> There is the precedent of Burma/Myanmar, "Country name remains Burma reflecting common British English usage".
Myanmar has the much bigger problem that it has no adjectival form, requiring even the most politically correct people to use "Burmese".
(Technically, that's not true - the official adjectival form, according to Myanmar, should be "Myanma". Good luck getting English speakers to understand that.)
> Technically, that's not true - the official adjectival form, according to Myanmar, should be "Myanma". Good luck getting English speakers to understand that.
How is that any harder than Afghanistan => Afghan.
> Second, the -ar in particular has a lot of trouble with non-rhotic English accents, where "Myanmar" might already be pronounced the same as "Myanma"!
It's supposed to be. Both names, "Burma" and "Myanmar", are formed under the assumption that your English pronunciation is non-rhotic.
The same is true of the common Korean surname "Park", which does not contain any R-like sound. British spellings of foreign words really cause tremendous damage to the pronunciations used by rhotic speakers.
> British spellings of foreign words really cause tremendous damage to the pronunciations used by rhotic speakers.
It's such a strange thing to use an 'r' to modify the sound of the preceding vowel, and it's not even as if it's 100% consistent, because all English is a mess.
This expectation also leads to comical situations like the typical British pronunciation of "pasta". I guess the Italians should have spelled it parsta.
> Officially, the Queen's English says this is pronounced "drawing". But most Brits feel compelled to insert an R, "drawRing".
Am British, literally no one I know personally puts an extra R in when pronouncing drawing. I have heard it said that way before but you certainly couldn’t say that “most” Brits do it.
> But most Brits feel compelled to insert an R, "drawRing".
They really are compelled to insert an R there. That is one of the phonological rules of their variety of English; it's how you avoid running one vowel into another vowel.
Complaining about this is the equivalent of complaining about how Americans "feel" compelled to insert a vowel into the name Gbagbo, pronouncing it guh-bagbo. They don't just feel compelled; that is a genuine requirement of their language.
It is not at all similar to any variation on "Mel and I", which is an artificial rule that English speakers must be taught in school. The form people use naturally is "me and Mel".
> It is much like Americans saying "Mel and I", in object context, e.g. "She accused Mel and I", where "Mel and me" would have been right.
...
> It is not at all similar to any variation on "Mel and I", which is an artificial rule that English speakers must be taught in school. The form people use naturally is "me and Mel".
I think you're misunderstanding here. There's no situation where "she accused (Mel and) I" works. It's not taught in school. It happens because of people "hyper correcting" to match the inverted sentence. "(Mel and) I accused her" which they get corrected to use by the teacher when they say "(Mel and) me accused her".
> There's no situation where "she accused (Mel and) I" works.
That is true.
> It happens because of people "hyper correcting" to match the inverted sentence. "(Mel and) I accused her" which they get corrected to use by the teacher
That is also true. But your own example is telling you that there is also no situation where "Mel and I accused her" works. Sentences in that form do not naturally occur in English; they must be taught in school. The correct form would be "Me and Mel accused her".
Intrusive R isn't like that. It is a feature of the language, not something dictated to speakers by a formal education system.
> The correct form would be "Me and Mel accused her".
No it isn't. You'd never say "Me accused her". If you don't like the inversion its perfectly fine to say "I and Mel accused her", but using "me" for the subject is never correct.
If you believe otherwise, you are tragically misinformed and miseducated.
Using "me" in subject context is, besides being wrong, a social low-class marker. It does not come naturally to English speakers; it only ever occurs through exposure to the misuse.
I'm a bit skeptical of this overall, but it's obviously complicated to get data that filter out the effects of sociolectal solidarity. (Can you get people to speak "naturally" but without priming them to speak or to avoid speaking in a particular register or sociolect!?)
which can become conventionalized and eventually part of native speakers' intuitions even though they can be contrary to a more logically consistent or simpler understanding of agreement.
> Using "me" in subject context is, besides being wrong, a social low-class marker. It does not come naturally to English speakers
This is not even a theoretical possibility. There are no low-class markers that don't come naturally, because no one is going to make an effort to present themselves as low-class.
It takes obvious effort to overcome received habits from one's local idiolect, as for example underclass people did in England, last century, deliberately adopting an (imperfectly reproduced version of) the overclass rhotic affectation in an attempt at economic advancement.
You are getting really disingenuous, now. Who are you performing for?
You like saying that, but so far you've shown no evidence that you have any idea what you're talking about.
