Pet peeved

[muckefuck]

I've already complained too much about the "foreign zh", haven't I? I'm sorry, but this morning's example was really egregious. The capital of Côte d'Ivoire is "Abidjan", not "Abi[Z]an". It's why the d is there, you half-wit newsanchor!

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

I'm beginning to wonder if it's not a natural feature of at least some American speech patterns. I've been watching Star Trek: Deep Space 9 reruns, which are set mostly in the vicinity of the planet Bajor. (Rhymes with "claymore".) Some people pronounce the adjective "Bajoran" (rhymes with "the foreign") with a "j" sound, but many/most of the characters say "Bazhoran" instead. Some go so far as to call the planet "Bazhor". (I think some may switch from "j" to "zh" as the series progresses, as if that sounds more natural to them, but I'm not sure.) Whatever they're doing, they're not trying to mimic a Bajoran accent, since there's no pretense to such a thing existing. While the term may be fake-foreign, there aren't any real cues to suggest that the characters should be using anything other than standard pronunciations for anything. (Unless you count the occasional silent "gh" in words like "pagh".)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

If the [Z] were a simple dialectal variant of /dZ/, you'd expect to hear people say "ma[Z]or" (for major), "ca[Z]e" (for cage), pi[Z]eon (for pigeon), etc. Have you?

Years ago, I read an essay--I unfortunately cannot remember the name of the author--which rather successfully argued that the default foreign pronunciation for English-speakers is French. That is, unless you know better, you will unconsciously apply the rules you associate with recent French borrowings (which may be quite different from the actual rules of French). This theory not only explains the replacement of [dZ] with [Z], but also "bru[S]etta" for bruschetta and the overwhelming tendancy toward final stress in Jewish surnames ending in -el(l), -al(l) (e.g. "ManDEL Hall", "Steven SeGALL").

[lhn.livejournal.com]

One possible point of comparison would be in drug names, which are non-foreign but are more or less built up of nonsense syllables for trademark purposes. (Unfortunately, eyeballing some lists mostly tells me that "j" is woefully underused in the pharmaceutical industry, except in syllables like "ject" for injectable drugs which contain a pronunciation clue.)

[pacotelic.livejournal.com]

Ms Gabor on line 6....