A generous Hatter was kind enough to send me a birthday gift that arrived today and immediately demanded to be posted: a copy of War Words: Recommended Pronunciations (Pub. for the Columbia Broadcasting System by Columbia University Press, 1943), by W. Cabell Greet. You can see a HathiTrust copy of this first edition here (read-only) and an Internet Archive copy of the greatly expanded 1944 second edition here (Full text). It’s a kind of reference work I dearly love, done by a single person with care and a vigorous, sometimes cantankerous, style. From the Introduction: “The boldness and good humor of Australian pronunciations will please most Americans.” (The NY Times review gives as an example: “Their town of Wagga Wagga is to them simply Wogga.”) Under “The English Pronunciation of Foreign Names”:
Just as the names of the older countries and the principal regions of Europe have English variants — as Germany, Italy, and Spain for Deutschland, Italia, and España — many European cities, provinces, and rivers have, during the centuries, acquired English pronunciations and even English spellings, which are commonly preferred in English contexts. But of course for the most formal occasions and for musical programs, and also in the case of foreign speakers, the nuance of foreign pronunciations may be desirable. Announcers should know both.
Although the English forms are stable, there is here, as in all other aspects of language, the possibility of change. Nowadays the “French” pronunciations of Marseille and Lyon are probably better American usage than the Anglicized Marseilles and Lyons. We now pronounce Prague in the French style, ignoring the time-honored English variant, as well as the Czech and the German. One sign of the falling off of classical studies is a general ignorance of the English pronunciation of Greek place names. The press reports usually give English spellings which don’t quite make sense if they are pronounced as modern Greek, as, for example, Piraeus and Athens. If the classical traditions grow even weaker, such forms may be displaced. Piraeus, especially, gives trouble now.
News announcers when faced with the necessity of choosing between English and foreign pronunciations should of course use the pronunciations commonly employed in the comfortable English of educated people acquainted with the place and the subject. Names that are not on these lists probably have no English pronunciation, and they should be pronounced in foreign style. We cannot be so conservative (or so radical?) as the English family who, according to Mr. Calmer, spoke of happy holidays in Brittany and pronounced Saint Michel as if it were English Saint Mitchell.
One does not, of course, go to an eighty-year-old guide for help with current usage, but it’s an endless source of fascination if you want to know how things were said in earlier days, and Greet’s obiter dicta make great reading. Some examples:
s.v. entire: “For emphasis the accent may occasionally shift to the first syllable; normally it should be placed on the final syllable. Commentators have a tendency to overuse this word.”
s.v. Guadalcanal (after giving the pronunciation we are all familiar with): “According to the Royal Geographical Society pamphlets the local pronunciation is kä-lä-kä′-na (kah-lah-kah′-nah). Another form is Guadalcanar.”
s.v. strafe:
Because strafe is freely inflected as an English verb, the completely Anglicized pronunciation with ā is preferable to ä in all forms; sträf is not difficult to say, but to many people, sträft and sträf′-ing seem unidiomatic. In contrast is suave, q.v., which as an adjective has only one form and more easily maintains an exotic pronunciation.
s.v. strengthen: “The pronunciation strĕn′-thən [stren′-thuhn], probably an infantilism, is not uncommon. It should, of course, be avoided.”
I could go on endlessly, but you get the idea; if this is the sort of thing you like, you know where to go. (I must regretfully report that in the second edition many of his personal remarks seem to have been done away with. And they call this progress!)
in the second edition many of his personal remarks seem to have been done away with.
Cries of “Shame!” A great hissing and a booing!
Similarly in NZ, many Māori place names featuring reduplication just drop it in informal talk: Kaiteriteri ==> Kaiteri; Whakarewarewa (itself a reduction) ==> Whaka forest.
Antananarivo> Tana
“ But a word of caution must be added. Absurd foreignisms will be
labeled pretentious and asinine, fine as the line is between what seems
absurd and what seems ”correct.” The pronunciations must conform
to the customs of idiomatic English. The “Parisian” r, for instance, is
not welcomed. As Fowler cogently put it: “To say a French word in
the middle of an English sentence exactly as it would be said by a
Frenchman in a French sentence is a feat demanding an acrobatic
mouth; the muscles have to be suddenly adjusted to a performance of a
different nature, and after it as suddenly recalled to the normal state;
it is a feat that should not be attempted; the greater its success as a
tour de force, the greater its failure as a step in the conversational prog-
ress; for your collocutor, aware that he could not have done it hunself,
has his attention distracted, whether he admires or is humiliated.” “
All of which reminds very little of a day in late summer of 1968. A few months prior I had left, for the first time, my home country. From the most modernistic TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport in NY I traveled to London’s Heathrow, then hitchhiked to Brighton, took a ferry across to France, and hitched on to Paris. I carried my suitcase, my extensive naivety and three or four words of French.