Compare the article on intrusive R I linked before:
> This is now common enough in parts of England that, by 1997, the linguist John C. Wells considered it objectively part of Received Pronunciation, though he noted that it was still stigmatized as an incorrect pronunciation, as it is or was in some other standardized non-rhotic accents. Wells writes that at least in RP, "linking /r/ and intrusive /r/ are distinct only historically and orthographically".[17]
John C. Wells has patiently explained to you that intrusive-R pronunciation, while not expected of anyone, is (mostly) not considered to require correction, or to reliably unmask a bounder.
No. If you had been correct, there would have been no reason to post what I did. But you are 100% wrong on both counts, and I did. (For amusement, see rndmio's comment above.)
There are examples in the hypercorrection article about people adding an /h-/ in a very similar situation, so what you describe clearly can happen. But are you sure that the R example falls into that category?
It seems to be a distinction about how conscious the change is, or at what layer of language it happens. Isn't that an empirical question that could be tested?
Strictly speaking, the masses adopting rhotic pronunciation was, originally, an effort at mimicking a privileged-class affectation. The extra "R" in "drawRing" did not mimic anything, though, but seemed required by the imperfectly deduced rule. Those in actual contact with the privileged class had plenty of examples to, er*, draw upon, denied to those without.
Class markers in speech are always a moving target, a sort of low-grade arms race: low stakes for the upper class, high stakes for lower.
So, pronouncing it "drawRing" is a lower-class marker, similar in a way to "aks" for "ask" in American English.
As always, all of these pronunciations are legitimate and produce no misunderstanding.
If you wish to argue that, I'd suggest you guard your absolute clauses a bit more carefully, as they now suddenly aren't absolute. You said "produce no misunderstanding", I demonstrated that they do.
There are now many, many more foreign speakers of English than native. They definitely have had and are having an effect, collectively, on how the language evolves.
Got a source for your "typical British pronunciation" of "pasta" being non-Italian? I read your comment as asserting that typical Brits pronounce it as "par-sta" with a non-rhotic 'r', but I don't think I've ever heard anyone except the Australian John Torode pronounce it that way.
> I read your comment as asserting that typical Brits pronounce it as "par-sta" with a non-rhotic 'r'
That is exactly the opposite of what TillE wrote. If that were how the British already pronounced the word, there would be no need to change the spelling.
> Got a source for your "typical British pronunciation" of "pasta" being non-Italian?
This is just infantile. You can verify the pronunciation yourself in any number of ways.
Did not know about that discussion. As a "rhotic" person it makes me wince but I accept different accents. In any chat that leans towards getting heavy on this I refer people to The (great) Proclaimers song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=066oSmDRKPA
Lots of people replying based on what sound like personal preferences or language biases; I'm guessing the biggest reason, if this is accurate, is that no one ever asks and GP assumes no one will.
The -i ending comes from Arabic which makes it seem a bit out of place in Myanmar (not to mention the obvious religious tension).
-ese, -ian, -an and -n all come from Latin via routes of varying directness, which is why they feel somewhat "neutral" in English (e.g. Congolese and Japanese both seem cromulent and not intrinsically African or Asian).
"Chinese" in English comes from Portuguese ("chinês"), who were some of the earliest Europeans there. -ês and -ese both come from the same Latin origin.
I hazard that words like Cantonese, etc., came either via the same route, or by back-formation to match the existing wider term "Chinese".
Interestingly, "Japanner" used to be another word for a Japanese person.
I have heard the people of Myanmar referred to as “Myanese” many times, in English, in Thailand. Enough that I might guess it’ll establish itself, like Czech people being “from Czech” did in much of Europe (in English).
Yeah, that’s what one might expect, given than “Czechia” is pretty close to some historical words for the area.
But it has not been my experience at all that Czechia was the “usual” word, at least among English speakers in Europe. Nor do I personally find it any less unwieldy than “Czech Republic” but that’s my bias.
Assuming you also speak from experience, is there any easy way to verify this?
I don’t mean the official name, I mean what people actually say in English when referring to the country a Czech comes from.
I have no experience of what English speakers say in Europe. My only option to refer to the country is "the Czech Republic", but the one Czech guy I've met did ask that people refer to the country as "Czech".
Myanmar has the much bigger problem that it has no adjectival form, requiring even the most politically correct people to use "Burmese".
(Technically, that's not true - the official adjectival form, according to Myanmar, should be "Myanma". Good luck getting English speakers to understand that.)