another english gripe

[rone]

"Rubenesque".  The painter's name was Rubens; thus, the term should be "Rubensesque".

Comments

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

I'll be happy if you can just get restaurant staff to learn there's no such thing as a rueben sandwich.

If I had a nickle...

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Oh, definately.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

And how should we pronounce 'quixotic', mr. pedant sir?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Oy, that's a toughie. It should definitely be "kee-HOTE-ic", but i'm willing to be flexible, even though i've never heard anyone pronounce it "Don Kwixotee".

For what it's worth, there is no Spanish translation for "quixotic", according to the Real Academia Española's dictionary.

[deirdremoon.livejournal.com]

I actually have heard secondhand that the title of the novel was pronounced "Don KWIKsoat" in England for a while. But I have no proof of that.

[deirdremoon.livejournal.com]

Say, is it confusing in Spanish-bilingual company that the European Union is calling itself the EU, when that has also stood for Estados Unidos? Or is the EU always called something else in Spanish anyway?

Gods, I know just enough to get myself into trouble...

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Heh, i imagine they'll just call it the UE (Unión Europea). Also, the US is rendered as the EEUU (because it's plural, they duplicate the initials... it's dumb, i know. don't get me started on the capitalization of 'double letters' such as ch and ll... seeing the country spelled CHile drove me insane in my youth).

[crankysysadmin.livejournal.com]

Euphony's full house beats grammar's two pair! RESPECT

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Euphony can trump grammar when we stop speaking with our mouths and start speaking with our EUPHONIUMS! *PLONK*

[crankysysadmin.livejournal.com]

I've been plonked, so I'm saying this into the ethervoid, but: EUPHONIA!

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

I would like my voluptuous woman without the thousand-island dressing, please.

[vampyrecat.livejournal.com]

I agree: it sounds better. There are too many glottal stops in rubensesque. Rubensesque does not flow well out of the mouth; it feels horrid to utter. Esthetics trump rules.

[vampyrecat.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with plonking. Does your plonking apply to others?

[vampyrecat.livejournal.com]

I always pronounce it "Donkey Hoe-tee". Thus, it would be "kee-HO-tic" for me.

[frosch.livejournal.com]

I've heard "Don QUICKsote" on BBC. The English are fond of pronouncing foreign names the way they're supposedly spelled, using English pronunciation rules. Americans generally try to pronounce foreign names and words the way the foreigners in question pronounce them, which often results in grotesque misspellings by Americans who often hear foreign phrases uttered by others and try to write them without ever having seen them in print ("persay" - for per se - comes to mind), and sometimes to amusing spectacles such as the entire American press corps running around talking about "Aboo Gribe".

The Germans, on the other hand, spell foreign words and names the way they're pronounced, transliterating as required. (See this article (http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,378476,00.html) from Der Spiegel in which "cliches" is spelled "Klischees".)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

No, i dole out PLONKs on an as-needed basis.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Glottal stops? It's just throwing a z or s sound in the middle.

And, hey, people say "gotta" and "wanna" but in formal writing they're rendered "got to" and "want to". So you can say "Rubenesque" if you must, but it OUGHTA be written "Rubensesque".

[alfvaen]

Okay, so how is "Rubens" pronounced in Flemish? Maybe there's a glottal stop in there. Or how do the Walloons pronounce it?

One of my friends, widely travelled in Europe, ragged on me for pronouncing Macedonia with a soft "c", when they themselves didn't pronounce it that way. I asked him how many countries' names he pronounced exactly as the inhabitants did, and he subsided. Of course, these days you pronounce it "FIE-rom".