--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Andrew Jarrette" <anjarrette@...>
wrote:
> You might be interested in the following point: as you say, many
> French speakers pronounce foreign names according to French rules
> of pronunciation. Well, in English, I have noticed time and again
> that many English speakers, particularly those who are not
> especially interested in languages or linguistics, pronounce all
> foreign words as if they were French words, and pronounced
> according to French rules of pronunciation. I.e. all foreign
> languages are considered varieties of French, with French
> pronunciation. Well, actually, what I've noticed is that, although
> the letter "j" is pronounced normally [dZ] in English, if it is in
> a foreign word or name, such as "Beijing" or "Maharaja", it is
> always pronounced [Z], as though the word is French, even though
> the source language pronounces it more or less as in English,
> approximately [dZ]. I don't know why so many Anglophones believe
> that if a word is foreign, it must be pronounced according to
> French rules of pronunciation.
This is, indeed, one of the reasons why I oppose the 'path
depenency' of Italian from the French rules of pronunciation of
foreign words in my field of study, namely, Indian civilization.
Since as early as the 18th-19th century, some Gallicized Indian
words such as Visnù (from Viçnou/Vishnou, pron. [vis^'nu:], the
French rendering of the name of the Hindu god Vis.n.u), Kalì (from
Kali, pron. [ka'li:], the French rendering of the name of the Hindu
goddess Ka:li:), indù (from hindou, pron. [heN'du:], the French
rendering of the Persian word hindu), rajà (pron. [ra'Za], the
French rendering of the Indic term ra:ja: 'king'), and a bunch of
others, have entered the Italian lexicon due to the greater
authoritativeness of French Orientalist scholarship, narrative
literature, and journalism over Italian ones. Ever since, those
Indic words have been pronounced in French fashion by most of
Italian speakers not especially interested in Indic languages and
culture. In certain cases, even the official spelling has been left
unchanged till today; for instance, the Italian term for 'Hindu'
still found in all vocabularies is still today "indù", although
Italian Indologists are striving to introduce the correct
transliteration of this term in the current linguistic use.
Best wishes,
Francesco