Petr Roesel asks if the pronunciation of Salman Rushdie that I gave as the “correct” one is an accurate reflexion of the pronunciation in Urdu.
All words borrowed from one language into another, whether names or not, have to be adapted in order to fit the phonology of the borrowing language. Sometimes, when the borrowing language is a well-established literary language and has its own writing system, it prefers to adopt a pronunciation that reflects the spelling as interpreted by the borrowing language. For instance, the word football has been borrowed by French with the English spelling, but with the second syllable pronounced ‘bal’ (as in ballet), whereas Spanish has borrowed a close approximation to the English pronunciation, changing the spelling to fit: fútbol.
In the special case of names, the BBC always aimed to make a recommendation that was as close to the native pronunciation as was possible while using mainly English sounds. I am not a speaker of Urdu, but I think I am safe in saying that in Salman Rushdie’s name, the two vowels of the first name are both open, that the second is long while the first is short, and that stress falls on the second syllable. In the family name, the first vowel is back and close rather than open, the second front and close, and the stress is on the first syllable. I would expect a French or German speaker to use a uvular R at the beginning of the family name, a dental L, N and D, and a clear L in the first name, where English speakers would have an approximant R, alveolar L, N, and D, and a dark L. While the French speaker would have no trouble with the initial voiceless S, a German might substitute a voiced sound, although Austrians would find the voiceless sound natural to their dialect of German.
As a reminder, the pronunciation recommended to the BBC by friends of the author is salMAAN ROOSHdi (-al as in “pal”, -oo as in “book”, and the stressed syllables in capitals). It is what you might call “Urdu with an English accent”.
Starting in the early 1990s, I was increasingly asked at the BBC how we should be pronouncing the names of the years following 1999. Until then, there was only one way of naming the years: by grouping the numbers in twos, i.e. 1899 was eighteen ninetynine, or, in the case of the last year of a century, by saying, for example, nineteen hundred. The choice for the future appeared to be between two thousand and twenty hundred, and then two thousand and one and twenty oh one, etc.
For 2001, I always thought that two thousand and one was inevitable, as that was the title of the Stanley Kubrick film from the 1960s, and for over thirty years it had been pronounced like that, but the rest of the decade would have to wait until we got there. The oddity was 2000, which was (and is) rarely called two thousand, and never twenty hundred. The usual pronunciation is the year two thousand, and very often the words “the year” precede “2000″ in writing as well.
Charlotte Green was, I think, unique among BBC newsreaders and radio announcers in calling the subsequent years twenty oh …, and this habit was questioned on Radio 4’s Feedback (BBC domestic radio’s ‘listeners’ letters’ programme). But early in 2006, she succumbed to the adverse criticism, and started to say two thousand and … like all her colleagues.
Interestingly, for years following 2009, we hear much more the twenty oh … style, and I suspect that at New Year 2010, we shall start to hear this regularly.
It is very disappointing that Charlotte received hate mail for this pronunciation. There was nothing wrong in English terms with the style she had adopted, and the British public should be more tolerant. However, I know from bitter experience that there is nothing that makes British people more angry and abusive than a perceived mispronunciation.
In the case of year pronunciations, the French have always had two styles, and as a student of French at secondary school, I was made aware of this very early on: 1968 is either mille neuf cent soixante-huit, or dix-neuf cent soixante-huit. Why should English be restricted to a single way? There’s more than one way of skinning a cat!
In John Wells’s blog today, he talks about the interjection (or should that be exclamation?) most usually associated nowadays with Homer Simpson - variously spelt doh, d’oh or duh. He quotes from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and says this may be the only dictionary to include the word. In fact it is also in the 10th edition of the Concise Oxford (1999), Oxford Dictionaries having researched its origins, and taken it back at least to Laurel and Hardy films, in which the word is often to be heard, in very much the same context as that in which Homer uses it. The definition in COD, at DOH(2) is “exclamation, informal, used to comment on a foolish action”, but the only pronunciation given is more suitable for the spelling duh. At DUH, we are told it is an alternative spelling for DOH(2).
But, as John says, duh is a comment on someone else’s stupidity, while DOH admits that the speaker has been stupid. Oxford has not grasped this difference (or at least it hadn’t when it published the 10th COD. Perhaps the 11th, which I haven’t seen yet, has got it right).
