----- Original Message -----
>Quirky British realizations of place and proper
names
>are are source of transpondential humor. The classic
>is how the Marquess of Cholmondeley realizes
"Cholmondeley"
>('chumly'). The realization of
'Featherstonehaugh' as
>'fanshaw' is another one.
I've never heard 'Featherstonehaugh' pronounced; is
that fans-haw or fan-shaw?
>There is a rather consistent rule in
English that
>the way a person pronounces their name is
always
>correct. The same rule applies to how local
residents
>pronounce a place name.
Yup. Living in a college town I like to
yell at people from elsewhere who pronounce "Ooltewah" with /lt/ in it, instead
of /ɾ/ !!
Nevermind the people who like to read my last name Rivera as though it
were Riviera.
Egad. My last name is Rivera.
I have never looked at it that way before. That's so weird...
>Getting back to my thesis, I can say that
the 'by the book-ness'
>of American English reflects to some degree my
own English.
>If a word has a letter, that letter should be
pronounced. Words
>like 'knot' are slightly disturbing, while
words such as 'balm',
>'calm' are quite disturbing to one's linguistic
maps.
I know how that is. Generally the /l/
doesn't make it into my pronunciation of "calm", but it
does at least color the vowel. It is pronounced in structures
like "calming" or "balmy", which come out as cal-ming and
bal-my.
What I find very odd are the kind of
accents that ... I don't know the word for it. What
non-rhotic is to the R sound, this is like that but with L
instead.
>As I have
thought about this in the last 24 hours, I think I might
>add that anyone with a full college education
is greatly influenced
>by the written form of his language. For
languages where the writing
>system and the spoken norm are at odds with
each other, some
>sort of 'stratum develops
Yup. The words that are never heard until
read out of books tend to get reassigned sounds in non-phonemic alphabets like
ours! Spelling pronunciations.
The example closest to mind is the metric prefix
giga- (billion). Older use, such as my dictionaries or the 1985
movie Back to the Future [1.21 gigawatts!] gives it the soft g as in
gigantic (with which it is apparently cognate). But in modern use [my 3.2
gigabyte HD] it has hard g as in giggle.
*Muke!