The meaning of Feh

[Ice Dragon]

Just now, bottlegnomes said:

re: my hundred example.

One word: English.

If you've been reading my responses at all, you should know that English doesn't have the feedback loop that other languages with greater prescriptive power does to begin with. This means that it's natural in English for changes in pronunciation to not be accompanied by changes in spelling, whereas it is the norm in other languages.

 

The problem with your examples is that you're still using the context of English to argue that language (spelling and pronunciation) is more descriptive than prescriptive. That's no different than using an ostrich as an example to argue that birds can't fly.

I very much agree with you that English orthography is more arbitrary than prescriptive, but you've been only using examples in English to try to make arguments about language as a whole, and that's what I'm taking issue with.

 

Names are this thing where you stay within the bounds of the language the name originates in. In languages without a strong prescriptive element, you can pick any pronunciation for a name you created within reason and generally convince others that you are right. For example, I could name someone "Byll" and likely convince people that it's pronounced like any of "bill", "bile", or "beel".

The problem is when you try to import names from other languages. In general, names moving between languages with the same character set do not change their spelling, even if the spelling is in direct conflict with the other language's pronunciation rules. This is because the "appearance" of the name is just as important as (or even more important than) the pronunciation of the name for identification purposes. For example, "William Shakespeare" is spelled the same (and pronounced the same) in both English and Spanish despite the fact that in Spanish "Shakespeare" would need to be rendered as "Xéicspir" (never mind that "x" is only used for the "sh" sound in words borrowed from Mesoamerica and South America) to keep its pronunciation.

That said, "Xéicspir" would be a frickin' cool name to have.

In the case of less well known names that are imported from another language (like "Birbiglia"), it makes sense that people would pronounce it using the mapping of letters to sounds in the new language (i.e. English speakers are not wired to interpret "gl" as a palatal "l") instead of the sounds in the originating language, and it becomes hard to convince speakers to use the original pronunciation ("g" as a "g" or "j" sound in English is too strongly ingrained). And again, because the "appearance" of a name has importance, one would typically not change the spelling of the name to facilitate pronunciation (though this was actually done for immigrants to the United States during the early immigration boom).

Chinese and Japanese actually take this further by (mostly) not giving a shit about how the other language pronounces anything and uses their own pronunciation of the characters instead of the original pronunciation, keeping the "spelling" intact (where regional variants of the same base character are considered the same character). 東京 (simplified Chinese: 东京) (Tokyo) is read "toh-kyoh" in Japanese and "dohng-dzhing" in Chinese (and something else completely different in Cantonese that I won't bother to try to butcher).

However, due to the fact that Japanese has flexibility in the pronunciation of its characters, it would not be out of the question to convince Japanese speakers to pronounce a Chinese name with the Chinese pronunciation (or at least the closest approximation using the phonemes available in Japanese).

Names from languages not using the CJK character set are rendered in their original language's character set, in the Latin character set, or phonetically in the CJK character set (in the same way that moving between the Latin and Cyrillic character sets generally render names phonetically with no regard to the original "spelling" because the original spelling means literally nothing in the new language).

[bottlegnomes]

38 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

If you've been reading my responses at all, you should know that English doesn't have the feedback loop that other languages with greater prescriptive power does to begin with. This means that it's natural in English for changes in pronunciation to not be accompanied by changes in spelling, whereas it is the norm in other languages.

That said, "Xéicspir" would be a frickin' cool name to have.

I have, and I completely agree with that first point in my quote. My points are this:

1. Language is, when you get down to it, arbitrary and defined solely by mutual agreement. That agreement is not some divine truth and is capable of being changed. It's more akin to men don't wear dresses than apples grow from trees.
   1. I agree that some languages stick to these rules better and thus have major changes less often, re my German example.
2. Language is, generally, an attempt to catalog and organize the way people speak to help make communication more consistent and understandable.
3. In the case of names, the only absolute defining truth, unless you (not you specifically, but a general rhetorical you) are going to be a jerk about it, is the person whose name it is. Yeah, it might be hard to convince society to use a wonky spelling or pronunciation, and as such it'll die out after you, but you're not wrong about your name, which is what I was getting at with the whole nonsense Feh spelling example.

Points one and two are what I meant when I said language is more descriptive than prescriptive. I had an example, but I deleted it since I feel like that would just open the door to language is innately cultural and therefore the rules of the culture and how flexible they are are linguistic rules. I don't disagree with that, which is why I deleted it, but that also kind of underscores my point: language is essentially some shit we made up, and when we get down to it, subject to our whims. I'm being flip with my usage of whims there, but I hope you understand what I'm saying.

Point three is entirely my opinion, but I feel like someone would have to be a bit of a dick to say someone else is spelling/pronouncing their name wrong, though again, so's the other person probably for intentionally spelling their name nonsensically. I'm more than okay with agreeing to disagree on that.

I feel like this is getting into relativism versus determinism (I think those are the right ones), but that's kind of my point: language is relative since it's essentially just some shit humans made up. Anyway, I also feel like we're starting to go in circles. I will agree that I was probably overly general in saying language is more descriptive than prescriptive, but my intention was that language (with some exceptions like Tolkien's Elvish or Klingon) evolved and continues to evolve in an effort to describe how people speak rather than being a steadfast set of rules laid out to prescribe the proper way to speak. Again, maybe I'm being overly all-or-nothing.

And lastly, completely agree with your second quoted point, and I am officially starting an unofficial petition to change Shakespeare's Spanish name to Xéicspir.

[Stephen the Great]

Good grief. You lot have taken this far beyond where I started!

[Vaximillian]

42 minutes ago, Sigismund of Luxemburg said:

Good grief. You lot have taken this far beyond where I started!

Linguistics is serious business.

[Lau]

Mm, 'Feh' always reminded me of the noise a condescending, angsty anime character would make...

I quite like it, it suits the adorable owl.