For a linguist, at least if the linguist is me, it is a thrill to cross for the first time the northern border that separates Austria from Czechia. Immediately after crossing the border last Sunday, my train stopped at Břeclav, and I was able to hear over the beautifully clear announcement PA system my first real-context occurrence of one of the rarest sounds in the languages of the world.
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I recall that, as a graduate student in Sinology, one of the most troublesome tasks was figuring out how to romanize the names of Japanese authors, the titles of their works, place names, technical terms, and so forth. Overall, Japanese Sinological (not to mention Indological and other fields) scholarship is outstanding, so we have to consult it, and when we cite Japanese works, we need to be able to romanize names, titles, and so forth to reflect their Japanese pronunciations.
For Times Insider, David W. Dunlap has an article about some of the more entertaining errors and corrections that have graced the pages of The New York Times: "The Times Regrets the Error. Readers Don't."
Among the goofs is this one from a Q&A with Ivana Trump that appeared in the Oct. 15, 2000 New York Times Magazine:
I'm prompted to ask this question in response to the very first comment on this post:
"'Butterfly' words as a source of etymological confusion" (1/28/16)
The comment supplies a link to this YouTube video, in which russianracehorse tells "The Butterfly Joke". A Frenchman, an Italian, a Spaniard, and a German each pronounce the word for "butterfly" in their own language. The words for "butterfly" in the first three languages all sound soft, delicate, and mellifluous. Finally the German chimes in and shouts vehemently, "Und vat's wrong with [the joke teller could have said 'mit'] Schmetterling?"
Nick Kaldis writes:
I am wondering if your collective knowledge of Gaomi Shandongese and dialectology can clear something up for me. My late beloved father-in-law, Tóng Jìguāng 佟繼侊, from Gaomi county, would pronounce something like an thi sandong len for "俺是山東人“ [VHM: MSM pron. ǎn shì Shāndōng rén ("I'm a Shandongese")]. My question is: is the lisp in 是 common in Shandongese? And, is there a specific word for "lisp[ing]" (of the letter/sound "s") in Chinese? Read the rest of this entry »
If you look up the pronunciation of poinsettia in the dictionary, you'll find two versions, one that follows the spelling in a regular way (/ˌpɔɪnˈsɛ.tɪə/) and one that would more naturally correspond to the spelling "poinsetta" (/ˌpɔɪnˈsɛ.tə/).
A couple of days ago, a journalist contacted me about this. I knew that the word was formed by adding the usual pseudo-Latin -ia to the last name of Joel Roberts Poinsett, just as Clarke Abel's name gave us abelia and William Forsyth's name generated forsythia. And I knew that there is a common (and even dictionary-sanctioned) alternative pronunciation for poinsettia. But why the i-less version of poinsettia and not (for example) a similar version of forsythia?
[This is a guest post by Jichang Lulu]
The usual Chinese name for the Lena River is 勒拿河 Lèná hé. That's not a particularly felicitous transcription. Lèná rhymes with 圣赫勒拿 Shèng Hèlèná i.e. St Helena; it fails to reflect the palatalisation of the l in the Russian name. An alternative name transcribes the syllable ле with 列 liè, following the usual practice.
I've heard people pronounce this symbol as though it were spelled "asteriks" or "asterix" (and some folks even write it the latter way). It gets really tricky when those who do so try to say it in the plural. And even those who pronounce "asterisk" the way it is spelled seem to have to make a special effort to render the final "s" of the plural audible when they say it.
We've had a recent post on the pronunciation of this lightning rod of a word.
"Pronouncing 'Daesh' " (11/15/15)
From a colleague:
Guthrie's article* states:
"And the vowel which begins the word 'islaamiyya' becomes an 'a' sound when differently positioned in a word, hence the acronym being pronounced 'da’ish' when written in Arabic, and the 'a' coming over into our transliteration of the acronym."
From a colleague:
A question about quinoa. Linguistic, not gustatory or political-economic. How do / would you normally say it?
kee-NO-ah? kwee-NO-ah?
KEE-no-ah? KWEE-no-ah?
KEEN-wah? KWEEN-wah?
keen-WAH? kween-WAH?
(or? )
Chris P sent in the following emojis from WeChat:
Two days ago, we contemplated the wonders of the short Polish-American surname Dzwil. Today we turn to a much longer, but equally wondrous, Hungarian-American surname, the one in the title of this post.
For some seemingly impenetrable Hungarian surnames, it helps an English speaker to have mnemonic devices to produce a passable pronunciation. An example is the surname of the Berkeley Sinologist, Mark Csikszentmihalyi. Mark is the son of the Chicago, and later Claremont, psychologist and management specialist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (in Hungarian orthography that would be Csíkszentmihályi Mihály). Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the creator of the concept of "flow", a highly focused mental state.
For the last few weeks, as I walk by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on my way to work, I've been noticing equipment marked "Dzwil" that belongs to a masonry construction company engaged to firm up the foundations.
Naturally, every time I saw that word I said to myself, "I wonder how they pronounce it".
