And some of the pronunciation got me thinking and put me in mind of this post from: John Wells’s phonetic blog: obsolete exonyms. In it we learn things about how things used to be pronounced: did you know that once upon a Victorian Time, Prague was pronounced 'Prayg', Rome 'Room' and Milan 'Millan'. The evidence is is past editions of dictionaries and things like the rhymes of Edward Lear. As John Wells points out: "Lear, like other early Victorians, would also have rhymed Rome with loom and tomb, Milan with Dillon, and Calais with Alice. Again, the latter persists right up to the 1963 EPD, where it is characterized as no more than “old-fashioned”.
So what does that have to do with the Reading this morning? Well, I noticed that the reader exhibited the difficulty which many readers in church nowadays have to struggle with (though sometimes it is the hearers who struggle for reasons that should become evident): how are those Hebrew names pronounced?
There are two competing and mutually exclusive approaches. One is illustrated by a little manual I saw being sold second hand last summer: a pronouncing dictionary of OT names. In this the pronunciation principle was based on the spelling conventions of English since the great vowel shift. The other approach seems to be an awareness that these are foreign words and not English and so should perhaps be treated accordingly, so a tendency to give vowels what some might call their 'continental' values.
A quick reminder, the great vowel shift took place roughly between Chaucer's time and around Shakespeare's (though it is still going on in local dialects: eg in Newcastle the shift of 'ow' from an 'oo' sound to something that rhymes with the final vowel of Bilbao is still taking place: 'broon coo' can still be heard for 'brown cow'). Anyway this meant that long vowels tended to shift meaning that, for example, 'I' shifted from sounding like the sound in French 'vive' to what most of us say today. This was applied to biblical names like any other words in English. So the post-vowel-shift-traditional soundings would pronounce an 'a' in a stressed position as like the sound in 'hay' (Asa - 'Aysa' instead of 'Ahsah'), 'e' as 'ee' (so Eve = 'eev' rather than 'ayv'), 'i' as above (so Dinah is 'Diner' rather than as previously 'Deena') and so on.
I have noticed in various churches over the last 20 years that there is a tendency with the less well known biblical names, to give them pronunciations which sound more like they would have been pre-vowel shift. I think that this may be because we have far more people reading who have not really heard the texts said out loud very often and so haven't got a sense of the formerly standard English approach. This may be because they have come in from non-Bible-reading backgrounds or non-churchgoing backgrounds. I suspect.
So it is interesting to find a similar sort of phenomenon in the way that foreign names are handled in wider culture.
What do I advise? Well, I quite like keeping names close in pronunciation to how native speakers would say them. So I wouldn't normally anglicise someone's name beyond the minor adjustments needed to keep it within the bounds of normal English phonology. This would mean that 'Eva' from Poland should be 'Ayva' though her English namesake would be 'Eeva', for example. This is about respect and courtesy.
However, I have no problems with the biblical Hebrew names being pronounced in an approximation to the Hebrew or Greek come to that. I feel that this is appropriate.
The only difficulty comes with names that are commonly pronounced in the 'modern' English style. Perhaps Elijah needs to remain 'ill-eye-dje(r)' rather than 'eh lee ya' in order to keep his 'brand' recognition (twinkle in eye). The area of interest to watch is where the border line of judgement lies between what is presumed to be a frequently used name which needs to be pronounced in the modern English style, and what is taken to be a relatively uncommon name and suitable to remain Hebrew-y or Greek-y.
So, if asked, I usually lay out both alternatives and my perception of what people may or may not expect and tell them to take their choice. I usually point out that saying it confidently is more important that which pronunciation: most people have no idea so a confident sounding out will be acceptable and even convincing to most.
2 comments:
And then you have vowel shifts in two languages going in two directions at once, so you get people pronouncing "Kyrie" like "courier".
That's an interesting thought, Steve. I tend to the view that the 'Y' in Greek was probably a high front rounded vowel. So I'd tend to pronounce it as if it were, in French, 'Currier'. If you are suggesting that you have heard people using a mid vowel for that first syllable rather than a high front vowel (ie like the vowel in the American or southern British 'cut') then I'm flummoxed as to what is going on. Unless it's a New Zealander ... ?
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