Re: pronunciation of saurus by a spanish speaker who also knows some greek

[Nick Pharris <npharris@umich.edu>]

Quoting David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>:

> > Mike, what I think is definitively wrong is....
> > (silence in the tribune) "SOR-us".
>
> A few random thoughts on the matter:
>
> - 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.*

Well, yes, that's the upshot, but I think the truth is closer to, most 
English speakers are so embedded in our bizarro spelling system that 
they don't know any better.

There is a huge amount of indeterminacy in the translation of a 
Latinate orthographic string into an English phonemic representation, 
as is obvious from going to any English-language conference and hearing 
five different researchers pronounce the same term five different ways 
(something I've been meaning to research from a linguistic point of 
view one of these days).  Some are a little closer to the original 
Classical languages, others further from them, and analogic processes 
(i.e., comparisons to more-or-less similar orthographic strings 
previously encountered) are rampant.  The string <aur> is normally 
pronounced /or/ in English (as, for instance, in the word *laurel*).  
Doesn't bother me any that many (including myself) extend this to words 
like *Camarasaurus*.


> - 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.

True, though the words in those languages that contain the string <au> 
and are pronounced /au/ are usually learned borrowings taken directly 
from Classical Latin.

The words that had <au> in Latin that have come into Spanish, Italian, 
etc., through "natural" historical processes have simply been respelled 
to match their contemporary pronunciation (e.g. Spanish and Italian 
*oro* 'gold', from Latin *aurum*).


--
Nick Pharris
Department of Linguistics
University of Michigan

"Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity."
    --Edwin H. Land