http://www.linguism.co.uk Language in a word Thu, 01 May 2008 14:40:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/my-name 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 ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/respelling 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 ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/linguistic-rhythm 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 ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/afghanistan-again 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, ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/marcel-berlins-and-the-bbc-pronunciation-unit 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 ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/more-on-french-names 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 ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/french-names-stress 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 ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/foreign-place-names-2 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, ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/foreign-place-names-1 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, ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/52