LL-L "Phonology" 2003.05.05 (02) [E]

Mon May 5 17:48:28 UTC 2003

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From: "Allison Turner-Hansen" <hallison at gte.net>
Subject: LL-L "Phonology" 2003.05.02 (04) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Phonology
>
> Dear Lowlanders,
>
> I have noticed a certain phonological phenomenon but am not sure if it
> has been widely recognized, analyzed and labeled.  I wonder what one
> should call it.  Perhaps it falls into the broader category of
> overcompensation.  If no one has named it so far, I will refer to it as
> "exoticization."
>
> At first I thought it was a temporary quirky thing among Americans who
> want to come across as linguistically more savvy than they are,
> noticeable particularly among radio and television reporters.  However,
> to my private dismay, lately I have been noticing the same phenomenon
> among Canadian, British and Australian media people and politicians.
>
> Specifically, this is a tendency, if not a rule, to pronounce what
> should be [dZ] (as in English "jar" or "jeep") as [Z] (as in English
> 'measure' or 'azure' and as in French _jour_ or _gitan_) in foreign
> words and names, excluding "important" languages such as Spanish,
> Italian and German.  This applies mostly to languages considered
> "exotic" by Westerners.
>
> The first time I noticed it -- quite a few years ago -- was in the
> Mandarin name _Beijing_ (for what used to be called "Peking"), which has
> come to be pronounced "bay-zhing" (with main stress on the second
> syllable, but let's not talk about stress here in the case of transfer
> from a tonal language).  What in Pinyin Romanization is written as <j>
> is an alveodental affricate (in some dialects [dz]).  The closest
> English approximant is <j>, also an affricate, not the "" fricative
> (which in English occurs quite rarely).  Somehow someone must have
> started this "Beiêžžng" thing, and everyone else followed like sheep.  I
> once called someone on it, and she said she didn't care what was
> correct; "Bei ng" sounded nicer to her, and everyone else was saying it
> like that.  I remember the American reporter Andrea Koppel pronouncing
> the name "correctly" with a "j", and I heard that she actually studied
> Chinese, but I do not know if she has conformed to the general "Being"
> thing in the meantime.  I have heard other Chinese names pronounced in
> like manner; e.g., Nanjing (as "Nan ng") and Guangzhou (as "Gwan(g)"
> instead of more appropriate "Gw ngjoe").
>
> I used to think this was confined to Chinese names, but lately I have
> been hearing words and names in Middle Eastern languages pronounced with
> "" instead of more appropriate "j".  Because of recent events, Arabic
> names and words have come up a lot.  Arabic has the affricate "j" sound
> (corresponding to "g" in Egyptian Arabic and also in Hebrew); it has no
> "" sound.  However, "" is almost regularly used in Iraqi city names
> such as (An-)Najaf and Fallujah, and yesterday I heard two BBC reporters
> pronounce the word _hajj_ 'pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina' as "haa".
>
> What is this about?  Did this start off as something French-influenced?
> Are people sticking to it because it sounds more "foreign," "exotic"?
>
> Regards,
> Reinhard/Ron
>
Dear Ron, Lowlanders,
I too have noticed such things.  I myself tend to pronounce all foreign
words, especially the vowels, as though they were German, probably
because
that is the foreign language I know best.  And that pesky symbol <j>,
which
rarely represents English /dZ/, comes out usually as a yod.  Some people
say
them as [h], which makes me think they know Spanish.  But most Americans
and
British are most influenced by French, I think, so it's not surprising
to me
if they say /j/ the French way.  I believe this tendency comes from the
structure of the brain (just a guess!).  It may be different for true
polyglots as opposed to bilingual people who learned the foreign
language
after they learned their native tongue.  I'm just saying that if I
perceive
a word to be foreign, and I don't personally know the rules of that
language, my brain switches from its "native rules" section to the
"foreign
rules" section, where the German rules are stored.  When I took Sanskrit
the
students in my class all mispronounced the affricate /dZ/ in different
ways
according to their previous linguistic experience.

Cheers!
Allison Turner-Hansen

----------

From: lingoman at webtv.net
Subject: Phonology

Good news: on last night's ABC news, both the anchorperson and the
reporter pronounced Beijing with "j" and not "zh."

I first noticed the zh take root when the Western press switched from
using Wade-Giles (inconsistently, of course) to pinyin transliteration
(same inconsistency).  They seemed to think that this change forced them
to drop our well-established Peking, which it did not.  Why English
speakers seem to have quickly decided to pronounce a "j" as "zh" is a
mystery.  I think Ron's theory is probably right, and in the back of
many English speakers is a "rule" that states: If you don't know how to
pronounce a foreign word, pronounce a la francaise.  Of course, in
America many have a rule to pronounce in a Spanish way.  I regularly
hear place names in the Arab world with a "j" pronounced with a Spanish
jota.  And this is from English speaking reporters!

On the same topic: during the recent war, more than one reporter did
something that surprised even me: when confronted with the town of Umm
Qasr, they managed to turn this into Umm kuh-SAHR...  This impressive
mispronunciation seems to go to a "rule" for Middle Eastern names:
pronounce with stress on last syllable (common in Hebrew, but in Arabic
only if last syllable has long vowel).  But this "rule" seems to even
override the fact that there was no vowel there to stress!

Sean Roach

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