"Neanderthal/ ~tal"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Thanks for using all those phonemic  symbols, Doug. Some of 'em are actually the same as IPA !

  Now the bad news : Google finds 100,000 exx. of "Beijing duck."  There seem to be a few thousand for "Beijing Man" (correctly, "Beijing Person"), but most of these just refer to a guy who lives in Beijing.

  "Beijing man" isn't quite the parallel to "Neandertal man," since (correctly, "because") the former replaces an entire word (as far as English is concerned), while the latter has revised the established English spelling to follow a later orthographic change in the source language.

  As I understand it, the logogram for the Chinese capital hasn't changed at all.
  Thus, from the point of view of consistency in written representation, we should retain
  the spellings {Peking} {Pekin} but pronounce them "Beijing."

  That goes for Pekin, Illinois, too.

  JL
"Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Douglas G. Wilson"
Subject: Re: "Neanderthal/ ~tal"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>I say / ae / and so did he.
>
> Presumably William King also said both / ae / and "th" (do we have an
> ad-hoc symbol for "theta" ? I recently used / D / for "edh"). The reason
> is that swaydo-"correct" foreign pronunciations in English seem to be
> chiefly a 20th-21st C. phenomenon. Remember Lord Byron's "Don Juan"
> rhyming with "new one" and "true one." Or was he just joking ?
>
> I used to pronounce English "junta" more or less as in Spanish till I
> saw the old OED opting for / dg /. So I switched - for the snob appeal,
> you understand - which has now backfired, / h^nt@ / being the choice of
> all right-thinking media persons today.
>
> Not / xunta /.
>
> English "Mexico, Mexican" may be next.

I use an English spelling pronunciation, meaning (I suppose) that I see the
word "Neanderthal" as fully naturalized: "Neander" like "Leander", "thal"
like in "Rosenthal" with /T/ (= theta). Since I learned about Neanderthal
man before I had any idea of non-English pronunciations, this is natural
enough, I guess.

I think one can also 'justify' a scientific-Latin-type pronunciation
/neandertal/ also, following "H. neanderthalensis". This 'happens' to be
close to the German pronunciation, according to my primitive notions.

I surely say "Peking man" /pikIN/ and not "Beijing man". "Peking duck" too.
And I don't call any dog breed "beijingese" either.

IMHO, the English reflex of Latin /r/ or any German /r/ is an English /r/
... whichever one you use.

If you see "junta" as a fully naturalized English word I guess you might
say /dZVnt@/. Apparently I see it as Spanish-ish because I say /hUnta/ or
maybe /xUnta/. I think either /h/ or /x/ can be considered the English
reflex of Spanish /x/. I don't know why anybody would use /hV/ as in
/hVnt@/. But then I don't know why "margarine" has a /dZ/ either.

-- Doug Wilson


--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.408 / Virus Database: 268.13.13/500 - Release Date: 10/26/2006

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



---------------------------------
Talk is cheap. Use Yahoo! Messenger to make PC-to-Phone calls.  Great rates starting at 1¢/min.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org