[Ads-l] [Non-DoD Source] "Niger" or "Niger"?

Fri Oct 20 23:30:36 UTC 2017

You'll be pleased to know that whatever her ultimate DNA, Karoun Demirjian
is a 100% U.S. American and Harvard grad (cum laude), who has no trace of
any pesky foreign accent.

JL

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 6:29 PM, Salikoko S. Mufwene <mufw at uchicago.edu>
wrote:

> Thanks to JL and WB (whose full name I've never seen) for their
> informative responses. I must point out that the connection (apparently
> accidental) between /Niger /and the N-word is only in the written modality,
> not in the spoken forms heard on TV or radio broadcasts. I found it a
> little bit bizarre that some connection was established at all between the
> two words. Of the etymologies I just googled, the Tuareg alternative
> (related to the perhaps indigenous name for the Niger River) sounds more
> plausible historically than that tracing it to Latin. (If this were the
> case, the French could have named many of their African colonies likewise!)
> There's even one that goes to Greek, through Ptolomy's writing, although I
> wonder whether Ptolomy knew of the region. Well, curiosity can take us in
> all sorts of directions.
>
> Below is the etymology passage from Wikitionary:
> Commonly linked by folk etymology to Latin niger (“black”), which likely
> influenced the modern spelling. Some sources give the term to Tuareg roots,
> deriving it from a claimed gher n-gheren or egereou n-igereouen (“river of
> rivers”).[1][2] Older sources derive Niger via a series of mistranslations
> and geographic misplacements by Greek, Roman and Arab geographers, from
> Ptolemy's descriptions of the valley Gir (a wadi in modern Algeria), and
> the "Lower Gir" (or "Ni-Gir") to the south.[3]
>
>
> On 10/20/2017 4:16 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
>> Dear Sali,
>>
>> As soon as I recognized the phonetic near-identity of "Nee-jur" and
>> "knee-jerk" (which was immediately), I thought it would be trivially
>> amusing (and marginally clarifying) to point out the meaningless
>> similarity.
>>
>> I promise I had no ulterior motive except a spirit of fun. More seriously,
>> I find the surprisingly various attempts to pronounce "Niger" correctly in
>> English fascinating.  At one point I was aware of only one version. Then
>> there were two. Now there are several. Which one will have the most
>> staying
>> power?
>>
>> I can think of several likely pronunciations of "Nigerien" (which looks
>> very odd in English) but must admit I've heard only two (both in the last
>> 24 hrs.):
>>
>> Nee-ZHAIR-iun
>>
>> Nye-ZHEER-iun
>>
>> The latter differs by only one phoneme from "Nigerian."
>>
>> JL
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 3:58 PM, Salikoko S. Mufwene <mufw at uchicago.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Dear JL:
>>>
>>> I suspect that for a lot of Americans this is the year when Niger is
>>> discussed on TV for, let's say, the first time and when they can try to
>>> situate on the map. There's variation in perception and reproduction of
>>> unfamiliar names, isn't there? When you also add the comparison with
>>> "knee-jerk," I start wondering whether you are making fun of the
>>> French-based pronunciation or of  the speaker's pronunciation. At the
>>> beginning of this thread, I had the impression that people were just
>>> interested in the non-Anglo pronunciation of the country name... and we
>>> have long come past that academic discussion!
>>>
>>> Sali.
>>>
>>> On 10/20/2017 12:12 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>>
>>> Pronunciation by WaPo journalist Karoun Demirjian on CNN:
>>>>
>>>> NEE-jur.
>>>>
>>>> Cf. "knee-jerk."
>>>>
>>>> JL
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 9:22 AM, Jonathan Lighter <
>>>> wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> April Ryan, award-winning White House correspondent.
>>>>
>>>>> BTW, the given name "Ryan" is now unisex: (Ms.) Ryan Manion (b.
>>>>> ca.1977?):
>>>>>
>>>>> <http://goog_153042178>
>>>>> http://www.travismanion.org/our-story/tmf-staff-and-board/
>>>>>
>>>>> board-of-directors/ryan-manion-board/
>>>>>
>>>>> JL
>>>>>
>>>>> On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 3:59 AM, Stanton McCandlish <
>>>>> smccandlish at gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> I've never encountered "Nigerian" for "a native of Niger", only for "a
>>>>>> native of Nigeria"; I would think trying to use it for both would be
