naming a language

[john at research.haifa.ac.il]

Other examples of such behavior:
Pronouncing Barcelona with a th for c (not being aware that there's no
th in Catalan, or for that matter than Catalan even exists)
Pronouncing e.g. Ataturk with a tapped or (God forbid) uvular r (not being
aware that the Turkish r is in this case closer to English r)
Kiswahili (like 'the English')
Writing e.g. Munster cheese with an umlaut
Trying to say 'Boston' with a Boston accent by fronting
the first vowel as in 'Harvard Yard' (should be a mid-back
vowel)
Pronouncing e.g. Colcester as 'Colster' or Cirencester as 'Cirenster'
by analogy with 'Worcester' and 'Gloucester'
Pronouncing Jogjakarta as 'Yogyakarta'
Arabs speaking Hebrew saying the Haifa neighborhood Neve Sha'anan with an ayin
even though it's written with an alef
Jews speaking Arabic saying e.g. al-quds beginning with an ayin although it's
written with an alef.
There are quite a few of these.
John



Quoting Paul Hopper <hopper at cmu.edu>:

> Mikael,
>
> Good point. The insistence on endonyms often results in irritating errors.
> One advantage of changing Beijing back to Peking would be that we'd no longer
> have to hear news announcers saying the -j- as a voiced palatal
> fricative--apparently following the rule that you can never go wrong if you
> pronounce a foreign word as if it were French.
>
> John Verhaar used to get very irritated at "Bahasa Indonesia" instead of
> "Indonesian", and once commented that it would be like always referring to
> German as "die deutsche Sprache". Even in linguistic works I've sometimes
> seen "Bahasa Indonesian"--as if Bahasa were the name of a region or something
> (cf. Canadian French).
>
> - Paul Hopper
>
>
>
> > I have often wondered why there is such a passion for endonyms among
> > linguists. It is one thing to avoid exonyms that the speakers might find
> > offensive, but apart from that, I have a hard time seeing the point in
> > using endonyms at any cost.
> >
> > There are plenty of cases where there is a relatively established (in the
> > linguistic literature) English term for a language, where later
> > publications have opted for a new name, and where I can see no other
> > effect than growing confusion. For people dealing with more than one or a
> > few languages (such as typologists), this implies that you have to make an
> > effort to know which language is which.
> >
> > Having the same L1 as two of the previous posters, I would certainly not
> > see any benefit in the linguistic community adopting ”svenska” for my
> > language, rather than the more usual ”Swedish”. That would simply strike
> > me as ridiculous, and indeed, no linguists use the endonym when writing in
> > English. Yet, I somehow suspect that if the language in question were
> > spoken primarily in a third world country, some linguists would have
> > preferred that option.
> >
> > Should the aim be to somehow to avoid Eurocentricity (or perhaps rather
> > ”national-languages-of-the-first-world”-centricity”), isn’t it Eurocentric
> > in itself to use one naming strategy for these languages, and restrict
> > another to everything else?
> >
> > Even if one term is used more than another in the already existing
> > literature, there may be reasons to choose another one. What the speakers
> > themselves call their language, however, is not a strong reason to do so,
> > in my view. Unless, of course, you happen to be writing in that particular
> > language.
> >
> > In a way, this can be compared to toponymical changes. There is a point in
> > using Harare or Volgograd instead of Salisbury or Stalingrad, since the
> > older names are, if nothing else, reminders of former rיgimes presumably
> > not supported by the people who inhabit these cities today. But need we
> > say Beijing and Guangzhou for what used to be been Peking and Canton? If
> > so, must we start saying “the United Arab Emirates in Arabic”? (And should
> > it be standard Arabic or the colloquial?).
> >
> >
> > Mikael Parkvall
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper
> Senior Fellow
> Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
> Albert-Ludwigs-Universitהt Freiburg
> Albertstr. 19
> D-79104 Freiburg
> and
> Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities
> Department of English
> Carnegie Mellon University
> Pittsburgh, PA 15213
>
>




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