beijing, and implies that as linguists should describe language, I am guilty of prescriptivism.

Linguists are in a bind here: we all pay lip service to the need for the objective description of language, but as soon as we start to teach a language, we become prescriptive. Necessarily so, because otherwise, what would be the point of the teaching? If anything goes, because native speakers will (generally speaking) make allowances for foreigners, and native speakers don’t need to be taught grammar, spelling, pronunciation, because they already “know” it (do we/they?), then we are all redundant, surely? A much discussed word in the linguistic blogs is “whatever” (or wev), and this is what (in my humble opinion anyway - I refuse to use textspeak abbreviations) is the end result of pure descriptivism.

One of the justifications to me for making recommendations, especially for the pronunciation of names, is courtesy: I think that very few of us are complacent about the mispronunciation of our own name, and are grateful when non-native speakers make the effort to get it right. [Digression: I remember being amazed when a Frenchman actually pronounced “Graham” correctly (in two syllables, with the first like the word ‘grey’). I asked him how he knew, and he said he was a fan of Graham Norton (comedian and TV chat show host). It turned out that this man, a waiter at a hotel in northern France, had spent six months in England. I asked him where: “Dover”.] Place names, for me, are an extension of this. While a personal name is “owned” by its bearer, a place name can be said to be “owned” by its inhabitants. This was always the BBC’s reasoning for advising the pronunciation of British place names that was favoured by local people, and why I stuck to the recommendation for Althorp that was used by Earl Spencer and his family even when the senior management of the BBC insisted otherwise (see my post on Althorp).

Now syz tells us that there are Mandarin-speaking expats who use [beɪʒɪŋ] rather than [beɪdʒɪŋ] as the pronunciation of their capital. I assume he means native English speakers living in China. I wonder what pronunciation they use when speaking Mandarin. The BBC’s correspondents have all continued to use [beɪdʒɪŋ], even the ones who often disagreed with the Pronunciation Unit’s recommendations, and so can’t be accused of simply following the party line, so some of the toothpaste must still be in the tube!
There may well come a time when [beɪʒɪŋ] is accepted universally as the anglicization, but until that time, my view is that the BBC is right to try and uphold a more authentic pronunciation.