"Neanderthal/ ~tal"

[Beverly Flanigan]

But definitely NOT "BeiZHing."

At 09:47 AM 10/27/2006, you wrote:
>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
>
>
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