Perhaps they'll listen now
Feb. 20th, 2012 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
How do you pronounce the surname of that artist who liked sunflowers and starry nights? I suspect I say it wrongly… but not sure. Crowdsourcing will have the answer!
[Poll #1820257]
(And did you know he lived at various times in Brixton, Ramsgate and Isleworth? I didn't until recently.)
[Poll #1820257]
(And did you know he lived at various times in Brixton, Ramsgate and Isleworth? I didn't until recently.)
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Date: 2012-02-20 10:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 12:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 12:51 pm (UTC)Als ik waar een nederlander...
Date: 2012-02-20 10:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 11:06 am (UTC)I have heard at least one person swear blind that it should be "van gog", but as I know nothing at all about Dutch/Flemmish pronunciation, I really can't say which is right with any conviction at all.
Which is odd for me, I usually have a fairly robust opinion on such things!
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Date: 2012-02-20 11:15 am (UTC)Most people I know (for example), would pronounce Don Juan and Don Quixote [loosely] as "don hwan" and "don ki'hoe-tey" respectively, but an English dictionary will give them as "don joo-en" and "don 'kwik-soet".
Mainly I object to half-hearted attempts. "Jalapeño" could be "ja-la-'pee-no" or "ha-la-'pen-yo", but "ha-la-'pee-no" gets right on my nerves!
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Date: 2012-02-20 12:25 pm (UTC)I guess Don Juan has to be so pronounced because the rhymes in Byron's poem don't work otherwise. I'm not sure why Don Quixote should suffer the same fate though (unless just because 'quixotic' depends upon that pronunciation).
Orthography of non-standard consonants (etc) is an interesting area. It seems to me you have three options when you're assigning your spoken language to the Roman alphabet and it doesn't quite fit:
* invent extra letters (the German ß);
* use diacritical marks on existing letters (the Spanish ñ);
* use unusual combinations of existing letters (the Portuguese nh);
Each has potential disadvantages when you're wanting foreigners to be able to pronounce your words properly. The Spanish seem to have made a rod for their own backs by having what is to them a separate consonant in its own right look like a modified version of a normal consonant in other languages.
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Date: 2012-02-20 12:34 pm (UTC)I think that for Don Juan and Don Quixote though, it is because the names came into common usage in English long before anyone gave a tuppenny damn what foreigners did with their words; on the well established anglo-saxon principle of "When in Rome, do as the English Do!"
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Date: 2012-02-20 12:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 12:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 12:18 pm (UTC)(but am not saying that I actually know. Sounds like Mr Broxted does.)
Manhatten.
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Date: 2012-02-20 12:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 06:05 pm (UTC)Despite that, I still can't remember how hard the "v" is. German suggests not hard at all.
Since I'm not going to pronounce it correctly, I don't see much point arguing whether it "should" be Go or Goch in English. I think I usually use the obviously-wrong Goff, but if someone raised him in conversation as van Goch I'm pretty sure I'd copy them.
Next up: Layonardo, Meechelangelo.
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Date: 2012-02-20 06:37 pm (UTC)Well sure. Because you don't want your @rse kicked.
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Date: 2012-02-21 10:42 am (UTC)I suppose there isn't much point in a strict sense. But I find it quite interesting that there actually does seem to be (judging by the responses) a consensual 'official' English pronunciation that many people are aware is different from how they actually say it, and also is different from what it's like in Dutch. Makes me wonder about the linguistic status of such a language element, which seems acknowledged as totemic yet widely ignored.
This relates to the 'making an effort' version of prounouncing foreign words in general. If you make some sort of approximation to the foreign phonemes, rather than pronouncing it as if it were an English word, then that counts as good enough, even though the actual vowel sounds and intonation and so on are still English really. Eg. "cwuss-on" for croissant.
I had the feeling that Michelangelo used to be ('officially') known as Michael Angelo in English, although I've not found a lot of evidence for that.
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Date: 2012-02-21 11:31 am (UTC)I have a vague impression that "van Go" is more common in the US than in the UK. But I might have imagined that, and even if I didn't I don't know why it should be.
that counts as good enough
There's also something both difficult and wrong with breaking into an attempted foreign accent for what (in "croissant") amounts to a loan word anyway. If you intone the word properly as well as getting the right phonemes in the right order then it's hard on the ear, if you don't speak the language then you'll get it wrong, and even if you do it's not necessarily an easy trick to pull without a pause either side. And then you have to decide whether it's "a croissant" or "un croissant".
Some languages and words are easier than others to slide into English -- people might not really notice or care if you say "Layonardo" when they expected "Leeonardo", or "lasagne" when they expected "Lazzanya", but with "van Gogh" the Dutch pronunciation is pretty much unidentifiable if all you know is the English approximations.
I had an argument with metame in 2002 whether it was pretentious of Gary Lineker to pronounce "Nagasaki" with no stressed syllables, and hence sounding to the English ear rather more like "Nagasski" than "NagasAHki". Also whether it made a difference if (a) he speaks a bit of Japanese, having made an effort when he lived there, and he likewise has a slight tendency to accidentally pronounce Spanish place names correctly from time to time (b) he's a jumped-up crisp salesman.
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Date: 2012-02-27 03:18 pm (UTC)Van Go, will get you laughed at
Van Goff, will be tolerated unless they expect you to know better (that'd be me then)
Van Goch is the right way to say it. The bloke on this Wikipedia audio sample has a monster dutch accent, so I'd go for this...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Nl-Vincent_van_Gogh.ogg
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Date: 2012-02-27 04:39 pm (UTC)