I have been made aware that “the small South Pacific country formerly known as Nauru” has officially changed its name to Naoero (NY Times story). That is, of course, its right, but my immediate question is: how do you say the new name? The Times has this infuriating paragraph:
How the new name is pronounced depends in part on one’s accent. British, Australian and American English speakers variously pronounce it nah-OO-roo, now-AIR-o or nah-oh-EH-roh.
Well, isn’t that nice! Maybe some people pronounce it Fanshaw. But my question is, how is it pronounced in Nauruan? Anybody know?
This seems to suggest that even in the national anthem, the name appears as “Nauru”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru_Bwiema
Nauruan in general seems to be particularly underdescribed, even for a Micronesian language, judging by what appears in Blust’s The Austronesian Languages.
The Wikipedia article on Nauru suggests [ˈnao̯ɛro] (so the closest reasonable English imitation would be something like NOW-ə-roh), but with no citation.
The relevant question does seem like it ought to be how do they expect it to be pronounced in English? The claim is Out There that “Nauru” itself was always an attempted concession to foreigners who couldn’t pronounce the Real Thing, but it does not seem well-sourced. See, e.g., German wikipedia’s “Das Wort „Nauru“ wurde später von „Naoero“ abgeleitet, damit Ausländer den Namen der Insel richtig aussprechen konnten,” which really seems like it should be followed by whatever the German idiom is for Citation Needed.
The Grauniad says „ Commonly known abroad by the pronunciation of Now-roo, the new name is spoken as Now-ero.“
According to Russian Wikipedia, stress is always penultimate in words that end in vowels, suggesting what the NYT calls the „American“ pronunciation („nah-oh-EH-roh“) is reasonably close.
I’m not seeing how nah-OO-roo—now-AIR-o—nah-oh-EH-roh result from differences of accent. It seems more like tomato (tomayto—tomahto) than foehn (fayn—furn)
The second and third seem like they’d be pretty similar in some accents, including mine. The first is totally different though.
Nauruan has been underdescribed for a long time (surprisingly, since its classification within Micronesian has been a difficult open question). Recently there has been a dissertation on Nauruan phonology, by Kevin Hughes, and several papers by Lev Blumenfeld. One of them, “Notes on the synchronic phonology of Nauruan”, transcribes the name of the language, dorerin Naoero, as /dořʌřɨn næu̯ʌřo/.
/u̯/ is distinct from /w/. As I understand it, in this context there is no clear rule for assigning the /u̯/ to the first or second syllable. By the stress rules described in the paper, the stress is on the first syllable for both words.
There are two rhotic phonemes, annotated /r/ and /ř/. Hughes’s dissertation, which includes detailed phonetic analysis, describes /r/ as “a plain alveolar trill. The phonetic length of /r/ varies, and it is sometimes realized as a flap [ɾ] or as the devoiced variant [ɹ̥̌]”, the latter being “a devoiced, non-trilled obstruent articulated at the alveolar ridge”. /ř/ “is an alveolar trill which has a greater degree of airflow obstruction than /r/.” The phonetics of /ř/ had not been well-understood before Hughes. One hypothesis was that /ř/ is the palatalized counterpart of /r/. Hughes had entertained that view as well but later abandoned it.
I think a DeiNaoero pronounces the name at the beginning of the Instagram clip here.
In this video the author (who claims to have spent some time there, but isn’t native) says that the name is [nau̯’ɛro] “but… they call it [na’uru]”, whatever that means. (Some kind of reduction process?)
He also pronounces the name in English as “naw-ROO”.
whatever the German idiom is for Citation Needed.
Beleg fehlt or Belege fehlen
but… they call it [na’uru]”, whatever that means.
Apparently Nauruan is classified as endangered and most Naruans speak English as well if not better than their „native“ language. Maybe he means most locals actually use the Australian pronunciation „Naw-ROO“ in daily life. I saw a video about a Naruan Independence Day celebration that seems to suggest that‘s the case.
The NYT quotation doesn’t contain “respectively”, so it might mean that in each country, more than one pronunciation is used.
transcribes the name of the language, dorerin Naoero, as /dořʌřɨn næu̯ʌřo/.
