What is it about Spanish names that sports commentators can never get them right? For the past four days, not a single BBC sports reporter or commentator has pronounced Sergio García’s first name correctly (let’s leave aside for the moment whether the second name ’should be’ garssee-a or garthee-a). They seem to have no problem with the name José - the first sound doesn’t come out as a full-bodied velar fricative, but there is an attempt at it - so why have they decided that Sr García’s first name is Italian? Inevitably, they don’t even get it really right as an Italian name either, saying ’serji-o’ rather than ’sairjo’, but can the golfer really want them to say it that way? Brian Perkins, the incomparable Radio 4 newsreader, is the only broadcaster I’ve heard all week end pronounce it in a Spanish manner. He ought to live up to his “Dead Ringers” reputation, and deal severely with the sports people! (more…)

In the days before most people were literate, there were only two ways to pronounce a foreign place name - you either pronounced it more or less how the locals pronounced it, or you ignored their name and gave the place/river/mountain/whatever a name of your own.

This meant we said Paris as ‘parriss’ and Lyon as ‘lions’ (like more than one of the animals). This is because in early medieval French, Paris was pronounced in French as ‘parreess’, and Lyon as ‘lyonss’ (-y as a consonant, not a vowel). In the course of time, final -s disappeared from French pronunciation, but not from English (I’m talking 12th-13 Century here), but by this time, the names were so familiar to English speakers that they had become English words and started to develop according to English rules rather than French. (more…)

I’ve been very flattered by the review of my piece on the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation in languagehat. It’s started a lot of reaction as well, several points being raised about other things I’ve mentioned. I’ll take them up one at a time.

First, in my piece on the Dictionary, I used the same “phonetic” transcription as the editors, including the -uu- for the vowel of “wood”. This is not the “standard” BBC Modified Spelling for the sound, as anyone who’s seen the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names will know. The original system was refined over many years, and first devised by Arthur Lloyd James in the late 1920s, when he was a lecturer in phonetics at UCL and secretary to the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English. While not in any way equivalent to IPA, the Modified Spelling (MS) serves its purposes admirably: its intention is to allow an English speaker to pronounce anything written in the MS in such a way that it is immediately recognisable, but not pretentious. I think that the MS symbol for the “wood” vowel, which was double O with a short mark above it, was far preferable to -uu- which looks very much like a long vowel. A single -u- is not satisfactory either, as it looks to the non-initiate like the vowel of “bud”, which would also be wrong. Lloyd James had obviously thought this through, but the OUP editors, who I believe insisted on the change for the latest guide, have not.

So, later, when I commented on the pronunciation of P.G.Wodehouse, I used an ordinary re-spelling, to show that the first syllable is pronounced like the word “wood”, and the second like the word “house”.

The approaching tenth anniversary of Diana, Princess of Wales’s death brings Althorp back into the news. This is where she grew up, and where she is buried. The BBC first became aware of the difficulty about pronunciation well before the Second World War - Broadcast English II, published in 1930, included it, with the pronunciation áwltrŏp. Later, in about 1952, the Pronunciation Assistant, G.M. “Elizabeth” Miller, wrote to the then Viscount Althorp (Diana’s father) about it, and was told the same thing. I, as Pronunciation Adviser, wrote to the present Earl Spencer (Diana’s brother) in 1992, and in January the following year, he wrote back saying “áwltrŏp. This is definitely correct. I can remember my grandfather pronouncing it like this; my octogenarian great-aunt does, too - and it is clear that alternative pronunciations only came about recently, out of laziness (it became simpler not to correct the many who mispronounce it - the majority of whom were foreign visitors to the house.)” See here for more on the argument. He included the same pronunciation in his history of Althorp

However, some time after this, he succumbed to the pressure, and put out a press statement saying that henceforth the house should be called ‘áwlthorp’ - as spelt.