anglicisation=cultural imperialism?

[cimorene]

psa: the delightful snacky has been running a snackfood deathmatch.  it's almost time for the semi-finals!  at last!

wax just pointed out that when we go to paris and munich this summer, i will have to find something to do with the dog, which is problematic when you're anti-social and hardly know anyone.  that hadn't even occurred to me yet.

speaking of munich, i didn't know until very recently that that's an anglicisation of its proper german name, münchen. this prompted a bit of indignance on my part, because i find the whole practice of renaming foreign cities irritating and unnecessarily confusing. it's one thing for finns to call london "lontoo" because the proper way would break their language's rules of pronunciation: the effect is the same as just reading the name with a strong accent, and most people have a ridiculously hard time with pronouncing foreign words. it's another thing entirely when english is changing "münchen" for "munich" or "torino" for "turin", because neither of the originals is difficult to approximate in english. i'm also puzzled about how many of these anglicisations came about in the first place, because, well, i just can't see an englishman looking at "torino" on paper and going "holy shit, how do you pronounce that?" and the umlaut might be a bit confusing with munich, but once someone said it to them, why on earth should they have any trouble saying "moon-chen"¹ back, even if they've never studied another language at all?

this was discussed on last sunday's episode of my favourite public radio show, a way with words.  the verbivores were actually bitching about NBC's completely arbitrary decision to break ranks with a) the other english-speaking networks and b) all of NBC's and everyone else's history of international news coverage and talk about the "torino" olympics instead of saying "turin".  they quoted scornfully from some NBC sources who are all, "omgz, it just is so much fun to say!  to-REEE-no!"  and in this instance i'm with them because i think standardisation and following accepted usage is more important, in journalism, than one's ideological feelings about that usage.  that said, i briefly considered e-mailing them to say i did think the "sure, i'll say 'roma' if i'm in rome, but we're in america!  and we have a name for it!" sounded a bit culturally imperialistic (though i don't think it really necessarily is).

i'm also sick of learning all these ridiculous words for european countries and languages.  swedish is "ruotsia" in finnish and they actually share a border.  swedish is the second official language of the country!  it used to be a swedish colony and it was swedish-speaking finnish nationalists who helped to invent and promote the written form of finnish.  we don't call italians named davide "david" or spaniards named maria "mary" anymore, though a few centuries ago we did.  maybe it's time to outgrow this altogether. 



1. i.e. as a worst-case scenario

Comments

[ciderpress.livejournal.com]

this is one of those interesting posts that i am always gleeful to see and if i had more than two minutes, i'd really want to discuss in detail because, hah, *phonetics* but i am so behind on my work, it's pitiful.

one thing, though. Turin is commonly mistaken for an anglicised version of Torino but is thought to be attributed to the Piedmontese name for the place. (Piedmontese is actually a romance language, spoken in the Piedmont region. They call it a "regional" language but it's really a fully formed, independent, romance language like Catalan.)

also, not in defense of anglicisation but as a descriptive phonetician -- a lot of the pronunciation of place names is misleading in present day English, anglicised or not because it really does depend on how certain letter sequences were spelt and pronounced when the word or place was discovered and subsequently anglicised. they may not have been as different then as they are now, historical linguistics and all that. although there is absoluterly no denying that imperialism played a huge part in how how certain colonial place names were pronounced and how language was used as a weapon to control populations ruled by others. um. must go.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

well, i'd love to hear your babble about it, but i have no background in phonetics, just the one chapter in an introductory text this one time. which i mostly don't remember anymore. however, this was very interesting. it hadn't occured to me that linguistic drift could be responsible for part of the difference.