"Neanderthal/ ~tal"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I say / ae / and so did he.

  Presumably William King also said both / ae / and  "th" (do we have an ad-hoc symbol for "theta" ? I recently used / D / for "edh").  The reason is that swaydo-"correct" foreign pronunciations in English seem to be chiefly a 20th-21st C. phenomenon. Remember Lord Byron's "Don Juan" rhyming with "new one" and "true one."  Or was he just joking ?

  I used to pronounce English "junta" more or less as in Spanish till I saw the old OED opting for / dg /.  So I switched - for the snob appeal, you understand - which has now backfired,  / h^nt@ /  being the choice of all right-thinking media persons today.

  Not / xunta /.

  English "Mexico, Mexican" may be next.

  JL

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: "Neanderthal/ ~tal"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How about the pronunciation of the first "a" as aesc / ash? Or do
people other than your humble correspondent say "nee ahn"? And what's
the proper English reflex of German "r," the lingual trill of Munich
or the uvular trill of Berlin?

-Wilson

On 10/26/06, Laurence Horn wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Laurence Horn
> Subject: Re: "Neanderthal/ ~tal"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 5:15 PM -0700 10/26/06, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >Wikipedia explains the two English versions thisaway :
> >
> > "The term Neanderthal Man was coined in 1863 by Irish anatomist
> >William King. Neanderthal is now spelled two ways: the spelling of
> >the German word Thal, meaning "valley or dale", was changed to Tal
> >in the early 20th century, but the former spelling is often retained
> >in English and always in scientific names, while the modern spelling
> >is used in German."
> >
> > Certainly "Neandertal" has been far more common in my experience
> >over the past twenty years or more, though I grew up spelling and
> >saying "Neanderthal" with the "th". Is this the only English
> >borrowing whose spelling (and to some degree pronunciation) has been
> >changed to reflect a later change in spelling in the source language
> >?
> >
> > I knew an anthro grad student once who derided my use of
> >"Neanderthal" as "wrong." I told him his use of "toolkit" was
> >"offensive." Then we beat each other up.
> >
> > That last part is fiction. But he did say, somewhat sniffily, that
> >"-thal" was "an incorrect pronunciation," even in English.
> >
> Is it any more incorrect in "Neanderthal" than it is in "Blumenthal",
> "Rosenthal", "Lilienthal", "Goethals", and so on, or (mutatis
> mutandis) in names like "Morgenthau"? Is it just that there are no
> (or relatively few) Neandert(h)als around to protest our changing
> their name compared to the number of extant Blumenthals and
> Rosenthals?
>
> LH
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



---------------------------------
Get your own web address for just $1.99/1st yr. We'll help. Yahoo! Small Business.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org