Zhongtong bus Company

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:46 PM -0500 3/1/11, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>An [East] Indian-British-American character on a TV show of recent
>vintage has his name pronounced by other characters as [raZ], although
>that's not the way he introduces himself. Some of the other characters
>are supposed to be Indian as well (as are the actors playing them). But,
>of course, AmE always has a problem with consonant clusters in "foreign"
>words.
>
>     VS-)

Well, I'm not sure the problem is clusters in this case.  (Can there
be a cluster of one?)  But this is the classic hyperforeignism--all
loanwords are French until proven innocent, and [Z] is the echt
French consonant, so...   (We've discussed this a bunch in the past,
with various examples beyond Chinese and Hindi imports, and it's
probably also been manna for Language Log.)

>On 3/1/2011 1:43 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>It's not only WRT Chinese, it's not only the young, and it's not even recent
>>or even merely an AmE thing. Remember the PTV special, at least a
>>quarter-century or more ago, re the old British Raj?

The Jewel in the Crown?

>>  The narrator, himself a
>>late-middle-aged native-speaker of BrE, insisted upon pronouncing "Raj" as
>>"Ra[Z]"!
>>
>>May his soul burn in hell! The romanization of Devanagari is based upon the
>>pronunciation of the ENGLISH version of the Latin alphabet, for God's
>>bleeping sake!
>>
>>The motherbleeper used to make me stone *crazy*!
>>
>>Speaking of this sort of thing, I've begun to heard BE-speakers saying
>>"boo[Z]ie" in place of the "standard" - so to speak - "boo[dZ]ie."

At least that one does ultimately come from French, where the [Z] is motivated.

LH

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