French/Hungarian

[A. Maberry]

Years ago one of the announcers on a classical music station in a major
city in the Pacific Northwest used to refer to Istvan Kertesz as *IstVAN
KerTESH, which irritated me and would probaby infuriate dInIs. I never
knew if the person thought that Kertesz might be Polish or thought
that the accent marks on the a and final e in Kertesz indicated stress.

allen
maberry at u.washington.edu

On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, Dennis R. Preston wrote:

> Frenchification (as the unmarked "foreign" pronunciation) is also a
> good MA thesis (which I have never seen). I'm always amazed to hear
> Hungarian words (with their stress unfailingly on the first syllable)
> rendered with a French stress (on the end, of all places!). I have
> even head classical announcers deliver barTOK and koDALY, made even
> funnier by their almost correct rendition fo the -daly syllable.
>
> dInIs
>
>
>
>
>
>
> At 10:14 AM -0700 9/25/02, Anne Gilbert wrote:
> >Fritz:
> >
> >  > BTW, no one (at least that I have seen) has mentioned the Taj Mahal. TaJ
> >or TaZH?
> >  > Fritz Juengling
> >
> >... As for TaJ or TaZH Mahal, I've heard both.
> >Anne G
>
> It's not so much that we're allowed to anglicize foreign names, which
> as dInIs points out (re Paris, Vienna, Spain, China, etc., we do all
> the time), but that we "correct" the standard (English)
> pronunciations of names like "Beijing" and "Taj" (with the affricates
> that presumably did a pretty good job of representing the original
> pronunciation) to the hyper-foreign, Frenchified forms (with the
> fricatives) in the vain belief that NOW we're really doing a better
> job of it.  I almost always hear and, to be honest say "Taj Mahal"
> with a fricative, but I'll get around to reforming that once I've
> mastered the affricate on "Beijing".
>
> larry
>
> --
> Dennis R. Preston
> Professor of Linguistics
> Department of Linguistics and Languages
> 740 Wells Hall A
> Michigan State University
> East Lansing, MI 48824-1027 USA
> Office - (517) 353-0740
> Fax - (517) 432-2736
>