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Can anyone confirm or deny the veracity of a factoid I heard years ago. Most people I know are meticulously careful to pronounce "Barcelona" the Castilian way, as in my subject line. I heard, however, that in Catalan, it actually is Bar-cel-ona. Any takers?
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old hand
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I thought only a single 's' was given the sibilant treatment in Espanol - and so always figured that Bar-thel-owna was a foreign affectation.
But I dunno for sure....
stales
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I have a Basque friend who invariably pronounces it Barthelona. I tend to prefer Latin-American pronunciation of Spanish words, but she instinctively corrects me with the Castilian version.
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journeyman
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That's right, Catalan has no th-sound. Nor do the Spanish dialects of Valencia or Andalucia, so people who think they're being authentic by lisping those names aren't really.
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pronounces it Barthelona. Ooh! That sets my teeth on edge just from seeing it, let alone hearing it. That is the main reason I've always disliked Spanish. Jenet's comment hit it: I can't help thinking to myself, "Why can't they make the letter sound properly?" In college, I met a couple of students from Colombia (I think), and they taught me that our words that end in -ty (for ex. university) end in the -ath sound for them, so that their pronunciation would be universidath. I couldn't help it--to me it just sounded like they couldn't be bothered to make the correct sound. And yes, for the record, I realize how childish that is of me, but.  Thanks for the distinctions of Catalan, etc.
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In Puerto Rico, the people notoriously omit the sound of the letter "S" from their pronunciation altogether. Thus, the expression "es lo mismo" is pronounced "eh lo mee-moh" -- which requires some adjustment for the person who learned high school textbook Spanish.
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old hand
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I presume that, in RP Spanish, the c-as-th sound is the proper way to pronounce it. Or are you saying the Spanish, with their rather phonetic system, should change pronunciation to suit us Anglos?
cheer
the sunshine warrior
ps: Edited to correct there/their horror
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Pooh-Bah
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Oh, why not? And at the same time, make Arabic, Hindi, Pushto, Bahasa and all them other pesky languages which won't do it phonetically toe the line as well. We can just beat up on them until they conform to our standards. Or we can send in the mari... well, maybe not. 
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Sure, why should we and the French have all the fun with spelling/pronunciation difficulties?
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veteran
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Catalan is interesting. Officially it's a European minority language, yet it has more speakers than Danish, an official majority EU language. Why shouldn't Castillian Spanish speakers pronounce Barcelona with with a dental fricative. Afterall anglophones pronounce Paris with an /s/ at the end. Saying Barcelona with a lisp is no more pretentious than saying /pa'Ri/. The CSp and Catalan pronuciations also differ in vowel quality: /,barTe'lona/ ~ /,bars@'lon@/. BTW, I always thought the rule for {s} > [T] was mirrored in the orthography. Only an /s/ in non-Castillian Spanish that is written {c} or {z} is lisped.
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In reply to:
Why shouldn't Castillian Spanish speakers pronounce Barcelona with with a dental fricative. Afterall anglophones pronounce Paris with an /s/ at the end. Saying Barcelona with a lisp is no more pretentious than saying /pa'Ri/
Thanks, jheem. I think the thread has wandered from my original question, which included no accustions of pretentiousness. I asked because most Anglophones who lisp Barcelona likely do so believing it to be the "correct" pronunciation. All I was asking was: If "correct" is defined as "how the locals say it", is it Barthelona, or not? That was all.
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veteran
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OK. Well, not everybody who is a citizen of Barcelona speaks Catalan.
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> not everybody who is a citizen of Barcelona speaks Catalan.
Undoubtedly.
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Or we can send in the mari... well, maybe not
I know an excellent mariachi band that works for *peanuts.
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Pooh-Bah
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They high-calibre mariachis, Keven?
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Oh, shoot! I've been way of target all thse years with what I was told in my salad days : that is that there was a King of Spain who lisped and the Court mimiced his pronunciation so that the lisped pronunciation was actuallly an affectation of the Nobles which gradually oozed into the general population who aped their "betters."
