I was reading Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What we Know (2014), and I came across this passage.
"Hey, I said, that's the olive oil they sell in that shop we went to. Marchmain's, wasn't it? Near Harrods, on Beauchamp Place.
I put some effort into pronouncing Beauchamp, trying to capture the French accent fluttering over the word.
Tomaso's family produce it, she explained. It's pronounced Beecham, she added.
She did not look at me.
Of course it is, I replied.
One way or another, I thought, the English will get you, even if it's with their French. I had been put in my place: That'll teach me not to question the ordering of letters."
That reminded me of a post I had made on this blog on the word 'Piccadilly' about a decade back. Place names can be tricky for foreigners, even if they think they know the actual pronunciation in the language the word originates from.
Foreigners aside, even locals can sometimes struggle with place names. In Kolkata, for instance there is Outram Ghat. Is it to be pronounced as Out (as in, in and out) or as Ut? Then there's Bethune College. It is pronounced as Bay-thoon by all and sundry, but supposedly the person behind the college, John Drinkwater Bethune--his surname was pronounced as Bee-thun (rhyming with run) (see the pronunciation here on Cambridge Dictionaries Online). There's Belvedere Road. Is it to be pronounced as Bel-vay-dear, or Bel-vay-dir (again, see the pronunciation on Cambridge Dictionaries Online).
One may argue these are all foreign names in Kolkata and thus we are unsure. Even Indianised place names can land one in trouble. Moulali is a corruption of Maula Ali. Does one say Maula Ali crossing or should one stick to Moulali crossing if one has to make oneself understood to people? Metiabruz--does one pronounce it the way it looks or as Matiya Burj? Does one say Tollygunge (the way it should be) or Taaligunge (the way it is often pronounced)? What about Kidderpore (connection with James Kyd)/ Khidirpur?
If one looks at Bengali names, one isn't always safe either. Kumortuli is never written like this in English. It is usually written as Kumar. Chingri-hata or -ghata?
One of the behavioural traits a lot of people, including I, have is to judge pronunciations. Except for one or two people, I do not try to correct other people's pronunciations because it is not worth the effort. The people whose pronunciation I try to correct, I guess, will not feel small or ashamed because I have corrected their pronunciation. Sometimes when I am speaking, I consider the pronunciation of some words about which I am unsure, and after using that word, I keep wondering whether I pronounced it correctly and later check the correct pronunciation and then feel ashamed if I mis-pronounced it earlier.
The fact is words are so difficult to pronounce, across languages. English and French have a wide disparity in the way words look and the way they sound. Their orthography is quite অর্থহীন. Italian has its rules of pronunciations and perhaps once one has mastered those rules, the pronunciation becomes easier. Bengali and Hindi at least have a close congruence between the look and sound of words. The pronunciation of Latin varies from the reconstructed pronunciation to the French and Italian way of pronouncing Latin.
