Re: New pronunciation of Bangalore


Ar an ceathrú lá de mí na Samhain, scríobh Michael Farris:

Well, India has a better claim to it than France or Germany; it has
millions who speak English, a good chunk of them native speakers
(certainly if you apply the same standards of what a native speaker is
as are applied in the US or Europe, and ignore that the accent isn't
European or North American)

Uh, you mean they use English almost exclusively so that children learn
it primarily from their parents and other children and start school with
a native speaker understanding of grammar?

I didn’t say ‘almost exclusively’--that would be impractical and
isolating. People in Europe with who are multilingual since childhood are
normally ruled native speakers of all of the languages in question; lots (in
absolute numbers if not in terms of percentages) of people in India grow up
with as much exposure to English as a Luxemburger has to French, that is,
schooling, media, literature.

It's been my understanding that most Indians who use English do so
primarily as a 9-5 work language after mostly learning it in school and
not a 24/7 everything language.

Although if the Indian movies I've seen are any indication most Indians
like to sprinkle their conversation with English expressions that don't
have anything to do with the subject at hand or anything at all as far as
I can tell, just to show they can, I suppose.

I go back on forth on the native-name fad. On the one hand, there's
nothing wrong with Bangalore, on the other hand, one of the prices native
speakers pay for the popularity of English is this kind of stuff.

It’d be nice if there was an Academy who could rule, say, that renaming
reasonable and to be followed by the wider speech community, while that of
Burma wasn’t, since the régime that enforced it has the legitimacy and
respect for human rights of the Wehrmacht in Ukraine.

--
Santa Maradona, priez pour moi!
.

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