12.1595, Qs: Guide to Linguists' Names

[The LINGUIST Network]

LINGUIST List:  Vol-12-1595. Sun Jun 17 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 12.1595, Qs: Guide to Linguists' Names

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1)
Date:  14 Jun 2001 12:08:56 EDT
From:  Lotfi at www.dci.co.ir
Subject:  Linguists' Names: A he or she? How should I say the name?

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  14 Jun 2001 12:08:56 EDT
From:  Lotfi at www.dci.co.ir
Subject:  Linguists' Names: A he or she? How should I say the name?


       A he or she? How should I say the name?
       Dear linguists,
       .
       Have you ever had the nasty experience of mispronouncing
       some linguist's (non-English) name , or failing to use
       the appropriate pronoun simply because you didn't know
       the name of the person in question is feminine or masculine?
       If no, you've been lucky, ... very lucky. And if yes, you
       might agree with me that we must do something about it.
       .
       With the urge to study as many human languages as possible
       (and also as deeply as possible, which makes native mastery
       over such languages a definite advantage), a greater number
       of scholars with non-English linguistic and cultural back-
       grounds have got involved in the project. This welcome event,
       by its turn, has inevitably led to the technical journals the
       field flooded with non-English names whose pronunciation do
       not necessarily match their spellings. (I keep saying non-
       English because I assume, perhaps wrongly, that English names
       are accessible enough to other people.) The problem is
       specially painful if your contact with the international community
       of linguists is primarily through publications (rather than live
       contacts) but at the same time you need to mention such names
       in your classes or have a talk in an international conference
       from time to time.

       Then how to pronounce a name like Krzeszowski, or whether Daiko
       Takahashi is a he or she becomes a great nuisance and may
       actually take much time and energy to find out. I think what we
       need is a list of 'problem' names on the web so that whenever we
       come across a case, we can just push a button and hear the name
       pronounced (or shown in phonetic transcription) and the gender
       specified.
       .
       My proposal:
       (1) Could anyone out there tell me if such a
           database already exists?
       (2) In case we don't have such services, perhaps we can make
           one:Any volunteers to help me with such a project?

Best,
.
Ahmad R. Lotfi (the first vowel is a short 'o' which English-
speakers may decide to reduce to some schwa but I prefer NOT to be
replaced by the vowel in the English word 'lot', the second some sort
of long 'i', with stress on the second syllable ;-)
--------------------------------------------------------------
 Ahmad R. Lotfi, Ph. D
 English Dept, Chair
 Azad University (Khorasgan)
 Esfahan, IRAN.
 lotfi at www.dci.co.ir
 http://www.geocities.com/arlotfi/lotfipage.html





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