What do you mean by “appropriation” and how does that apply to this matter?
I always assumed he was deliberately using what he imagined the early pronunciation of the word to be, back in the era in which the movie took place.
In some TV miniseries about the Kennedies, the doctor told Joe he was going to perform a “lobe-otomy” on — I think Kathleen? I have no idea if that actually was the early pronunciation or not, but I choose to believe it was.
On old radio shows, there are advertisements that use unusual pronunciations of “proteins” and “vitamins” (“pro-te-ens,” “VITA-meens”) - I think because they were both relatively obscure technical terms at the time.
“The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations” mentions the change in the number of syllables in “protein” The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations: The Complete Opinionated Guide ... - Charles Harrington Elster - Google Books
On a related note, I think my grandmother was probably the last person left in the world who pronounced vegetable with four syllables.
My high school biology teacher pronounced “protein” as Pro-tee-in, with three syllables.
I had a chemistry professor in college who pronounced “iodine” with a long e in the last syllable, i-o-deen. He explained the logic of that pronunciation once: look at the other halogens: fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and astatine. All of them end with “-een.” Why should iodine be different?
It was Rosemary. Kathleen was the one who was engaged to a duke , but died (in a plane crash?) before the marriage. The duke ended up marrying a Mitford sister.
Yeah, and even “Los ANG-uh-leeze” was not just a Bugs Bunny-ism back in the day.
Not a movie, but I remember that it was pretty common in the early sixties for even car mavens to pronounce the final “t” when saying Renault or Peugeot. Maybe someone will remember a movie where this happens.
[nitpick]
Not quite. In 1944 Kathleen married the Marquess of Hartington, the elder son and heir of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. Very soon after, he was killed in action. She was later killed in a plane crash. Hartington’s brother, who was already married to Deborah Mitford, subsequently succeeded as the 11th Duke.
[/nitpick]
In the episode of Star Trek “Errand of Mercy,” Kor says anyone subjected to the Klingon “mind-sifter” will emerge a “veg-e-ta-ble.”
Kor was played by John Colicos (1928–2000), a Canadian from Toronto. Like William Shatner, he was trained in the classical theatre
When it comes to pronouncing the “T” at the end of words like “Peugot,” I’m reminded of an incident where actress Jean Harlow was corrected after calling Margot Asquith, Countess of Oxford, “Mar-got”: “Yes, dear. But the “T” is silent. As in ‘Harlow.’”
Well the classic Star Trek pronunciation is Mr Spock’s “Sen Sore”…which a generation later Tim Russ retconned to be just a Vulcan pronunciation style.
On topic, I was watching a classic movie and they actually pronounced Baghdad properly, (Ba Gha Daadh, not Bag Dad like the Americans normally do).
Nearly fell off my seat.
Spock also pronounced “Chekov” as "Chek-ove’ (long “O”).
And never in the last 50 years have I seen it spelled that way, or met a Russian who has. The correct spelling is “Chekhov,” and it’s pronounced with the “-kh-” sound.
I’m not sure about the sounds you’re trying to convey, but it looks like you’re saying the proper pronunciation has three syllables?
It’s my understanding tht in Arabic, “Baghdad” only has two syllables. It’s “bagh-DAAD”, with the stress on the second syllable, not “ba-gha-daadh”.
The “gh” is the ghayn, a sort of gargled consonent that doesn’t have an equivalent in English (I could never quite get the pronunciation right). But it doesn’t have a vowel after it in the Arabic pronunciation of the city’s name.
And the first and last consonants in the last syllable are the same consonant, the daal, which is pretty close to the English consonant “d”. Not the dhal (or the Daad), which is what I’m used to seeing “dh” used to transliterate.
I too remember the pronunciation of ‘abacus’ mentioned in the OP; it did jump out as odd. FWIW I had a grade school science teached who pronounced it 'uh-BACK-us". My guess was that it was a fairly new word that most English speakers at the time were wrestling with.
The first time I traveled to Los Angeles, I saw a yoga instructor on a local TV show who pronounced Los with a long “o” sound, as opposed to the more commonly heard short “o”. I’d never really thought about it, but it made sense to pronounce Las Vegas and Los Angeles differently. FWIW the instructor was of Hispanic appearance, but didn’t have any discernable accent.
In those Dragnet intros, Webb also says “Cal-i-for-nee-a”, instead of “Cal-i-forn-ya”. He was a native of tha LA area.
In Arabic, but not that simple.
It’s spelt بغداد using the letters ب غ د ا د (read right to left). While the “ghayn” غ gets a lot of attention, since it’s a sound not found in English, the the last three letters are “dhal” د , “alif” ا and “dhal” د again. When “dhal” precedes “Alif” they are pronounced together as “da” or “dah” while a singular “dhal” (which comes after) is pronounced simply as “deh” or a throaty “the”.
For English speakers three syllables are necessary and closer to the actual pronunciation.
I’m not a native Arabic speaker, and the Arabic I learned has mostly rusted away. But that doesn’t accord with my understanding.
The Arabic is بَغْدَاد [baɣˈdaːd]. The first and third consonants take vowellings. The ghayn has a stop. Wikipedia’s native speaker pronunciation sounds to my ear like two syllables, and that pronunciation is consistent with what I recall of how the native Arabic speakers I’ve spoken with pronounced it, including Iraqi emigres and Iraqi nationals.
I can kind of hear how that ghayn might sound like an extra syllable in the middle, even though it technically isn’t. But I’m not hearing a “deh”, much less a throaty “the”. I’m hearing the same daal (and not the dhal) at the beginning and the end of the last syllable.
Now, Arabic is, as they say, spoken from the Gulf to the Ocean, so I certainly wouldn’t rule out that for some native Arabic speakers, the “proper” pronunciation is closer to ba-gha-daadh. But from my personal experience, the standard American pronunciation isn’t actually that far off. We usually put the stress on the first syllable instead of the second, which is wrong. But we don’t have the ghayn, and the hard English “g” is about as close as most native English speakers are going to get. At least in the dominant American English dialects I’m familiar with, we also don’t really distinguish between shortened and elongated vowels, so we don’t elongate the 'alif in the second syllable.
But given the limitations of English phonemes, BAG-dad actually sounds closer to my ear to the native pronunciation that ba-gha-DAADH.
We are having a lot of fun with a new coworker named Nguyen. She pronounces her name differently from the way another coworker also named Nguyen does.
One is originally from Saigon (an actual “boat person” as an infant) the other is the daughter of a well connected Vietnamese official and granddaughter of a Army of North Vietnam general and grew up in Hanoi.
Not only are their pronunciations wildly different, their religious and political views are as well. They are prohibited from overt political discussions (as are all of us) but they seem to be using the pronunciation battle as a proxy for which one is and uneducated idiot vs indoctrinated fifth columnist.
But those of us who tried for years to pronounce Nguyen properly (and not just say “win”) are now stuck trying to learn two pronunciations.
Of course, even in English two people with names spelled the same way can pronounce them differently (though without political implications (as far as I know))
I had a coworker who kept trying to “correct” how I pronounce my name. He was from the European country that colonized the place my ancestors come from and forcibly changed names and religion. But over 300+ years pronunciations have changed either in the mother country or the colonies, but he insisted I was pronouncing my name “wrong”.
Of course he also insisted that colonization was a massive gift to the natives!