naming a language

[Paul Hopper]

And (while we're on the subject) the instances in which a British pronunciation spelling gets rephoneticized: The Korean name "Park", for example, pronounced with -r-; South Asian names whose orthographic -u- (phonetic [a] or schwa) is pronounced as [u] ("Moombay" for Mumbay sometimes; "Poonjab" for Punjab is almost universal).

- Paul


> 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
>>> régimes 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-Universität 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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-- 
Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper
Senior Fellow
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Albertstr. 19
D-79104 Freiburg
and
Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities
Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213