Paris was in a state of upheaval, with students and workers joining to replace the established order with ?? It seemed like a fine pretext for marches in the streets, a party atmosphere, and lots of drinking and hugging, the quintessential political building blocks for an improved world order. So I took a train to Irún, and hitchhiked to San Sebastián.
Spain was love at first sight, first smell, first taste,and mostly first hearing. I immersed myself in the language, the food, the music, the poetry….and learned to keep my political opinions to myself, lest the Gristapo or Guardia Civil take notice of the danger I posed to the State.
So there I was, amazingly fluent in Spanish, sitting in a small Iberia jet on the way to Londres, and from there back to the U.S. Seated next to me was an elderly English lady, who hadn’t had the benefit of reading the pronouncing guide in question. “How did you like Sin TAHN duh?”
I grasped that she was speaking of my adopted home of recent months, Santander. I took umbrage at her mangled version of the town’s name. “Sahn tahn DARE is a fine little city, and the music festival
was a joy.”
She nodded, looked at me with kindly distain, and said, “I’m glad you enjoyed Sin TAHN duh. It is a nice place.”
(I have a late eighteenth c. map showing it as Santo Andero, or Saint Andrew.)
Years ago I listened to a radio discussion, featuring someone from the BBC pronunciation unit, on how the pronunciation of foreign place names was gradually changing from the traditional British pronunciation to something closer to the native one. Lyons to Lyon (Lions to Leeon) was one of the examples given.
You can see it in maps too. My (UK) world atlas has all place names except for country names in their native spelling. Florence and Copenhagen only appear as cross-references in the index. But all in the Roman alphabet.
A European Union map I saw went a step further, country names were native too. So Albania was Shqipëria. Greece was given both in the Greek alphabet and as Hellas.
We now pronounce Prague in the French style, ignoring the time-honored English variant,
So the English used to use the „say“ vowel ? I am going to adopt this.
Milan /ˈmaɪlən/ was another such case.
contact k6n’-tSkt kon -takt
As a verb meaning to get in touch with a person, this word was over-
used in the golden age of sales promotion. Though the word suggested
interesting metaphors of engineering, it excited objections from purists
and many ordinary speakers, probably because they heard it too often.
Now the verb seems likely to disappear with other foibles and symbols
of the Golden Era.
Prognosticating is hard.
Well, there’s very little difference between the German and the French pronunciation…
While visiting Australia, we heard a news item on the telly that involved a town called New Norcia. It sounded to us like Nyoo Nausea. Most amusing.
Well, there’s very little difference between the German and the French pronunciation
He’s exhibiting a confusion, as common then as it is now, between spelling and pronunciation — I’m pretty sure he means “we write Prague, not Praha or Prag.”
“But of course for the most formal occasions and for musical programs, and also in the case of foreign speakers, the nuance of foreign pronunciations may be desirable.”
i’m curious why ‘musical programs’ in particular should require a guide to foreign pronunciations. is this to do with (mainly Italian) technical jargon used in music, or with the names of foreign composers or works, or something else?
The latter. I’m always impressed by the general accuracy of classical announcers in rendering foreign names, though of course they sometimes slip up (I usually notice it in the stress on Russian names).
Hat, I took it to mean that we no longer pronounce “Prague” to rhyme with “plague,” unless it’s (as I’ve heard) the one in Oklahoma.
Jones, English Pronouncing Dictionary (1924 edition, 1926 reprint): “Prague preig”
6th edition, 1944: “Prague prɑːg [old-fashioned preig]”
11th edition reprint, 1958: “Prague prɑːg Note. — There existed until recently a pronunciation preig which is now probably obsolete.”
I have a couple of American dictionaries from the 1960s that were still giving rhymes-with-plague as an “older” or secondary pronunciation.
Wikipedia:
Hat, I took it to mean that we no longer pronounce “Prague” to rhyme with “plague,”
Yes, that’s the first part of the sentence; the whole thing reads “We now pronounce Prague in the French style, ignoring the time-honored English variant, as well as the Czech and the German.” The part about “the Czech and the German” only makes sense in terms of spelling, hence my remark about confusion.