Thanks, that fits with how the speaker pronounces it at the beginning of Xerîb’s Instagram clip, so I’m adopting it (minus the mysterious ř phoneme, of course).
The NYT quotation doesn’t contain “respectively”, so it might mean that in each country, more than one pronunciation is used.
Yes, that’s how I took it. It’s dumb and badly written, but they probably figured it would be too hard to get an official/accurate version. But then why include the paragraph at all?
What I know about Nauru is that after being for decades within the sphere of Aus/NZ, it has been trying to align more with PRC (by for example abruptly de-recognising Taiwan), and this dodgy deal done without forewarning Canberra. (Cook Islands has similarly struck a dodgy deal with PRC recently, again without forewarning NZ — which subsidises their economy substantially.)
So this name change is some attempt to throw off the colonial cringe. As @Hat says, of course it’s their right, but I note the name change was carried through without a referendum (yet). I suspect something shady is going on.
minus the mysterious ř phoneme
Not that mysterious. It has more taps than the <r>, and subjectively is more forceful. The speaker in Xerîb’s video pronounces it quite clearly in several words. It sounds more forceful than, say, Mexican Spanish <rr>.
I guess less “mysterious” and more “not worth the effort of trying to reproduce in English.”
Interestingly, this site, Nauru’s [sic] online legal database
https://ronlaw.gov.nr/docs/any/naoero
suggests that the form Naoero has been in (presumably) official use (alongside Nauru) for a good few years. It seems to be have been favoured as name for the people and their language, rather than using “Nauruan”, but not (hitherto) used for the official name of the country.
The NYT’s 18 May article, also by Victor Mather, gives different information:
The new text may have been a misguided attempt to avoid using exactly the same phrasing twice, or it may be because the old version was inaccurate.
The same DeiNaoero on Instagram, Purpleknots, has a clip here in which she says Naoero several times in a mostly English context, a little after the beginning of the clip.
That’s great, thanks.
I have to say, the new orthography gives me Dutch vibes.
Like “Soeharto”.
Yeah, but that was oe = /u/.
As in voetbal.
Right, and I would have expected it to be spelled “Naoeroe” in Dutch (it’s not, it’s spelled Nauru.)
The Synchronic and Diachronic Phonology of Nauruan: Towards a Definitive Classification of an Understudied Micronesian Language, a 2020 doctoral dissertation from Kevin Hughes, gives the pronunciation of the endonym simply as /næoero/ without indicating stress. He does distinguish between /r/ and /ř/ in his transcriptions (e.g. /bʲařebʲařawa/ ‘stingray’), so it would seem that the former is used here.
He avoids drawing a conclusion on whether a VV sequence can be a phonological diphthong: “in VV sequences where the second V is unstressed and less sonorous than the first, it becomes difficult to distinguish between a diphthong (V ͜V or V́ ͜V#) and two independent syllables (V.V or V́.V#)…. [P]reliminary investigation suggests variability in how such VV sequences are syllabified by speakers.”
He gives a weight-sensitive stress rule for Nauruan as follows:
Heavy syllables are (C)VC syllables where V is not [ɨ], [ɐ] or [ə]
1. Stress the final syllable if it is heavy
2. Otherwise, stress the penultimate syllable
3. If there is no penultimate syllable, stress the only syllable in the word
This would seem to suggest that /næoero/ would be stressed as [næoˈero] if each vowel gets its own syllable. If the first /o/ becomes nonsyllabic [o̯], the stress placement would be the same.
Hughes acknowledges that this analysis of the stress rule is different from that proposed by Blumenfeld. Phonetically, Hughes states that “Nauruan stress is realized primarily as relative differences in F₀ across the final two syllables in a given prosodic word.” I wonder whether Nauruan stressed syllables are not as prominent as their English counterparts, making it harder to decide where a given word is stressed.
3. If there is no penultimate syllable, stress the only syllable in the word
Good one!
Some languages like English do have monosyllabic words without stress, to be fair.
I too wondered when reading, if it was Naoeru > [read as Dutch and changed to] Nauru > Naoero.
The government of Palau went through a similar phase a decade or so ago, IIRC. They changed their name to Belau but now call themselves the Republic of Palau, reverting to the name most widely known from their colonial era.