What is the plural of diocese? Easy, you might think - it’s dioceses. Ah yes, but how do you pronounce it? Until 1999, and the tenth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, no help was given by most ‘ordinary’ dictionaries. They said nothing at all about the plural, with the implication that it was regular: di-o-ce-ses (4 syllables). This is still the case for the English Pronouncing Dictionary, and the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation. However, starting in 1990 with his first edition, John Wells noted in the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary that an alternative was to make an analogy with analysis ~
An older spelling for diocese was ‘diocess’. If we had kept this spelling, perhaps the plural, ‘diocesses’, would have stood more chance of surviving. We already have abscess ~ abscesses, and process ~ processes.
A few weeks ago, just after we changed the clocks to GMT, Fi Glover, presenting ‘Saturday Live’ on Radio 4, referred to the ‘moniker’ “Spring forward, fall back”. What she meant was mnemonic (pronounced ‘neeMONNik’). None of the possible scenarios I can think of as the reason for this mistake reflects very well on her. Was it wrongly written in her script, was she unable to pronounce the word, or did she genuinely believe that this was the correct term or pronunciation for this sort of aide-mémoire?
I have been reminded of this as I read Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London by Tim Hitchcock, Professor of History at the University of Hertfordshire. This is a book crammed full of facts about the lives of poor people in London at that time, including comments on the weather conditions on particular days, but there is a curious mistake that keeps appearing: the word pre-requisite, where perquisite is clearly intended. For instance, in the chapter entitled “Sleeping Rough”, we find the following sentence:
“At night, cleared and disregarded, the bulks [wooden shelves that stuck out over the pavement in front of shops], formed a convenient shelter for the homeless, an almost traditional prerequisite of the poor.”
The required reading here is definitely perquisite, or its modern abbreviation, perk. The same is true for most of the other instances I have so far come across. One however, is ambiguous:
“Even parish paupers demanded fresh linen every week, and its provision formed one of the most substantial prerequisites of domestic service.” (p.100)
Does this mean that it was necessary to have enough linen for a fresh set every week in order to be employed in domestic service, or, more likely, that as a consequence of being employed in domestic service, fresh linen was provided every week?
Once more, the reason for this mistake is unclear. Does Prof. Hitchcock really believe that ‘perk’ is an abbreviation for prerequisite? Does his spell-checker automatically ‘correct’ perquisite to prerequisite? Does the fault lie with Prof. Hitchcock’s editor or proof reader at the publishers (Hambledon Continuum)? Does no one at the publishers bother to check the copy before publishing it?
Both my son and my daughter have reported that when giving their name, it has been repeated back to them as “Quinton” rather than “Pointon”, and this has twice happened to me recently. Neither name is particularly common. What we have here is surely a synchronic example of the diachronic development of one of these sound complexes into the other, as is postulated for one of the differences between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic (Welsh pedwar and pump - ‘four’ and ‘five’ - versus Irish a ceathair and a cúig, for instance). The reconstructed Indo-European *kw developed into Latin ‘qu’ - quattuor and quinque, but into Germanic ‘p’ and then ‘f’ (English four, five, German vier, fünf). Celtic went both ways. I think it is interesting that a mis-hearing of an uncommon word can lead to the same development today.
Both labial and velar consonants are [+grave] in the Jakobson and Halle system of distinctive features (they have more energy in the lower frequency range), as do the back vowel that immediately follows in both Pointon and Quinton, and this is taking priority over the compact vs diffuse feature that distinguishes labial and alveolar consonants - and high vowels (+compact) - from the velar consonants and low vowels (+diffuse).
This is the same feature that ventriloquists take advantage of when they say ‘gottle of geer’ for ‘bottle of beer’ to disguise the fact that it is they rather than their dummy that is speaking.
Lilli Lee asks if we can still order Peking Duck, or whether we now have to ask for Beijing Duck. Some names are fixed, and regardless of other changes in the language, they remain. Strangely, this has happened three times with phrases containing the word duck: we can still order Peking Duck and Bombay Duck (not Mumbai Duck), and the species of duck known as the Muscovy Duck has not changed its name to Moscow Duck.
The Bombay Stock Exchange has not changed its name either, and I don’t see any suggestion that the Indian film industry should become known as Mollywood instead of Bollywood.
We now travel to Livorno instead of Leghorn, but leghorn is still a breed of chicken, and a type of straw hat.
