--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@...>
wrote:
>
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>
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> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Petr Hrubis <petr.hrubis@> wrote:
>
> > I don't see how any of the following matters,
>
> I had premised mine was kind of a weekend joke :^)
>
> > but as far as I know this is by far the best way to render the
> > Russian names by means of French phonetics.
>
> Isn't there really any practical way to avoid the constant shifting
> of the stress to the last syllable in French transliterations or
> transcriptions of foreign names/words (with the latter being
> historically always treated as if they were French terms)? Or is
> this the same case as that with the Japanese
> transliteration "makudonarudo" for McDonald (etc.)?
I think the problem is that in French, stress the only cue to the
position of word boundaries (in Czech too?). Therefore, stressing
foreign words according to a separate pattern will disrupt the
hearer's morpheme parsing. In the Germanic languages, except English,
there are at least two layers of foreign words, namely Latin and
French, which are stressed according to their own rules; English tries
to nativize those words, mostly by moving stress two syllables forward
(to the syllable which had secondary stress in the source language and
in English when it was first introduced there). Further, Germanic adds
a laryngeal Knacklaut to initial vowels, which helps establish a
boundary too.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/25369
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/39973
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/33381
But I guess you could trace the frustration Francesco expressed to a
feeling caused by the perception that the French in their language
will accept only one stress pattern, their native one, unlike the
practice of many of their linguistic neighbors, much like their
attitude in many other fields towards foreignness.
I remember being questioned by French police about what those pills
were someone had seen me taking at a rest stop on the road between
Calais and Belgium (they were alternative-medicine megadose
multivitamin pills against my mercury poisoning), but it all had to be
done in French (like all their peace negotiations on secession of land
to them were, which made French the language of diplomacy), as they
explicitly told me; they didn't speak any foreign tongue, which I
thought might be a handicap in their work, but then I said, with
sudden insight: 'Donc tout les bandits du monde parlent franc,ais?'
Actually I didn't; all esprit d'éscalier (please note, Arnaud, no aigu).
Torsten