Terrible thing that has happened in Burma. I assume the Red Cross will find a way into the country eventually, so we’ll make a donation.
And yes, I said Burma. A bunch of non-elected thugs with guns—the same thugs who would apparently rather their countrymen sicken, starve, and die than suffer the heinous indignity of allowing foreign planes to land—decided the country would be named Myanmar. Sorry; not playing.
We’ve been inundated with new names for old places recently. No such place as Peking anymore; we’re supposed to say Beijing. Bombay is Mumbai. Another flavor of it is changing a longstanding pronunciation. For example, right now it’s fashionable to pronounce Qatar as rhyming with gutter rather than guitar.
Guess what? When the place hasn’t legitimately changed names (like Leningrad back to Saint Petersburg), but has merely sprouted a new pronunciation of the same name, I use the old name.
My perception is that all too often, these things get traction because of chronically guilt-ridden intellectuals who slobber and trip over themselves trying to demonstrate the most sensitivity for other cultures. There’s an anti-American apologia about their motivations that I find highly distasteful. And I haven’t the least problem with pissing those people off just for sport.
Oh, my goodness! What an ugly American am I! How can I be so insensitive? I’m not in the least. I do recognize, though, that it says nothing of respect or lack thereof that a place may be pronounced differently in English from the way it is pronounced in its native language. Who says the integrity of English is less important? Can’t we just call the pronunciations “different” and move on?
Still, if you want to get into me for “Peking” and “Bombay,” that’s fine. I’ll get into you for “Paris,” “Rome,” or “Moscow.” (That’s pa-REE, RO-ma, and mosk-VAH to you. Or aren’t you sensitive to those cultures too, you knuckle-dragging neanderthal?)
I’m sure I’ll lose. This is just another arena of political correctness, a juggernaut for which ten liabilities seem to arrive with every asset. But fighting is free.
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I have always, and will always, pronounced Qatar like “KAH-tar.” The news people pronouncing it like “gutter” sounds awful.
What’s in a name, really?
I have a similar peeve, because none of the newscasters pronounce France as frahhwnce.
I clicked over thinking this was going to be a post about tea.
Listening to NPR Thursday, the host of the show that was on pronounced Othelo as O-Tell-o …
I guess I’m on the other side of this issue, at least in some ways. I agree that a bunch of fascists who take over a country don’t get to tell me what to call that place. I say “Burma” not “Myanmar” (not that I know how to pronounce the latter anyway). I have not heard of a popular outcry by the people who live in that nation to have it called something other than “Burma.”
On the other hand, I’ve never understood why, for example, I should call a place in Italy “Turin” instead of what the Italians call it, which, as I understand it, is “Torino.” (“Turin” is not English for “Torino” any more than “Geraldo” is Spanish for “Gerald”).I think all that comes from a long time ago when the British were both military and cultural imperialists. The Brits, like unto American yahoos, take pride in mispronouncing other places’ (and citizens’) names. (Think of the folks who love to call a guy “manual” instead of “man-well”). I do not think simple courtesy is the equivalent of “political correctness”, nor do I think the “integrity of English” (whatever that is) is served by being rude. (Don’t get me wrong, other nations have also engaged in the same ridiculous crap: why do the French call London “Londres”?).
Now, as for the whole Peking vs. Beijing thing, I understand that at some point in the not-too-distant past the “language police” decided to suck up to China by changing the way transliteration is done. My guess is that “Bay Jing” is little, if any, closer to the sound Chinese folk make when they refer to their capitol than “Pay King.” When I watch video of Chinese people talking, with subtitles, I often pay close attention when something is mentioned (like the name of a city, or river, or whatever) I could put a name to, sort of. Nothing I hear ever sounds even remotely like it sounds in my head when I think of it. I think some languages are poorly rendered in our 26 letter alphabet, even when we load the transliteration up with a zillion or little insect-looking symbols no regular person has the faintest idea how to interpret, or what they are supposed to be indicating about pronunciation.
This discussion reminds me a bit of my high school Spanish class (yeah, I know, it’s “Espanol”). One of the common occurrences was for some dipshit to hear a name of a person or place in Espanish and ask to know what it “meant.” The nincompoop’s notion that although his own name (let’s say “Robert”) had no “meaning,” all foreign words had a meaning (yeah, “Roberto” means “he who wears rope sandals”). Hey, “Peoria” means nothing, and neither does “Barcelona.” They are words we use so you don’t end up in Keokuk or Madrid. Hmmm, I wonder what the word for Keokuk is in Tagalog.