databases (was: Re: [Buddha-l] Tibetan for...?)

[Richard Hayes]

On Saturday 06 January 2007 11:17, jkirk wrote:

>  Same with some
> Spanish place-names that get mispronounced right next to the border.
> Plain ignorance. 

No, it's not ignorance at all. It's a matter of phonetics. People pronounce 
words with thephonetics of the language they are speaking, and it's most 
peculiar to change phonetic horses midstream. So when speaking English, the 
proper thing to do is to pronounce Spanish and French words with English 
phonetics, just as when speaking Spanish the proper thing is to pronounce 
English words with Spanish phonetics. (One learns that a one-syllable name 
like Hayes can be rendered in a great variety of ways.)

> So, if denizens of New Mexico succeed in pronouncing some 
> Spanish place-names correctly, I'd guess it's because they've learned a
> little Spanish, hearing it locally one way or the other.

If a person in New Mexico were speaking English and insisted on pronouncing 
Albuquerque or Santa Fe as they are pronounced in Spanish, the effect with be 
either comical or even potentially insulting. (Many Hispanics would see it 
as "talking down" to them, as if one were assuming that they do not 
understand English well enough to understand the name Albuquerque when 
pronounced in the Anglo way.)

And speaking of mispronunciations, let's not forget that Mexico is a seriously 
butchered version of a Nahuatl word that the Spanish never learned to 
pronounce. New Mexico's place names are frequently Tewa, Tiwa, Towa, Keres 
and Dine words that the Spanish dreadfully mispronounced. Then the English 
pronounced them in their own way without getting any closer to the originals. 
Hell, the name of the most popular object of worship in Mexico is the virgin 
of Guadalupe, whose name is a pathetic attempt by Spaniards to pronounce an 
Arabic phrase which itself of the Arabic word for river and an Arabic 
pronunciation of a Latin word. Imagine all the changes the word underwent 
before it came to be pronounced by New Mexican anglophones as Gwad-a-loopy.

> To include a Buddhist reference, I'm always amazed by Americans who insist
> on pronouncing dharma as dhaarma.

It's not insistence or stubbornness. Again, it's honoring the phonetics of the 
language one is speaking. One has a much better chance of being understood 
(and not seen as a prissy show-off) if one pronounces "dharma" and "karma" as 
English words (which, by the way, they have become) that if one pronounces 
them as they are pronounced in India.

> In Spain, Yah Allah became Ojala! We aren't the only ones to muck up
> pronunciation of foreign words taken into our language.

No, it's quite normal. It's only the few members of the conquering race who 
cave in to feelings of guilt who then try to diminish their shame by 
pretending to pronounce words from the conquered peoples's languages 
correctly , as if pronouncing the occasional word more or less correctly will 
compensate those whose cultures have been destroyed.

> Still, I think that a bit of etymology (say, using the OED for a
> few assignments) should be part of every primary school agenda (oops,
> agendum?) because it might ease the provincialism of this country and our
> tendency to simply ignore anything outside our borders.

The only cure for American parochialism is for the country to be conquered. As 
soon as Americans are forced to learn Cantonese to do business, or to speak 
Korean to speak to government officials, provincialism will quickly fade 
away. Hell, now that almost everyone in business in the USA has to speak 
Spanish to communicate with their underpaid employees, parochialism is 
already taking a beating. And not a minute too soon.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico