quest for info/suggestions. re: dialects

[Mike Salovesh]

"George S. Cole" wrote:
>
> And to complicate the situation, students with Polish names will often
> express offense when the name is pronounced as it might be in downtown
> Warsaw.

Hungarian family names can get you in more trouble than those in Polish.
A long time ago (meaning ca. 1956), my classmate, Hattula Moholoy-Nagy,
gently suggested that I might not be understood if I were to continue to
rhyme Moholy with roly poly and Nagy with soggy.  I took her correction
seriously, particularly because it came in the context of a course on
language 'n' culture we were both taking at the time.  (The "'n'" was
Norman McQuown's way of indicating that he didn't want to choose between
"and" and "in".)

Years later, it came as a great shock when a student "corrected" my
pronunciation of his name, Nagy.  I said it as if it were the word
"nudge" with the vowel changed to something in the range of "aw", or
"turned c" -- some kind of low back vowel, at any rate.  He insisted
that his name should be pronounced as if it were composed of two English
words: "nay" and "gee".  I had to apologize for using a standard
Hungarian pronunciation.  It was a long time until he acknowledged that
his grandfather's pronunciation and mine were in pretty close agreement.

I'm predisposed to be careful with other people's names.  My family name
came into being in the 1880s because immigration authorities in Newport
News/Hampton Roads failed to recognize or spell my grandfather's name.
(It was Soloveitchik, the Russian word for "nightingale".)  They wrote
Salovesh and told my grandfather that was going to be his name from then
on.  Since they obviously were government officials, my grandfather took
their word for it. He never tried to recapture Soloveitchik.

-- mike salovesh           <salovesh at niu.edu>                PEACE !!!

P.S.: I know I'm being vague about the vowel in my one-syllable
pronunciation of "Nagy", the Hungarian word for "large, big".  That's
because I'm not sure just what should be there.

In a field linguistics course I took from Sid Lamb in 1958, our
classroom informant was a refugee from the 1956 Soviet (re)invasion of
Hungary.   Our student analysis of Hungarian vowels got lots simpler
when we realized that Hungarian has a system of vowel harmony.

Our informant kept telling us that we were failing to transcribe the
differences between two vowels in the low back region.  I don't know
about the rest of the class, but I sure couldn't hear any consistent
difference between the "two" low-back vowels.  (That shouldn't have been
a surprise. English uses lots of distinctions among front vowels, many
fewer among back vowels.  We also tend to differentiate higher vowels
much more than lower ones.  That predisposes us to miss vocalic
distinctions in the lower back region.)

I still don't hear two different vowels back there.  That means I don't
do much of a good job in producing "them".  That is, if there actually
are two distinct low back vowels in Hungarian.

Alternatively, maybe our classroom informant was hearing something that
wasn't there.  If Hungarian spelling reflects vowel harmony, it might
have opted for consistency by writing as if one low back vowel could be
treated as if it had two phonetic variants. Our well-educated informant,
aware that Hungarian spelling makes use of two graphs, might have been
doing a Hungarian equivalent of pronouncing the "t" that should be
silent in "often" or the "c" that should be silent in arctic.

I can't even come close to settling that one.  Dennis?