politics of pronunciation
Thought others might be amused by this:
...the Davies BBC Pronunciation Department Theory Of Geopolitics, which basically states that the importance of any foreigner to the politics of the UK can be reasonably assessed by looking at how much trouble the newsreaders take to get his name right. In general, the BBC appears to believe that all foreigners are pissy little no-marks and you pronounce their names phonetically as if they were English words. Viz, the pronunciation of Ahmadinejad's name (which is actually much easier to spell than Khruschev's if you remember that it is actually a double-barrelled name - Ahmadi-Nejad - the Guardian actually used to spell it this way for a short while but seems to have given up). This is basically pronounced as "I'm a dinner jacket".
More important people, however, get flagged up for special treatment...
I actually developed this theory while watching the rise and fall of perestroika in the development from "Mik-ail Gorbachev" to "Mikhail GorbaCHOV" to "Mik-khi-yeel GorrrbaCHOV" and then back to "Mikail Gorbachov", as Boris/Buriss Yeltsin/YeltZEEN rose and fell - I suspect if they showed up again today it would be Mickle Gobbychev and Boris Yeltsen once more. It was confirmed to me by a French mate who added that he realised that Vladimir Putin was here to stay when the French newscasters started remembering not to call him Vladimir Prostitute.
Rest of the post and comments at Daniel Davies's blog here.
...the Davies BBC Pronunciation Department Theory Of Geopolitics, which basically states that the importance of any foreigner to the politics of the UK can be reasonably assessed by looking at how much trouble the newsreaders take to get his name right. In general, the BBC appears to believe that all foreigners are pissy little no-marks and you pronounce their names phonetically as if they were English words. Viz, the pronunciation of Ahmadinejad's name (which is actually much easier to spell than Khruschev's if you remember that it is actually a double-barrelled name - Ahmadi-Nejad - the Guardian actually used to spell it this way for a short while but seems to have given up). This is basically pronounced as "I'm a dinner jacket".
More important people, however, get flagged up for special treatment...
I actually developed this theory while watching the rise and fall of perestroika in the development from "Mik-ail Gorbachev" to "Mikhail GorbaCHOV" to "Mik-khi-yeel GorrrbaCHOV" and then back to "Mikail Gorbachov", as Boris/Buriss Yeltsin/YeltZEEN rose and fell - I suspect if they showed up again today it would be Mickle Gobbychev and Boris Yeltsen once more. It was confirmed to me by a French mate who added that he realised that Vladimir Putin was here to stay when the French newscasters started remembering not to call him Vladimir Prostitute.
Rest of the post and comments at Daniel Davies's blog here.