Germany (Deutschland, or Allemagne - les Allemandes sont les gens qui habitent en Allemagne, he says in his very rusty and probably inaccurate French) is kind of a special case, in that people in other countries had well-established names for that geographical area before it became a country (Germany was united in, what, 1860something?). If you’ve got a common name for a country in your own language, that’s probably what you use. The Germans are happy to call France Frankreich. (For that matter, we British are happy to pronouce France with a front a instead of the [correct] back one - “Frahnce”).
But Iran, as a nation, is called ee-rahn. Unless you want to appeal to tradition and call it Persia. The mispronunciation “eye-ran” has no tradition behind it, it’s just that people can’t be bothered with the right pronunciation. Personally, I’m happy for newsreaders to make some effort to pronounce place-names the way the natives use them* … the BBC, gawd bless 'em, tend to be pretty good about this.
*Unless there’s a decent excuse, like the name of the place uses phonemes or phonotactics not normally found in English. I don’t have a problem with them calling Hrvatska “Croatia”, for example. But Iran isn’t one of these cases.
George W. Bush made the axis of evil remark, not Wolf Blitzer.
I didn’t know Wolf Blitzer was small, but why does that bother you?
Americans don’t speak Farsi. Predicatably, Americans (and everyone else) have a hard time pronouncing things the correct way in languages they are unfamiliar with. There are Iranians I’ve known for close to 20 years who still call me row-JEHR. They just can’t grasp the correct pronunciation of Roger. I’m not offended by them.
This seems like a pretty petty issue. A slight mispronunciation is still an infinate improvement over “shetuneh bozorg.” Personally, I’m just happy to hear “Amreeka” without “margh bar” in front of it.
Sorry about that, LaurAnge. I swear I didn’t see that posting. But you might notice that Mexico falls into that bit about different ways of pronouncing the same word.
Okay, here’s my response to the “Mexico” and “Paris” questions. And I’m not going to say this is the ultimate answer, because I’m not sure.
The native pronunciations of Mexico and Paris don’t have a direct translation into English sounds. And at the very least, they have established histories of pronunciation in the English language. Which, I would argue, “Eye-ran” doesn’t.
Maybe if we hadn’t been calling them “Mec-si-co” and “Pah-riss” for hundreds of years, we could be having this argument, and it would be valid.
Maybe we should try to, now that we know better, create histories of pronunciation that are more accurate, and in accordance with the people’s self-identification. But what’s done is done.
I’m guessing you’re gonna ream out the good folks at dictionary.comwell?
The last listed pronunciation appears to be “eye-ran” (and I don’t see “ee-rawn” listed as a pronunciation…although “ih-rawn” is)
You can say that they’re incorrect…but then cut Blitzer some slack.
(similar findings at m-w.com…the first pronuncitation is “ih-rawn”, NOT “ee-rawn”, and “I-ran” listed as well)
