'Nepaul' (which is what I was brought up on) or 'Nepahl'?
It says that's the 'local pronunciation.' Are we obliged to use it?
Good question Robin:
Italians don't call Florence 'Florence', German's don't know where Cologne is.
French call London 'Londres'
Many places in Belgium have two names
Americans pronounce Leicester as 'Ly-chester'. A few Americans even pronounce Edinburgh as Edinberg
Nobody outside Israel talks about Bet-Lechem and beyond the Arab world it is rarely referred to as Bayt-Lachum. I was quite surprised when it turned out I was in the middle of Bethlehem.
So really it shouldn't matter too much how you pronounce the name of a place. But the closest to 'correct' has to be the local pronunciation.
the closest to 'correct' has to be the local pronunciation.
Or to be completely objective about this, the current tendency is for pronunciation of foreign names to move towards the local, at least in England. An example from long past is Milan, now pronounced as the Italians do, with the stress on the second syllable. To add the final 'o' would be pretentious, as would any attempt to reproduce the actual phonemes used by the Dutch in say, 'Utrecht', or the French in 'Paris'. So I don't think you can say 'correct' is closest to local pronunciation, or vice versa, which I think is logically equivalent.
I still try to remember to write, and say, 'Marseilles' and 'Lyons', and even 'Leghorn' and 'Constantinople', but I recognize that this is looking increasingly affected or eccentric.
A movement in the opposite direction is in the use of foreign titles. The BBC used to refer to 'Herr Brandt', 'Signor de Gasperi' and 'Monsieur Pineau'. Now they'd all be 'Mister.'
It used to drive me nuts when BBC newsreader Huw Edwards would pronounce Nicolas Sarkozi as though Edwards was a particularly affected Parisian - nee-koh-la saar-koh-zee, with equal emphasis on all syllables. The logical extension of his approach would have been to pronounce Ian Paisley with a heavy Belfast accent, George Dubya Bush the way any self-respecting Texan would say it, and Silvio Berlusconi as though one were ordering pasta and wine.
Meanwhile, back at the 'verbing' and 'nouning', this sentence occurred to me last night:
Management b****cks: "I've been tasked to work on the company project. It's a big ask."
English: "I've been asked to work on the company project. It's a big task."
I don't know when 'witness' became 'eyewitness', but it can have some hilarious consequences, such as this headline in the BBC News BlackBerry app:
Amtrak train eyewitness: 'I heard a bang'
What? With your eyes?
'Do sit down.' 'Do try a Duchy Original.' 'Do shut up.'
Is 'do' here (= 'I strongly urge you to') old-fashioned, posh, polite or just British?
'Do debate me, one on one' doesn't sound quite right.
'Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer.....'?
Is this in reference to my usage of 'yoofs' elsethread? Because it didn't refer to any ethnic group, and I don't think of the terms excluding white kids.
I immediately associate 'yoof' with 'television' and Janet Street-Porter. So - no ethnicity implied, AFAIK.
Probably showing my age, again, though...
'Youth' (or 'yoof') as a collective noun (youth club, youth culture) clearly hasn't any ethnic connotations. But as applied to an individual person - a youth/yoof, youths/yoofs?
I first came across that usage in fairy stories as a child - youths and maidens - and always assumed it was archaic or at least old-fashioned or provincial ; I remember thinking it odd when my South Yorkshire born grandfather said, 'When I was a youth...' If I am right about that, why has the word come back into everyday usage?
Nowadays it always seems to me to have a slightly pejorative tone - would you refer to your favourite nephew as a 'youth' or to the Scouts doing a wonderful job helping old people as 'youths'? 'Youths' or 'yoofs' implies to me 'getting up to no good' And it also implies to me - perhaps wrongly, in the light of what Rachael and Mr_Numbers say - that it is probably being applied to young people (a better term, in my view) who are, at any rate mainly, black.
Youths - not pejorative. For example, many of the services for young people are referred to as 'youth' services. If I wanted to identify a lad (not a girl) who was neither a boy nor a man, I might refer to him as a youth.
Yoofs is different to 'youth'. Yes, I used it to suggest 'up to no good' but in a very minor, light-hearted way. Hanging around, doing nothing useful in a way that would make and mother in (early) middle-age like me wag my finger. Not suggest criminal or disruptive behaviour. I chose it deliberately and put it in inverted commas because, as mentioned, it was really coined by the media and refers to a social group rather than anything sinister.
Never, ever have I thought it referred to any one ethnic group, or excluded any.
I'm going to make a totally wild guess here and suggest that 'young' is out of favour because of implications of relative age - eg, 'You're too young to know...' or 'You're not old enough to realise that...'
'Youth' is a kind of
branding of an age group, I guess. And in fact it's a word that (were I to be serious for a moment, which is somewhat improbable) I would connect in a word association game with 'worker' - 'youth worker' - or 'culture' - 'youth culture'. There is (very arguably, I grant you) the notion of a
social identity that is associate with age but without any judgemental or relativistic connotation associated with any other age group. 'Youth' stands on its own; 'young' is relative to 'old'.
You're all entitled to say this is total b****cks of course. But even so, I personally definitely don't associate it with ethnicity.
Edit: Looks like rshdunlop and I were hitting the keyboard at the same time and came to the same conclusion
My wife thinks I'm wrong too. Roma locuta est, causa finita est.
