Re: New York

[cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!RJB]

The fashion, or more likely affectation, that moves people to wnat to
use the "right" name and "right" pronunciation for everything, is recent,
parochial (in the sense that it's an affectation of a very limited
community), and comical.  For most of the world of course it's also
impractical when not impossible.

Chinese, for example, with its commitment to using logographs to "spell"
foreign words, produces a quite unrecognizable "New York," without even using
the Chinese word for "new."  Japanese, with its syllabary, produces some
antic approximations (especially when fuiltered through its earlier
preference for using British pronunciations for English words).  I shudder
to think what Russian does with "Herefordshire."

I suppose that languages tend to assimilate foreign words into their
own phonemic structures unless other pressures -- for example, the affectations
of a class eager to advertise its cosmopolitanism, the presence of an elite
language (e.g. Latin, or Mandarin Chinese), or a constant and high
level of close contact that leads people to develop a broader sense of
the "natural" range of sounds.

Here in Washington we are blessed with Spokane, Sequim, and Puyallup, to
name but a few of our shibboleths.  The fact that furriners from Outside
don't get them right is hardly a matter of imperialism in any but the most
otiose and irrelevant sense.

--RJB