donn@sdchema.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (09/05/83)
Joe Presley is certainly right about the pronunciation of 'Honda' (as hone-dah) but anyone who wants to remedy this mistake has a lot of work to do; even the (American) spokesmen and advertisers for the company pronounce it the other way (as hahn-duh). I had a programmer friend once whose last name was 'Handa' (she was an American of Japanese extraction). Of course her name was pronounced almost exactly like the name of the car maker usually is in English. She owned (naturally) a Honda automobile and had the lettering on the back adjusted so that the 'o' was turned into an 'a'... My current gripe is about the pronunciation of the name of the fish, 'piranha'. There was a movie called 'Piranha' on the other night and all the announcers pronounced the word 'purranuh'. My knowledge of Portuguese ain't too great but I'm pretty sure that the word is pronounced 'peerahnyah'... (Such a pity that ASCII doesn't have enough useful characters to do a decent phonetic transcription.) Many of the funny pronunciations Americans emit when they read foreign words are a result of the infamous 'Great English Vowel Shift', which haunts us to this day. At some point in the past speakers of English would have pronounced 'Honda' the way it's supposed to be pronounced, but the vowel shift screwed us all up. Since our vowels changed but our spelling stayed the same, we 'overgeneralize' and expect that all foreign languages have also had their vowels mucked up... Of course, who is saying or spelling it wrong depends on your point of view. (The vowel shift is also partially responsible for such horrors as pronounce/pronunciation...) Chairman of Americans for the Repeal of the Vowel Shift, Donn Seeley UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn
cunningh@noscvax.UUCP (09/05/83)
One of the problems about pronouncing Japanese (besides the
romanization of words) is the stressing of the various syllables.
Japanese tend to stress all the syllables in a word more or less
equally, while English speakers habitually seem to want to stress one
syllable at the expense of all the others in a word.
--
Bob Cunningham ...{ucbvax|philabs}!sdcsvax!noscvax!cunningh
21 17' 35" N 157 49' 38" W MILNET: cunningh@nosc-ccdave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman) (09/06/83)
Yes, Donn, piranha in Portuguese is, roughly, peeRANya. The "nh"
in Portuguese has basically the same sound as the Spanish ~
n.
But so what? Once a word enters another language, as piranha has
into English, it gets changed. Unless you're referring to a name
as it is CURRENTLY used in another language, you're not wrong.
I get annoyed if I hear Sao Paulo (tilde over the a) pronounce
"say-oh pow-lo". (It's, roughly, saung [nasal 'ng', all one syllable]
pow-lo.) But I don't get annoyed if someone refers to, say,
"reconnaissance" with a decidedly un-French pronunciation. Once
the word's in the language, whatever people use is, by definition,
correct. Linguistics and the study and discussion of language
should aim to be descriptive, not prescriptive.
Dave Sherman
--
{allegra,cornell,floyd,ihnp4,linus,utzoo,uw-beaver,watmath}!utcsrgv!lsuc!dave