Czech could mean Praha. Although wikipedia’s French example has a *very* French R, which isn’t much like how it’s pronounced in English at all.
I can’t find any previous mention here of the classic Jimmy Smits SNL skit on attempting to insert foreign pronunciations into English sentences, but perhaps I just used the wrong search terms, or the deterioration of Google interfered.
Czech could mean Praha.
Well, yes, hence my remark about the confusion of spelling and pronunciation. He started out explaining the pronunciation shift, then decided he might as well mention the fact that we spell it Prague and not Prag or Praha, and just stumbled ahead without straightening out the sequence of thought.
Well, there’s very little difference between the German and the French pronunciation
Well, there is. The standard German pronunciation devoices the final consonant. But adopting that into English makes you sound like a Katzenjammer kid.
Rome used to be homonymous with room. Apparently Queen Victoria was one of the last people to use that pronunciation.
I don’t see what makes Language Hat so certain that Greet wasn’t referring to the Czech and German pronunciations of Prague. He’s pointing out that as long as we were re-borrowing a foreign pronunciation (to be precise, the closest English approximation of French), we could theoretically have borrowed from Czech or German instead (though that presumably would have entailed borrowing their spelling as well).
That’s why I said “very little” and not “no”. The Austrian standard, for example, keeps /g/ and /k/ quite distinct there, they’re just both voiceless; and while the Standard English accents don’t have syllable- or word-final devoicing, they do have prepausal devoicing. On top of that, the long /aː/ in German increases the similarity to the French pronunciation by taking away what’s called prefortis clipping in English.
The standard German pronunciation devoices the final consonant.
Yes. And in everyday pronunciation many people will pronounce final g as [x] or [ꭓ].
I can’t get ꭓ to display correctly; what is it? However, fricative pronunciations of g don’t occur in areas where Alemannic or Bavarian dialects are or were spoken, and were also absent in Prague German as we recently learned.
I can’t get ꭓ to display correctly; what is it?
Analyse string says: U+AB53 LATIN SMALL LETTER CHI, belonging to Latin Extended-E, Letters for German dialectology. If I understand correctly, IPA for voiceless uvular fricative is χ , U+03C7 GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI; no idea if the Latin one is supposed to mean anything different. Google provided a Unicode working group document about why that character exists.
I don’t see what makes Language Hat so certain that Greet wasn’t referring to the Czech and German pronunciations of Prague.
Because there is no “Czech pronunciation of Prague”; the Czech word is Praha. The whole Czech and German thing only makes sense in terms of spelling.
When did “Leghorn” become obsolete? I would guess about when people switched from traveling by ship to traveling by airplane, and port cities like Livorno became less known globally.
Probably a certain cartoon character didn’t help, either.
‘Flushing’ is the one I wish was still around, for some reason.
Maybe no one uses “Flushing” as an English version of that place in the Netherlands, but that spelling/pronunciation remains current for its New Netherlands namesake, which is these days significantly more populous than Old World Vlissingen, possibly of greater cultural import, and certainly a better place to get Chinese food. https://ny.eater.com/maps/flushing-chinatown-nyc-best-restaurants
Now yer makin’ me homesick.
The Mets and great Chinese food!
The Flushing restaurant that as of a decade-plus ago arguably offered the most linguistic interest (Biang! – which was named after a kanji/sinogram that was legendary for its complexity and for taking 57 separate strokes with yer ink-pen to properly construct) unfortunately closed down and a subsequent attempt to revive it also failed. Apparently the problem was that it had an ‘upscale” presentation but basically served the same food offered at other places with the same owners at markedly lower price points. I ate at the Flushing location once or twice before the plug got pulled, and here’s a story from that era: https://hexacoto.com/2013/10/17/the-most-complicated-chinese-character-food-chain-in-new-york/
there is no “Czech pronunciation of Prague” — all right then, “the Czech and German pronunciations of *their names for the city*”. I thought that was clear enough as it was, and Greet’s sentence was too, but OK, we’re all here to be precise.
The place in the Netherlands is probably a better place to get Indonesian food, though. *Homeric drooling* Rijsttafel…
Ah, didn’t know Unicode had made one.
all right then, “the Czech and German pronunciations of *their names for the city*”.
But it would make no sense to talk about the English adopting the Czech pronunciation of Praha, a name virtually no English speakers knew existed.