I posted about a video by Taylor “Language” Jones last year, and now he’s got another one I can’t resist sharing, Dear Hank Green, here’s the science of “Bruschetta”. It’s about how we choose which version of borrowed words to say (with detours into what even counts as “borrowed,” e.g. the fake-French “nom de plume”), and it’s one of the few video essays I wish were longer — it’s under fifteen minutes, and I would happily have watched for half an hour if he analyzed a bunch of good examples. One of his trick questions (“leave the answer in the comments if you know it!”) is what the real French phrase is; another is “in what language is bgadim an actual word?” (spoiler: it’s Hebrew). I was distressed that he called /beɪˈʒɪŋ/ (“Beizhing”) the “standard” pronunciation of Beijing, but I can’t in good conscience dispute it. And I’m reminded of my comment here: “The problem, of course, is knowing with whom to use which pronunciation.” (I just thought of a good example: I’ve heard enough Cantonese-speakers call Wong Kar-wai “Wong GAH-wei” that that’s how I say it in my head, but I would never dream of saying that in conversation — I will keep calling him WONG kar-WYE like a normal English-speaker.)
Relatedly, I ran across the name of the luxury clothing line Xuly Bët (or, as they apparently style it, XULY.Bët Funkin’ Fashion Factory), which is said to mean “to open your eyes wide” in Wolof. Amazingly, that is actually correct; Arame Fal’s Dictionnaire wolof-français has “xulli, v. écarquiller les yeux, faire les gros yeux” (Bul xulli xale bi, dafay tiit ! Ne fais pas les gros yeux à l’enfant, il va avoir peur !) and “bët b-, n. oeil.” As I understand the writing system of Wolof, this should be pronounced /ˈxulli bət/; my question, in case any of you have any dealings with luxury clothing lines, is: how do non-Senegalese pronounce this? If I were an English-speaker who knew nothing about Wolof, I might try /ˈzuwli bɛt/, but I can think of all sorts of other possibilities, and I can’t imagine either English- or French-speakers hitting on the correct (i.e., Wolof) one.
Even if the two words exist in Wolof with relevant senses, it doesn’t follow that both of them together form a grammatical sentence or have the intended idiomatic meaning. \killjoy
There is always the question of whether you can use the more widely circulated form of a borrowing, or the more pedentically correct version (“is it safe to say restaurant with a nasal vowel around this person, or will I get a sneering look?”). But what’s really fascinating is when there is such a dichotomy and it’s not a correct-versus-incorrect thing. The socio-linguistics around the pronunciation of the word “amen,” for example, is complex, and it’s usually not because of people arguing over how accurate it is.
Now that there are so many in the Premier League, the mean degree of anglicisation of foreign surnames by British TV sportscasters is a good deal lower than in the 1970s, though the standard deviation is still high. Everyone in Ireland of a certain age will pronounce Schillaci as [skɪˈlætʃi]
Eta—they may spell it Schillacci
I’d say pseudonyme in French, but apparently the cunning French have borrowed “nom de plume” too …
(I don’t think that they have as yet progressed to the inevitable next stage of giving it a different meaning from “nom de plume.”)
Even if the two words exist in Wolof with relevant senses, it doesn’t follow that both of them together form a grammatical sentence or have the intended idiomatic meaning.
The example Wolof sentence suggests that xulli means “open the eyes” by itself, without “eye” as an explicit object; but Wolof I know from nothing.
In Kusaal you actually would explicitly mention the body part an expression like that (e.g. um nini “close the eyes”, despite the fact that um only ever means “close” with eyes.) But Kusaal and Wolof are extremely distant relations, if they’re even related at all.
Bët is actually singular (plural gët), though I suppose it’s possible that the Wolof idiom might be to say “open the eye” for “open the eyes.” I dunno.
(In Kusaal, it would have to be plural if you were talking literally, but some metaphors involving body-parts use a fixed singular: o tɛɛgi ba tʋbir “she’s pulled their ear”, i.e. “she’s punished them”; just one ear between them all.)
Lamine Badian Kouyate’s mother, Henriette Carvalho Kouyate, was born in Senegal. His pronunciation, at least for English language fashion videos, is pretty close to your guess.
Thanks!
I will concede that Wikipedia’s attribution of the brand to Malian-Senegalese fashion designer Lamine Badian Kouyaté is a pretty strong indicator that the Wolof expression is, in fact, correct – or at least intentionally incorrect.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you that /beɪˈʒɪŋ/ is NOT standard, certainly not in educated circles in the North Eastern US. It’s also true though that for a lot of Americans the distinction between non-initial /ʒ/ and /dʒ/ isn’t that salient, especially in normal flowing speech.