A letter in the Independent newspaper last week (Wednesday 21 November), from Shirin Tata of London, explained the spelling and pronunciation of Peking as ‘a close approximation to the Cantonese name for the city (”puck-ing” with a hard “p”)’. This came about, the writer says, because early contacts between Europe and China were with traders and seamen from the south of China, and the Europeans copied their pronunciation for place names. This explanation is similar to that for the origin of the English name for Livorno in Italy: Leghorn (now obsolete), which is a close approximation to the local dialectal form for the name: Ligorno.
However, I have a different explanation for Peking: some of the earliest European travellers to China were Jesuit priests - the first dictionary of Chinese for Europeans was written by Jesuits - and as these would mainly be from southern European countries and speaking Romance languages, they would have transcribed what they heard in terms of their own languages, whether French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese. In all these languages, the voiceless plosives (/p. t. k/) are unaspirated, unlike the English equivalents. As the initial consonant of the Mandarin name for Peking is also unaspirated, the priests will have written down a ‘p’. The following vowel (or diphthong) is, or at least starts as, a half close front vowel, and the spelling convention for this in all the Western Romance languages is ‘e’ (or ‘é’ in French). The next consonant is also unaspirated, but pronounced in the palatal area, auditorily closest to the sound represented in European languages by a ‘k’ when it occurs before a front vowel, as in this case. The final velar nasal is a sound that occurs only allophonically in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, so again, the nearest sound was used: [n]. This gives us the French version of the name Pékin, borrowed into English (the spelling ‘Pekin’ was common at one time).
I find this more satisfactory as an explanation than that of Shirin Tata, as it accounts for the initial ‘p’ in the English - and general European - spelling. Both the Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations have what Shirin describes as a ‘hard’ p - in other words, an unaspirated sound, which is far more similar to English /b/ than it is to English /p/.
I’ve been reading some Defoe novels recently, and it’s surprising how many ‘mistakes’ in grammar he makes that are frequently seen these days and attributed to the poor teaching of English over the last half century: confusion of who and whom; using I in contexts that clearly demand me; and these sort of … are three that I particularly remember. The editions that I’ve been reading are all reputable ones, so I don’t think we can attribute these to printers’ errors. For those in any doubt of the antiquity of these ‘mistakes’, Defoe died in 1731.
What are we to make of this? I think we have to say that at all stages in the life of any language there are points of grammar that cause problems for even the best writers. Defoe came of a fairly well-to-do family, and received a good education, so his ignorance cannot be ‘blamed’. Since the loss of case as a regular feature of English, the remnants, in the form of the personal pronouns, have been under threat in all but the most obvious contexts, and the phrase ’sort of’ seems to behave as a compound adjective rather than anything else, leaving the determiner ‘these’ to agree in number with the following noun (which is usually plural).
Samuel Johnson famously defined a lexicographer as “a harmless drudge”, and there were a few other semi-humorous comments in his dictionary, including the non-definition of ‘trolmydames’: “Of this word I know not the meaning”.
Chambers (or, as it used to be called, Chambers’s) Dictionary is well worth reading like any other book, or at least browsing from one entry to another, because it has some light-hearted definitions in its pages. I am rather sad that the definition of ‘lunch’ no long includes the phrase “a restaurateur’s term for an ordinary man’s dinner”, that was in the Mid-Century edition, but ‘fog’: “thick mist” and ‘mist’: “thin fog” are still there, as are ‘middle-aged’: “between youth and old age, variously reckoned to suit the reckoner” and ‘Agapemone’: “a religious community of men and women whose ’spiritual marriages’ were in some cases not strictly spiritual”.
Chambers is not the only dictionary to repay a close reading. Einar Haugen’s Norwegian-English Dictionary, of 1965 (published by Universitetsforlaget, Oslo, and The University of Wisconsin Press) has, at the word ‘kansjke’: “perhaps, maybe: … kanskje blir vi ferdige med denne ordboka en gang - maybe we’ll finish this dictionary sometime”.
Professor Gregory James, Head of the Language Centre at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has published a weighty tome on the making of dictionaries in Tamil which all hinges on the way ‘rice’ is defined: most of the Tamil dictionaries, while paying lip service to the principle that a dictionary should never use a word in its definitions that is not itself defined elsewhere, call ‘rice’ “an esculent grain”, but never define ‘esculent’. (A History of Tamil Dictionaries, Gregory James, ISBN 81-85602-76-X)