[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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