The ultimate truth is that we should have stuck to Peking. I will never understand why English-speakers allow others to dictate what forms should be used in English.
Nah, we shoulda stuck to Peiping.
That is not some übertraditional form, it was used for a relatively brief period (1928 to 1949) while the capital of the Republic of China was Nanjing. Frankly, I doubt many English-speakers ever used it in conversation unless they were quoting a newspaper.
Peiping (北平) isn’t a different Romanization of the same name. As noted, it replaced Peking (北京, “northern capital”) during certain periods when the capital was elsewhere, particularly when the Nationalist capital was Nanking (南京, the “southern capital”). Peiping (“northern peace”) was chosen as a similar-sounding name, but without the explicit “capital” part.
French does have nom de plume:
1, http://stella.atilf.fr/Dendien/scripts/tlfiv5/visusel.exe?11;s=2874436245;r=1;nat=;sol=0;
2. “Pour les écrivains, on parle de Nom de plume et, pour les comédiens, de Nom de théâtre. Nom de religion, que les religieux prennent ou reçoivent en entrant dans certains ordres”
(the latest edition of the dictionary of the French Academy, s.v. nom).
Etc.
Yes, now it does, but the traditional phrase is nom de guerre. OED s.v.nom de plume:
Peiping is an example of the usual phenomenon of people dropping the apostrophes from the Wade-Giles transcription: correctly it’s Peip’ing*, with the apostrophe marking the phonemic and very loud aspiration, corresponding 1 : 1 to Beiping in the Communist transcription.
京 once was “a sketch of a palace building”, or so I’ve read.
* Of course not. It’s Pei³p’ing² with the tones spelled out. Likewise Běipíng.
“The ultimate truth is that we should have stuck to Peking. I will never understand why English-speakers allow others to dictate what forms should be used in English.”
Hear, hear. My current bugbear is the new ‘official’ name for Turkey, which I can’t be bothered to type out. I started reading an ambitious history book a while ago and was so annoyed by the constant use of the word (even when writing about events in the Bronze Age, long before the Turks arrived in Turkey) that I gave up on the book. Well, that wasn’t the only reason, but it helped to tip the scale. I always prefer the appropriate historical placename if there is one: ‘England’ shouldn’t be used for my country before (say) the time of Alfred the Great, but Albion or Britain or Britannia (or even Pretannia) or Wessex, etc., as needed. But it’s a difficult area. I’m happy with the phrase ‘Neolithic Europe’ because we have no idea what name the Neolithic people used for their home.
One of Erdoğan’s silly whims that isn’t likely to last even as long as the palace he had illegally built in a nature reserve.
“Türkiye” and “Beijing” come from the same mindset as “Gulf of America” and should be regarded with exactly the same amount of deference.
It’s also the case that you haven’t really arrived as a city or country unless foreigners have their own distinctive version of your name. You’re a mere parvenu. (But you can cheat by coming up with an internal-use-only name like Shqipëri or Sakartvelo or Suomi or Hayastan or Cymru for yourself to make sure this happens.)
Would you count the German/Platt names of the towns in North Schleswig that are now Danish? Flensburg for Flensborg is maybe marginal, but Appenrade for Åbenrå might count.
Anyway, Kopenhagen has MLG pedigree, it says. But L Hafnia might be just as early, I can only see that it was still Hafn in papal documents of the 12th.
Peiping is the postal-map spelling. The Post Office rejected strict Wade-Giles from the get-go because they knew people would just screw it up in practice.
Peiping is the postal-map spelling.
Do you have a reference for that? It appears in the table here only for 1947.
I presume JWB meant “Peiping as opposed to Peip’ing or Beiping”, not “Peiping as opposed to Peking”.
Yes, what mollymooly said.
Ah, sorry.
Swedes often say [be’jɪŋ], which is more-or-less what it “should” be given Swedish spelling rules and final stress. Probably doesn’t strike Mandarin speakers as much of an improvement over [‘pʰe:kʰɪŋ], though.
(An advantage of the first, though, is that no-one ever uses it as a nickname for Norrköping, Sweden.)
In the past year or two, I’ve heard a number of native Mandarin speakers saying /beɪˈʒɪŋ/ while speaking English, which I don’t think I ever heard previously. I’m afraid that really is going to become the standard form, if it hasn’t yet. I really, really dislike that pronunciation, but I think we’ll just have to get even more used to it.
Andreas Johansson: [Peking] as a a nickname for Norrköping, Sweden
That’s brilliant, actually.