>>>>>> fatally ambiguous, thus "Nigerien".
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I've lately heard (in the US anyway) a lot of radio and TV people
>>>>>> taking
>>>>>> extra care to try (often farcically) to approximate French and Spanish
>>>>>> proper name pronunciations, starting in the 1990s (and probably
>>>>>> radiating
>>>>>> out from the American Southwest).  This has included pronunciations of
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> names of some other former French colonies, e.g. Montserrat without
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> "t"
>>>>>> sounds and with a nasalized "n".  I would think that eagerness to
>>>>>> avoid
>>>>>> anything like the pronunciation of the N-word is behind rapid
>>>>>> re-adoption
>>>>>> of "knee-ZHAIR" in English, but it's actually part of a broader
>>>>>> pattern
>>>>>> (cf. someone else's comment about Côte d'Ivoire).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> See also ready Western adoption of Beijing, Mumbai, and other changes
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> some Asian placename transliterations to be more accurate, and
>>>>>> increased
>>>>>> appearance of the proper diacritics on many names in modern newspapers
>>>>>> which used to eschew them entirely or almost entirely (I remember one
>>>>>> journalism style guide permitted them for Spanish and French but no
>>>>>> others).  Also been seeing a lot of Dao De Jing (even Daodejing), Mao
>>>>>> Zedong, Laozi, etc., where once we had Tao Te Ching, Mao Tse Tung or
>>>>>> Mao
>>>>>> Tse-tung, and Lao Tzu or Lao Tze.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> All of these proper-naming shifts seem to have happened over a single
>>>>>> generation, from the 1980s to 2000s, and are being pushed top-down by
>>>>>> publishers, not bottom-up by "the common folk". Most of the shifts I
>>>>>> notice
>>>>>> are bottom-up ones, like turning "e-mail" into "email", inverting the
>>>>>> meaning of "comprise", accepting "less" as applying to count nouns
>>>>>> ("15
>>>>>> items or less"), and treating "bad" and "good" as synonymous with
>>>>>> "poor"
>>>>>> and "well", respectively, in the performance senses ("She speaks
>>>>>> English
>>>>>> really good").
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On the other hand, the British war against punctuation, especially the
>>>>>> period and comma, is a two-way affair, pushed aggressively by the UK
>>>>>> newspaper industry and also loved by youths, who hate all those fiddly
>>>>>> punctuation rules and were already ignoring them. It's resisted by
>>>>>> British
>>>>>> academic publishers and by regular people over about 35.  But I
>>>>>> digress.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> Stanton McCandlish
>>>>>> McCandlish Consulting
>>>>>> 4001 San Leandro St
>>>>>> Suite 28
>>>>>> Oakland  CA 94601-4055
>>>>>>
>>>>>> +1 415 234 3992
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://www.linkedin.com/in/SMcCandlish
>>>>>>
>>>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
>>>>> truth."
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> --
>>> **********************************************************
>>> Salikoko S. Mufwene                    s-mufwene at uchicago.edu
>>> The Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and
>>> the College
>>> Professor, Committee on Evolutionary Biology
>>> Professor, Committee on the Conceptual & Historical Studies of Science
>>> University of Chicago                  773-702-8531; FAX 773-834-0924
>>> Department of Linguistics
>>> 1115 East 58th Street
>>> Chicago, IL 60637, USA
>>> http://mufwene.uchicago.edu/
>>> **********************************************************
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
> --
> **********************************************************
> Salikoko S. Mufwene                    s-mufwene at uchicago.edu
> The Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and
> the College
> Professor, Committee on Evolutionary Biology
> Professor, Committee on the Conceptual & Historical Studies of Science
> University of Chicago                  773-702-8531; FAX 773-834-0924
> Department of Linguistics
> 1115 East 58th Street
> Chicago, IL 60637, USA
> http://mufwene.uchicago.edu/
> **********************************************************
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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