last comment about pronunciation of saurus

[Sebastian Apesteguia <sebapesteguia@yahoo.com.ar>]

jejeje...Jaime, I swear is my last contribution on
this subject 'cause I think is almost like discuss on
religion and I'm tired, but if I'm not wrong in what I
remember from my greek lessons, lizard is actually
sauros, pronunciated "sah-bros".
So none is wright, jejeje.
Sebastian

 
 --- "Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com> escribió:

> David Marjanovic (david.marjanovic@gmx.at) wrote:
> 
> <- When English speakers discuss on how to pronounce
> a scientific name, that
> usually means how to pronounce it IN ENGLISH. That
> concept is apparently
> natural to e. g. French speakers, but totally alien
> to e. g. German speakers.*>
> 
>   Naturally, I feel offended that, as an English
> speaker, any form of
> pronounciation I give in person or in my head is
> naturally "in English" and not
> in fact without any form of semi-educated Latin or
> Greek parsing. Okay, so I'm
> not offended, but the tone of the above assumes that
> those of us for whom
> English is our first language whould pronounce names
> as in English, which is
> wrong as far as the generality goes. Yes, there are
> those who DO, and there was
> a TV show in the 90's that for the longest time,
> taught the Jurassic Park era
> that the name of the great two-fingered king is
> pronounced "Trannysorus".
> Sexually ambiguous dinosaurs aside, that's what
> "English" does to names, not
> "sawr-us". There has never been a for-kids type of
> show that attempted to teach
> kids the correct way to pronounce the names, and for
> a few good reasons:
> 
>   1) There is little funding to bring in a language
> coach for a kids show.
> 
>   2) There is no "one correct way" to pronounce the
> names. Even in Greek, the
>      word is transcribed into Roman letters and then
> into a descendant alphabet
>      and then into another language. A lot is lost,
> and this loss should be
>      expected. This is like expecting people to KNOW
> that *Boluochia*, based in
>      Mandarin, has a natural unwritten "ur" sound in
> there, or that
>      *Nqwebasaurus* has those sounds most people
> have only ever heard, should
>      they be old enough, when watching "The Gods
> Must Be Crazy". But that's
>      certainly not what it's spelled like, and the
> transcription is to allow
>      speakers of other languages the ability to
> speak it without knowing those
>      rules.
> 
> <- We can be quite sure that "au" (alpha ypsilon)
> was never pronounced like any
> sort of "o" in Greek. In modern Greek it's
> pronounced "av", so it seems to have
> drifted in the opposite direction. In Latin, a
> tendence to merge "au" into "o"
> seems to have started early on, as seen in spelling
> ambiguities like
> Claudius/Clodius, but it didn't get very far --
> today French pronounces "au"
> the same as "o", but Spanish, Portuguese, and most
> kinds of Italian don't.>
> 
>   German papers describing nomenclature in German
> are welcome to provide keys
> of their own for their own language, and the same is
> true for Hebrew or Slavic
> or Chilean Spanish. Ease of communication allows for
> transcription rather than
> knowledge of 2,000 year old pronounciation regimes,
> which for the most part we
> are all guessing at (though with some VERY GOOD
> guesses, I am sure).
> 
> <- Consistency within a language would certainly be
> a good thing, but the
> English orthography is an outright obstacle to
> this... (French has the opposite
> situation.)>
> 
>   English has so many parent languages and loan
> words, dialects, and
> "sublanguages" that there being ONE key would be a
> laughable excercise. You
> cannot get two perfectly decent language speakers,
> one Minnesotan and one
> Georgian, to be expected to say most words the same
> way, without any sort of
> inflection, that marks them from where they are.
> Regions inside New York City
> have dialects on par with dialects between whole
> states further west, and you
> can tell a Bostonian from a New Havener EASILY. This
> is similar to the English
> countryside, where different towns and rural
> districts have their own distinct
> and cataloguable dialects. Chalk it up for one of
> the most diverse languages on
> the planet, which doesn't seem to try too hard to
> stop itself from changing
> every time a new loan word enters the lexicon. This
> becomes significant when
> you hear a Spanish speaker speaking to her brother
> in Mexico City from here in
> Oregon using English and Spanish simultaneously,
> switching in an English word
> (not even a proper noun) for a Spanish one and vice
> versa.
> 
> <* That doesn't mean we get it right. But we tend to
> _believe_ we get the
> pronunciation in the original languages right. :-}
> That is to say, we don't
> consciously pronounce foreign words as if they were
> German.>
> 
>   Why not? Assimilation is the nature of change.
> Then again, not to let the
> bull into the shop, but German culture itself seems
> rather adverse to
> assimilation historically.
> 
>   Cheers,
> 
> Jaime A. Headden
> http://bitestuff.blogspot.com/
> 
> "Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B.
> Medawar (1969)
> 
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Lic. Sebastian Apesteguia
Seccion Paleontologia de Vertebrados
Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales 'B. Rivadavia'
Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA
www.paleoninjapesteguia.com.ar

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