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. (more…)

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.

I was always taught that the word however is either surrounded by commas, in a sentence like If you do this, however, you will get into trouble, or else it must be either the first or last word in the sentence, and whatever its position, it is an adverb. Now, even on government websites, it is used as a conjunction in the middle of a sentence, with a single comma (sometimes before it, sometimes after) which clearly (to my ears at least) does not fit the intonation. Here is an example from the Highways Agency:

Depending on the stage of works it may be necessary to maintain lane or road closures, however we will do everything possible to open lanes as soon as we can.

Obviously no one proof reads anything any more (re-write: … road closures. However, we will …)

John Wells’ blog today mentions the pronunciation of Beijing, and the BBC Pronunciation Unit’s recommendation to pronounce the -j- in the same way as in the English word ‘jingle’. He wonders how many people will heed the advice (and it’s what he gives in the Longman English Pronunciation Dictionary as well). From my experience, not many.

The New China News Agency (NCNA) decided back in the 1970s that from 1 January 1979, the only romanized spellings they would use for all Chinese names were the Pinyin ones. This meant that the capital city became Beijing, rather than whatever it might be in the various languages the NCNA put copy out in. For English-language newspapers and broadcasters, this left a problem: did they follow suit, and adopt Pinyin spellings (and so pronunciations) for all Chinese names, or did they continue to use the versions that had been current up to then, only using Pinyin for those people and places that were unfamiliar, or had no regular European spellings? Some names did not change, of course, such as the name of the Ming dynasty, but many others acquired very unfamiliar spellings: the Ching dynasty became Qing, and the early Communist leaders changed from Mao Tse Tung and Chou En Lai to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Indexing became a problem as well: did you continue to look under C for the Ching dynasty, or only under Q, or should you cross reference everything, thus increasing the length of the index by a good deal?

Some publishers appeared to be completely bemused - I remember an article in the Times which used both Peking and Beijing in consecutive paragraphs. Many readers must have wondered whether the writer was talking about two different places. The BBC eventually canvassed the views of many of its journalists as to whether the”old” name, Peking, should be used, or the “new” one, Beijing. The correspondent in the Chinese capital at the time thought Peking should be maintained. No one asked me, but had they, I should have agreed with him: the words “old” and “new” were inappropriate in this context. The Chinese had not changed the name of the capital, which might have justified our changing it (as happened with Cambodia changing to Khmer Republic and then Kampuchea, before reverting to Cambodia), but had simply changed their romanization. However, his views were over-ridden, and the BBC has said Beijing ever since. Unfortunately, it has not - apart from the Radio 4 newsreaders (and not all of them!) and newsreaders on other networks (Radios 2 & 3 and World Service principally), most BBC broadcasters persist in using the palato-alveolar fricative (see my post ‘Fricative or Affricate’, and also John Maidment’s blog recently on Chinese alveolo-palatals). Notable exceptions have been every single one of the BBC’s correspondents stationed in Beijing, most recently James Reynolds. If they can learn, I see no reason why the rest of the Corporation’s staff can’t take the trouble to check with the pronunciation database and follow its advice.

I am very grateful to JJM who has answered my plea for information about what the French do with feminine nouns referring to masculine creatures (e.g. sentinelle, recrue) (see his note to “(s)he vs they”), and says that the French have less difficulty separating gender from sex than English speakers do.

Now comes the worrying part: Language Log reported last week that the French no longer agree on the genders of nouns: “Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed only 1 of them”.

Does this mean that we foreigners can now ignore the problem, as we are likely to be “wrong” only as often as the native speakers?

The first dictionary definitions of essential are ‘vital’, ‘absolutely necessary’. However there is one place where we see the word every day when this is not its meaning, even if the users of the word would like us to think it is. Manufacturers of soaps, shower gels, shampoos and the like are keen to tell us when they have added “essential oils” to their products. There are alternative names for these oils: volatile oils or ethereal oils, but of course these names would not serve the ends of the manufacturers - they do not give the impression that without the oils we will die!

All that essential oils do is add a pleasant smell to the product: “essential oil - an oil present in and having the characteristic odour of a plant etc., from which it can be obtained by distillation” (Oxford English Reference Dictionary). Essential in this sense is the adjective formed from essence in its subsidiary meaning: “an extract obtained by distillation etc., especially a volatile oil; a perfume or scent, especially made from a plant or animal substance”.

Essential? I don’t think so!