With this man’s arrest at the weekend, broadcasters are once more having to struggle with the pronunciation of his name.

The BBC recommendation, which corresponds to that given in most if not all manuals of pronunciation for Serbian, is to treat the ‘dž’, written with the single letter ‘џ’ in Cyrillic, as the straightforward English voiced palato-alveolar affricate. The final ‘ć’ ([tɕ]) is not the same as the English voiceless palato-alveolar affricate /tʃ/, but this is the nearest English sound to it – many English speakers find it very difficult to distinguish between the two Serbian sounds represented as ć and č, the latter being the [tʃ]. So the full recommendation for BBC broadcasters is /’kærədʒɪtʃ/, or in the BBC’s Modified Spelling, ‘kárrǎjitch’. Radovan doesn’t seem to present any problems at all.

However, many broadcasters are ignoring the ž completely, and saying /’kærədɪtʃ/ (‘kárrǎditch’), while the former Bishop of Oxford, Lord Harries, astonished me this morning by saying /kə’rædzɪk/ – ‘kǎrádd-zick’. He is a well-known commentator on current affairs. Does he never listen to what other people are saying?

It would help if the English-language media could be persuaded to use the necessary diacritics. With unicode fonts now readily available, there is no real excuse for not making use of them.

It ought to be easy to establish anglicized versions of Spanish names – stress is as important in Spanish as in English, and there are far fewer phonemes in Spanish than in English, so we should be able to find equivalents without too much trouble.

A major difficulty is the assumption that many British people make that they already know how to pronounce Spanish, having spent the obligatory fortnight on one of the Costas. In deciding how to treat a particular name, this leads to preconceptions having to be overcome.

Dealing with stress first, the rules for placing the stress on Spanish words are simple:

1. Words that end in a vowel, or in <n> or <s> are stressed on the penultimate syllable. <i> and <u> next to another vowel do not count as a separate syllable, whereas any combination of <a>, <e> or <o> make two syllables.

2. Words that end in any other consonant are stressed on the final syllable.

3. There are exceptions, but these are all marked by an acute accent placed above the stressed vowel. So, if you know the correct Spanish spelling, then you know where the stress comes.

This is where the problems start: English-language printed material often ignores the accents. Consequently, such triples as cántara (water jug), cantara ((s)he would sing), and cantará ((s)he will sing) become confused. In the case of names, Mérida may be stressed wrongly on the second syllable, and Jaén and Cristóbal on the first.

There is one useful rule of thumb: family names that end in <ez> are stressed on the penultimate syllable, so González, Pérez, Martínez. Jerez, a place name not a family name, is stressed on the final syllable.

The name Esteban, which by all the rules is stressed on the second syllable, is mispronounced by many English speakers who stress the first syllable, even though a little thought would make them realise that it is equivalent to Stephen or Steven.

Now for something completely different.

In April, a French luxury yacht, the Ponant, with thirty crew members on board, was hijacked by pirates in the Gulf. The French government decided to pull out all the stops to mount a rescue. The BBC reported the affair rather sketchily, here, here, here, and here,  but now the full story has emerged, in Le Parisien and Le Canard Enchaîné. I’m not aware of any of this being reported in the English-language media. Here is the account from Le Canard (11 June 2008). Any inaccuracies in the translation are mine.

“L’opération a été rondement menée”, avait claironné le chef d’état major des armées aprés l’épopée du Ponant. Sarko exprimait sa “gratitude”. Morin, son ministre de la défense, ses “félicitations” aux “forces armées, qui ont fait preuve de professionnalisme et de réactivité”. Il aurait pu ajouter: et d’une grande capacité d’adaptation dans l’adversité.

“The operation was carried out promptly,” the armed forces chief of staff trumpeted after the epic events surrounding the Ponant. Sarkozy expressed his “gratitude”. Morin, his Minister for Defence, sent his “congratulations” to the “armed forces, which  have demonstrated their professionalism and ability to react”. He might have added: and a great capacity for improvisation in adversity.

(more…)

Language Log today has an example of amazing French official duplicity, arrogance, ignorance and dishonesty.

A representative of the Académie Française claims that the minority languages of France are nothing more than debased dialects, unworthy of being recognised as languages at all, having failed to produce writers of the calibre of Balzac, Montesquieu, etc. On top of that, the European initiative to recognise minority languages is all a German plot! Germany being the only EU state to have no minority languages (is that even true?)

So Basque, Catalan, Occitan, all with long and eminent literary histories, are to be consigned to the  dustbin of history because a few narrow-minded French chauvinists (rightly is that word borrowed from French!) can’t be bothered to find out anything about them.

There are surely more Catalan speakers, for instance, than Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonians. Does the Academy not want to recognise these languages either, as being not worthy of notice? And yet they are national languages.

I think the French state feels very insecure. Inferiority complex?