An apocryphal story perhaps?
But then : in England, I was also told, the name of the river Thames was pronounced Tham-es for many years until one of the early Georges called it Tems and so it remains. The oozing into the general population following the same path : King, Nobles, comman man.
Any comment Cap?
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T/V??
OK, I know what it means. What do the T and the V stand for?
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veteran
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I assumed tu 'thou' & vous 'you'.
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Yeah, I thought maybe. So why not Þ/Y?
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Yeah, I thought maybe. So why not Þ/Y?
Francophonophilia? Could stand for tu/vos in Latin, too.
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Did Latin ever indulge in this sort of linguistic brownnosing?
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Sure, Quintillian and Varro are always throwing Greek words and phrases around. Heavens know what the Etruscans did. The Hittites used a whole hella lot of Hattic and Sumerian, just to keep the gods appeased. I sometimes tune in a local TV station to listen to the Taglish (Tagalog/English). Bilingual human nature, I s'pose.
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Well, yeahbut®, did they do funnies with pronouns like the English/French 2nd pl or the German/Spanish 3rd pl in singular contexts?
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I'm sorry, I must've misunderstood you. You weren't talking about using foreign terms when domestic ones would do, but pronominal paradigms with strange hijinks? I think most of the European lgs did it.
German
du / Ihr ~ Sie / Sie
where ihr is youse informal and her, and sie is she, they, and you formal sg/pl.
In English, lawspeak we use Your Honor and 3PS. Go figure.
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It's hard to keep track of what I'm talking about at any particular moment. I started off wonderin why T/V, which was, as you suggest, wondering why foreign paradigms were being used in an English context. Then I shifted to wondering whether Latin had this same sort of pronomial hijinks for purposes of sucking up to one's betters. How different modern languages handle this is a whole nother question. I'm sure Japanese would have a veritable treasure trove of funnies along these lines, but how many of them would be pronomial I wouldn't care to guess.
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journeyman
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Catullus is supposed to be the first one to use vos as singular in Latin, or the first one recorded anyway. I'm assuming Tom Stoppard is accuratel reporting Housman in "The Invention of Love", because that's where I learnt this.
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Yes, Japanese seems to be the archetypical case, but, as you suggest, it's not just pronominal. Japanese has many dual sets of words, one for mine and the other for thine. Okusan is somebody else's wife, but nyobo is my wife. Murakami has written novels in which the narrator is only known as boku 'I'. This pronoun is used amongst young males. Needless to say, it's hard to translate. Here's a list of first person pronouns I found online:
- Sessha (used by samurai, extremely polite)
- Watakushi (very polite, usually feminine)
- Watashi (standard/polite)
- Oira (used by monks)
- Atashi (female casual)
- Boku (mostly young male, also the poetic first person)
- Ore (almost exclusively male, somewhat rude, male "cool")
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To a mere English speaker the Indonesian pronoun system seems quite complicated enough, though I gather it's simplicity itself compared to Javanese and Sundanese.
I/me/my can be aku or saya, aku implying a more intimate relationship, saya being more neutral
You/you/your (singular) can be engkau, kau, kamu, again implying a more intimate relationship. If you don't have that relationship, you use a relationship term such as bapak (literally father) for older or higher status males, or ibu (literally mother) for older or higher status females, or just the person's name. These relationship terms can also be used by an older person to refer to themselves when talking to a younger one. Thus without the situation it's difficult to know whether Di mana mobil ibu? (literally Where is mother's car?) means Where is my car? Where is your car? Where is her (Mrs X's) car? or Where is mum's car?
He/she/him/her/his/her can all be translated as dia or if one is referring to someone of very high status: beliau. Again relationship terms can be used to substitute.
We/us/our = kami (exclusive) kita (inclusive).
You/you/your (plural) = kalian or Anda. Anda is for talking to everybody in general in notices, adverts, etc.
They/them/their = mereka.
This is a simplified version. It's a nightmare. I'm surprised people ever talk to each other for fear of offending by using the wrong pronoun.
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