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User Name Thread Name Subject Posted
Gibb Sahib BS: Language Pet Peeves (2488* d) RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves 08 Dec 20


"HimALyuz" is the proper South Asian (Hindi etc.) pronunciation / the pronunciation of the people who live near/in Himal(a)ya, so perhaps people are starting to actually listen to how foreign words are said, rather than looking at a spelling in Roman character and making it up.

(The first "a" is long and like in "father," the second is a short schwa, like in "about." There being no schwa symbol in the standard Latin alphabet, both, very different vowels have been doomed to be represented with "a," or else the latter is written with "u" [cf. "Punjab"] and causes other problems. None of these vowels are foreign to English, however, so it's just a matter of spelling, and pronouncing from spelling without listening, that screws things up. No language training, just listening is all it takes.)

My peeve is the spellings of familiar Cantonese items like the foods haa gaau ?? (shrimp dumpling) and caa siu ?? (BBQ pork). A casual "phonetic" rendering might give "ha gow" and "cha siu."

But more often than not one sees "har gow" and "char siu." I assume the British in Hong Kong / Canton stuck an "r" in there -- though there is no R sound in the Cantonese language -- as one of those "silent Rs."

But if so, being a foreign word, why add it at all? What do Britons with a non-rhotic accent get out of "har" rather than "ha" or "haa"? And, as a result, everyone else in the world seeing the words in Roman character has now to assume there is some functional R in there, and we sound ridiculous ordering dim sam saying "harrr gow" etc.!

See also "Burma" / "Myanmar."

It's a wonder we don't spell India as "Indier"...


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