Eeyore

[Benjamin Barrett]

You see the same thing with Chinese: 叉燒, pronounced as chāshāo in Mandarin and caa1 siu1 in Cantonese has no "r" in it, but the English version often has it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Char_siu).

I also recall a Korean researcher, who was working on a proposal to create a new Romanization system. He was testing various spellings, and many of them added "r" in an attempt to force certain vowel sounds. Being an r-ful speaker, I told them all of those variants were less favorable.

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

On Mar 24, 2012, at 9:19 AM, Herb Stahlke wrote:

> Most r-ful American speakers miss the onomatopoeia of Christopher
> Robin's young donkey friend Eeyore.  In r-less British English <or> or
> <ore> represents a low or mid back rounded vowel, open o or turned
> script a.
>
> Watching English Premier League soccer this morning, Chelsea vs.
> Tottenham, I noticed a Tottenham forward with the name "Adebayor."
> African players are not uncommon in the EPL, and Adebayo is a common
> Yoruba name from Nigeria.  The final <r> is the puzzle.  Some southern
> Nigerian languages and some Ghanaian languages use <or>
> orthographically for a mid back tongue-root retracted rounded vowel,
> usually transcribed with an open o.  Yoruba does not do this but
> rather uses a subscript dot under <e> and <o> for the tongue-root
> retracted sounds, similar to English sounds in "bet" and "for."  So
> where did the <r> come from in Adebayor?  Most typewriters and
> computer keyboards are not equipped for subscript dots or bars, and so
> the letters are often seen without them, as in this posting.  I did
> some checking on Adebayor, who is one of Tottenham's stars, and found
> that he's from Togo but that his parents moved there from Nigeria.
> I'm guessing that sometime in that non-Yoruba speaking region, also a
> region where <or> is used for the sound, the spelling acculturated and
> his parents went along with it.
>
> For me the oddity was that the English announcer was pronouncing the
> final <r> and stressing the final syllable.
>
> Is Eeyore doomed to lose its onomatopoeia even in England?

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