The Ugly Brit
You meet idiots in the most unexpected places...
By virtue of a much higher percentage of them having passports, and of London being almost as near to Paris as to Newcastle, you might expect more of the Brits, and in many ways you’d get it, though in many places that they visit prolifically — Tenerife’s Los Cristianos, for instance, you’ll be hard pressed to find a place that doesn’t loudly advertise its Full English Breakfast! (Heaven forbid that someone on holiday for seven days might try the local cuisine!)
The British manifest their arrogance more subtly, with their refusal to even try to pronounce foreign place names and words not exactly properly, but as well as they can. Consider the case, since we just finished having a breakfast there, of Tenerife, which has four syllables, the last rhyming with “day”, but which the Brits will not be dissuaded from calling Tenor Reef.
(The spouse of a former friend of mine points out that, by not pronouncing Paris to rhyme with “spree”, with the second syllable accented, I’m a craven hypocrite, so lets forget I ever mentioned the largest Canary Island.)
There’s a podcast I enjoy. Its co-hosts’ refusal even to try to pronounce foreign names, or even to mispronounce those names in the same way, or consistently, has me thinking of them as Ugly Brits. Herewith, an email exchange I had with of them
I am an avid listener to, your podcast. That said, how is one going to trust your scholarship when you can't do something as simple as pronounce major historical figures' names, or at least agree on a mispronunciation?
Evita's husband's last name is pronounced pair-OWN, for Christ's sake. How do we know that the second syllable is accented? Well, THERE'S AN ACCENT MARK ABOVE THE BLOODY SECOND SYLLABLE! One of you, apparently thinking that all names are better for having been anglicized, made his name sound like “Perrin.”
There are times, I'll admit, when the two of you evoke the oik-iest oik down the pub, as, for instance, when one of you pronounces the Spanish given name Juan to rhyme with "man". There is no universe in which Juan is so pronounced. That bespeaks a distinctly British sort of linguistic arrogance that is enormously off-putting, like the football broadcaster who pronounces Carlos to rhyme with "floss", rather than "gross". You have the necessary vowel sound in your linguistic arsenal, but damned if you'll give those horrid foreigners the satisfaction of making some small effort to pronounce their names properly!
I’m not asking you to attempt sounds you don’t use yourselves. For instance, I don’t ask that you trill the R in Perón, or that you begin “Juan” with the guttural fricative that is present in Spanish and absent from English. But pronouncing Juan to rhyme with “man”? That’s just unconscionable.
Keep up the good work, and please make it even better, as outlined above. :-)
I receive this reply, which leads me to believe I’m dealing with an imbecile:
…you want us to pronounce Spanish names not in a Castilian or Argentine accent, but in an American accent? With Perón as “PAIR-OWN”, as it would be pronounced by a man who had never left, say, Cleveland, Ohio? And with Carlos as "CAR-LOWSS” - a sound no Spanish-speaker would ever make, but that Americans somehow believe is an indicator of cosmopolitanism?
I have to be honest with you. We often try to please our listeners, but this is a change we will never make.
Ugly Britishness writ large, innit.
I thought it was Americans that were so chauvinistic, it appears to e an anglo saxon thing, as does genocide (after all the Saxons wiped out the Romano Celts then their descendants did the same to native Americans.
Frankly French and Spanish are also chauvinistic, instead of using English technical terms, they have a committee that sanction French and Spanish equivalents. And try just try to get a Spaniard pronounce a J (Whether it is at the beginning of the a word of the middle, or an H .
Watching a Spanish speaker try to pronounce Jack and Jill is entertaining,
Vietnamese can pronounce the p in say peanuts, it sounds like phenuts, by the same token English speakers can't handle the diuretics in Vietnamese,where the letters m o and i when joined can mean mosquito , salt or many other things including me.
By the same light Gringos try to anglicize everything. Take Nevada, it is Spanish for Nevada it is Spanish for Snowfall or Snow capped mountarin. It is pronouned Neh vah dah, but Gringo's insist on pronouncing it Neh VAY dah. Jorge they pronounce George, Mojave, Mo JAVE, Inchilada instead of onchilada.(the word is enchilada, not inchilada)
por cierto Español es mi segundo idioma
The point is that humans should respect anothers culture and language and at least try to accomodate, it is pure arrogance when one doesn't.