Back in the saddle

Ugh. I feel so draggy. It's like my body has completely forgotten how to get through a day at work. And it's been a relatively calm one, what with my work PC forgetting how to connect to any servers or anything for a few hours. Maybe a stroll in the bracing coolness will perk me up.

monshu, being a clever lad, is taking today off to transition back to his grind. I think the loveliest discovery of the trip is that a lot of his negative qualities--his impatience, his judgementalness, his inflexibility, his unwillingness to go out and meet new people--are severely exacerbated by the demands of his work schedule. Take away that pressure and he becomes mellow, outgoing, spontaneous, and oversexed. All my worries about some ugly communication breakdown turned out to be completely unfounded.

So there it is: If I were independently wealthy and he could retire early, our lives would simply be perfect. Still, there's a lot to be said for near-perfection.

Cartoon of the Day

Tom Toles in today's NYT.

Pet Peeves Only I Have, #3: The "foreign ž"

Part of the fun of dining with Mort and Kcat last Thursday was getting to chat about geeky linguistic things with the latter. She said that one of the advantages of stating observations among colleagues was that it enabled correctives to the "If it's new to me, it must be a new development" fallacy. As she put it, "You say, 'People have suddently started saying X' and they say, 'Oh, yeah, I published an article on that back in 1963.'" (At this point, I mentioned how I consider it my duty that, whenever caitalainn states a pet peeve, I immediate search the OED for the earliest citation of that phenomenon I can find. Some "new" barbarisms have surprisingly ancient pedigrees. The oldest I know is ax for ask; it goes back to Old English. Ask is actually a 17th century innovation in Standard English.)

So I don't pretend to be the first person to notice the phenomenon of the "foreign ž". I haven't even done a prelim search of the literature to see how often it's been commented on. All I know is that it bugs me batshit. (One of their other dinner guests said, "You're a linguist! You're not supposed to have pet peeves!" and Kcat replied, "We're not, but we all do!")

I first started noticing it in Beijing. After years of saying "Peking" (a barbarous pronunciation, but who can really blame them when such an inaccurate, obsolete romanisation is in use?), commentators did their best to assimilate the new Pinyin spelling. Unfortunately, they tried too hard. Instead of pronouncing j as English "j" (as the designers of Pinyin presumably intended; the actual putonghua value is close enough for government work), they hypercorrected it to French "j", i.e. the g of beige--a sound not found in Chinese (although Pinyin r comes close). It's now become something of a shibboleth for me. If you pronounce the j in Beijing correctly (as, for example, the BBC correspondent stationed there does), then it implies that you actually know a thing or two about Chinese, even if you don't really speak it.

Then, some years ago, I read an article about anglicisation of foreign names that pointed out that this mispronunciation had spread to to Indian names like Taj Mahal and Punjab (the latter also subject to an overcorrection of u--meant to represent the English central vowel--to [U] or "short oo"). I began listening more carefully and soon heard more Ta[ž]s than I could bear.

Today, I was listening to reportage about the civil war in Côte d'Ivoire. The reporter must've mentioned the name of the capital a dozen times and I winced each and every time. One could almost forgive a reporter giving a "French" pronunciation to the j in Abidjan except for one significant fact: dj is how the French transcribe the English "j" sound! (Phonetically analysed, it's [dž], an affricate or combination of a fricative ([ž]) with a stop ([d]).) That's why you see such seemingly odd spellings like Djibouti or Djakarta.

One little mispronunciation, but enough to throw the reporter's entire competence into question. How likely is it that someone who made such a fundamental error in French pronunciation would have a good working knowledge of it? And, if he didn't, how could he do a reliable job reporting? If he'd really spoken to dozens of local informants--even in English--wouldn't he have heard the correct pronunciation from their lips? And if he was too dull to pick up on it, what else in their testimony was he too dense to notice?