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 and English speaker should pronounce the capital of France in the French way when speaking English. Presumably I, in the same way, should continue to pronounce London in the English fashion when I am speaking French (even though I am not bilingual), and ignore the fact that French has a perfectly good version – Londres. Most English speakers know that Germany is called Deutschland in German. Are newsreaders to say “In Deutschland this afternoon …”? That way madness lies.
When Mishal Husain is speaking Punjabi, or Urdu, or whatever her other language is as a bilingual speaker, then I would expect her to call England by whatever it happens to be in that language, and not “England”. Likewise, when she is speaking English, it is mere pretension to affect a Punjabi/Urdu pronunciation for a South Asian place name, when there is a well-established English version.

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, but neither Mitterrand nor Pompidou had this justification for initial stress, and yet they tripped off the English tongue just fine, while MitTERRand and PomPIdou would have sounded bizarre. Names from other languages often have final syllable stress transferred to the initial syllable in English: Khrushchëv and Gorbachëv are two Russian names that immediately spring to mind.

John’s comments are prompted by Marcel Berlins’ column in yesterday’s Guardian. Mr Berlins has, as they say, ‘previous’, in complaining about the BBC Pronunciation Unit: about ten years ago, he wrote a piece in which he claimed that a member of the Unit had told him he was mispronouncing his own name. I wrote him a polite letter saying that it was most unlikely that any member of the Unit should have suggested such a thing, as policy was always to recommend the version preferred by the bearer of the name. In fact, no member of the Unit recalled having even spoken to Mr Berlins, let alone having discussed the pronunciation of his name with him. Instead of writing back to me, Mr Berlins returned to the topic in his column, and (one assumes jocularly) threatened legal action for doubting his word. As a good BBC employee, I let the matter drop at that time, but it is clear that he enjoys attacking those who cannot answer back in kind. I find it difficult to believe that any current member of the Unit could write a “snide, sniffy and defensive letter”, as he says.

Rather than just assert this to be the case through his column, he should publish the offending words, and let us see for ourselves just how unpleasant the current members of the Unit are, so that we may all know how to treat them in future. Perhaps Mr Berlins should take the trouble to visit the Unit, and meet the three highly qualified, and very personable, linguists, and develop a personal relationship with them rather than making “snide” and “sniffy” comments about them from afar.

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. Continue Reading →

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 …)