Dueling dialects

[Mark A. Mandel]

dInIs wrote:

>Do you care about pronouncing Hungarian and Xhosa names the way
>Hungarians and Xhosas do?

As a matter of fact, I do. Sometimes it annoys my family.

But that doesn't mean I insist on always pronouncing all names as natively
as I can regardless of the language I'm speaking. In English, the name of
the capital of France is /'p ae rIs/, not [pa'Ri:]. My son recently pointed
out to me that I was being inconsistent in pronouncing "Istanbul" with [i:]
instead of [I] in English, and I agreed that he was right and switched to
the English pronunciation.

On the gripping hand, "Gary Cooper" is a name in English and in my opinion
deserves to be pronounced as its bearer wishes/wished  it pronounced, within
the fairly wide boundaries of English spelling and dialect. Since I
distinguish /ae r/ from /Er/ and /u:/ from /U/, and recognize both as
possible pronunciations *in a single dialect* in a name spelled like this, I
would try to pronounce it that way. But since I am a rhotic speaker, I would
not pronounce "Cooper" r-lessly even when referring  to an arrhotic speaker.

(Actually this is most important to me with people whom I meet, but the
principle remains.)

(Damn, when did I start sounding so stuffy?)

-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian,
   Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody
   a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel