Palma de Majorca and Bexington

[Rachel Adams]

Hello.

What is the right pronunciation of Bexington and Palma de Majorca? is it /b[FONT=&quot]eksiŋtən/? And /palme/ de [/FONT][FONT=&quot]meorka?
Please excuse my attemts to transcribe them. I could only find Spanish pronunciations for Palma de Majorca.[/FONT]

 

[emsr2d2]

It's quite reasonable that you should only find Spanish pronunciations for Palma de Mallorca. It's Spanish! It should be pronounced as it is in its original language.

 

[Rachel Adams]

It's quite reasonable that you should only find Spanish pronunciations for Palma de Mallorca. It's Spanish! It should be pronounced as it is in its original language.

Well, Paris isn't pronounced in English as it is pronounced in French.

 

[emsr2d2]

I know! I was being just a little sarcastic, in all honesty. The only correct pronunciation is the Spanish one. You'll hear various pronunciations of it from BrE speakers. The majority make the first word sound like "Pah-l-muh". They use a long "a" at the start, rather than the short (phonetic) "a" of the Spanish version. Also, most BrE speakers can't accurately reproduce the very distinct "ll" sound in "Mallorca". I speak pretty good Spanish but I can still make a Spaniard laugh by attempting to say "paella" correctly.

I don't think I've seen it spelled as "Majorca" in the UK for some time. That would have a very different pronunciation in Spanish. Although we change the pronunciation, we don't usually change the spelling of cities and towns.

 

[Rachel Adams]

I know! I was being just a little sarcastic, in all honesty. The only correct pronunciation is the Spanish one. You'll hear various pronunciations of it from BrE speakers. The majority make the first word sound like "Pah-l-muh". They use a long "a" at the start, rather than the short (phonetic) "a" of the Spanish version. Also, most BrE speakers can't accurately reproduce the very distinct "ll" sound in "Mallorca". I speak pretty good Spanish but I can still make a Spaniard laugh by attempting to say "paella" correctly.

I don't think I've seen it spelled as "Majorca" in the UK for some time. That would have a very different pronunciation in Spanish. Although we change the pronunciation, we don't usually change the spelling of cities and towns.

Now you would be angry with me because I should have written about it in the first post. Sorry. I found it in English File. Yes, they changed the spelling. This is how it's written in the book.

 

[probus]

English has a venerable tradition of modifying foreign place names. The Italian Venezia, Lugano and Napoli, for example, become Venice, Leghorn and Naples (although to be fair I haven't seen or heard Leghorn for many years.) The situation with anglicization of place names in India is even worse than that with Italian places.

May I add, gratuitously, that the idea that we should pronounce place names as do the natives of a place is somewhat ridiculous. We wouldn't be able to say Long Island when speaking of New York. We'd have to say Lawn Guyland.:-D

 

[emsr2d2]

I realised, after I wrote it, that we do change the spelling of a lot of place names. My mind was, however, fixated on Spanish places because we'd been talking about Palma de Mallorca. I couldn't think of any Spanish (or French) places that are spelled differently in English, however we might pronounce them. Italian place names are, as you say, sometimes changed. I'd certainly never heard of Leghorn. My dad is a regular visitor to Lugano and that's what he calls it, and so do I.
And of course, with places that are not written in the Latin alphabet we have to Anglicise them.

Москва = Moskva (pronounced in Russian, I think) = Moscow (written in English) + Moss-coe (pronounced in BrE)
Αθήνα = Atheena (pronounced in Greek) = Athens (written and pronounced in English)
北京 = actually, I have no idea how it's pronounced in Chinese = Beijing (written in English) + Bay-zhing (pronounced in BrE)

 

[jutfrank]

It's quite reasonable that you should only find Spanish pronunciations for Palma de Mallorca. It's Spanish!

It certainly isn't! I hope there are no Catalans around here to hear you say that!

The Catalan 'll' is subtly distinct from the Spanish 'll'. It sounds to me like an English 'l' rolling into an English 'y'.