[PLUG-TALK] begging the question

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Mon Oct 5 18:34:43 UTC 2009


On Mon, 5 Oct 2009, Michael M. Moore wrote:

>> We also seem to have a penchant for making up names for other 
>> places. Germany is really Deutschland, Japan is really Nihon, Spain 
>> is really España, etc. Do others do this as much as we do?
>
> The English do that to annoy the French.  I think in the 
> U.S./Canada, we just inherited the penchant along with the language.

I think the question of how far a linguistic group ought to go to 
duplicate foreign proper nouns is actually rather interesting.

On the one hand, it seems to honor the native tongues of those who 
devised the proper noun in the first place. That's most true, IMO, of 
given names and surnames, but has some application to place names as 
well.

On the other hand, one of the things that drives people crazy about 
English is its unrestrained willingness to borrow from other 
languages, usually in such a way that it creates more and more 
exceptions to standard pronunciation practices.

So where does the line get drawn? Should "Paris" be PAIR-iss, 
following standard pronunciation, or pah-REE, as in French? Choose the 
first, and you torque the French (which isn't difficult, in general); 
choose the second, and you doom millions of students to learn Yet 
Another Exception.

It's a tough call from where I sit...

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/


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