pronounciation of english
bulborum botanicum (Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:13:57 PDT)
Finally with a lot of words you say the same as I do
*Lets grow bulbs and enjoy this
*Roland*
*
2010/7/27 Jane McGary <janemcgary@earthlink.net>
Ben Zonneveld, who is a very good botanist, wrote:
The funny thing is that only English speakers every time wonder how to
pronounce a name . The explanation is simple. There are about 35
different sounds in every language. There are also about the same number
,35, of ways to write these sounds. With one exception unfortunately
.The English has about 800 different ways to write these same 35 sounds.
For me, if I see a dutch word for the first time I know in most cases
how to pronounce it. This is nearly impossible with an English word even
if you are a linguist.
I, who am no botanist but who am a linguist with a BA in Classics, must
correct this. Many languages have far more than 35 phonemes, or meaningful
sounds, and a few have fewer than that. I've worked with more than one
language of which we said, ruefully, that it has more phonemes than
speakers. (And by the way, the orthography of Dutch is far from
transparent.)
The pronunciation of classical Latin and Greek (most people who get caught
up in this sort of discussion ignore the fact that many botanical names are
Greek, not Latin) has been reconstructed in various ways at various times,
and we can be sure that the way these languages were spoken varied from
place to place and from time to time. You can't base your pronunciation of a
plant name on whatever you heard in your high school Latin class decades
ago, because historical phonology has moved on since then.
I will not loose the standard lecture at this point, but will say only that
botanical names are best considered loanwords in whatever language context
they are being used. Most languages' speakers have a strong tendency to
treat loanwords in certain ways, such as rendering the vowels and assigning
syllabic stress. These tendencies can vary even between two varieties of the
same language; for instance, American English speakers tend to assign stress
to the penultimate syllable of an unfamiliar word, and British speakers to
the antepenult. Moreover, American speakers are more likely to preserve the
Continental vowels than are British speakers (i.e., the vowel pronunciations
most easily heard in Spanish). These are not mistakes; they are just
characteristics of different language varieties.
If your interlocutor (the person you're talking with) understands what you
mean, you are doing all right. If he doesn't, you can write down the word,
or, if you know how, render it in a different language variety.
So stop worrying about how to say them and let's worry about how to grow
them. I am busy with the latter. I'm lifting my whole bulb collection to
move it into the new bulb house, which will be finished tomorrow! Then the
mason builds the raised beds inside it, and I, or, I hope, some powerful
hired hands, bring in the soil components, and the bulbs go into their deep,
unconstricted new homes, where they should all be much happier than in pots.
Then I can start rounding up replacements of all the things that froze to
death last December -- mostly arums, but if you can spare Gladiolus tristis,
I'm missing it sadly.
Jane McGary
Northwestern Oregon, USA
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