Popes n "Tsars"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Pres. Bush calls him "Pooty-Poot."

Sign of the Apocalypse ?

JL

Wilson Gray <wilson.gray at RCN.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: Popes n "Tsars"
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On Apr 7, 2005, at 4:41 PM, Rex W. Stocklin wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: "Rex W. Stocklin"
> Subject: Popes n "Tsars"
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> Tangentially of interest to the dictionary reindeer games, I'm
> guessing, are these two orts from Rick Valicenti's Thirstype mailing
> list (a typography resource for graphic designers). Just in case
> y'all are interested in other aspects of language than pure etymology.
>
>> I've been thinking about language a lot recently; type is, after
>> all, a delivery vehicle for language. A good typeface does a good
>> job at delivering as many messages in as many languages as possible.
>> (I've been trying to build the best type vehicles I can; Galaxie
>> Polaris is built for use in over a hundred languages using the roman
>> alphabet.)
>>
>> Since the passing of Pope John Paul II, there has been much coverage
>> of the life of the man born Karol Wojtyla. That last name should be
>> spelled "w o j t y l-slash a", but in English, we do not use the
>> l-slash, and it is not part of the basic ASCII glyph table. Instead,
>> the "l-slash" has been replaced with "l", which has led to
>> widespread mispronunciation: the Polish "l-slash" sounds like "w" as
>> it is pronounced in English. For an introduction to Polish
>> pronunciation, I recommend this article:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language#Phonetics
>>
>> In Polish, Czech, French, or Malagasy, where technology allows we
>> should correctly spell all of the words we use in all of the
>> languages we use; it is disrespectful to streamline or simplify for
>> the sake of expediency. (It kills me to not be able to use "l-slash"
>> in this email.)
>>
>> ////
>>
>> In the same vein, this past weekend William Safire's "On Language"
>> column in the "New York Times Magazine" discussed the romanisation
>> of the name of the Russian premier. The piece points out the
>> difficulties in trying to capture the essence of one language in
>> another, and in trying to standardise the romanisation of non-roman
>> scripts:
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03ONLANGUAGE.html?
>> (Site membership might be necessary to view the article.)
>
>
> Lexy Rexy
> Fishers, IN
>

Now, if only we get newsreaders to stop saying "'Pootn"! "Poochin" is
at least as easy to say as "Pootn" and it sounds a whole lot more like
the native pronunciation.

An article someplace claimed that this name means that Putin was born
by the side of the road. No way! The name tells you only that some
ancestor of his somehow became associated in some way with a put', a
*path*, not a road, so that this ancestor was given the nickname
"Putin," roughly, "path man."

-Wilson Gray


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