Re: "Major Bloomberg"?

On Apr 21, 5:12 pm, Trond Engen <trond...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peter T. Daniels skreiv:

In his Farewell Address to the American People from the Airport last
night, which WNBC alone among network affiliates felt needed to be
broadcast live, in place of the first 45 minutes of *Monk*, Pope
Benedict XVI (81-y.o. German-speaker) included a long list of
acknowledgments, and among those he thanked were the mayors of
Washington and New York. But he said "Major."

What happened is obvious, but why? He doesn't say "New Jork" as in
some caricatures of Spanish accents!

/nu dZOrk/ (or some such) would be Über-English but I don't think that's
what's going on here. This is a lexical thing. He's either sorting the
latinate lexicon of English by means of Latin, confusing dual forms like
'major' and 'mayor', or he's doing an inline transfer along the path of
regular correspondence, missing the intermediate stage in French
'maïeur'. I know I do similar things when I speak French, in which my
active, instantly ready vocabulary is painfully limited and I work to
figure out words from parallels as I speak. A bit odd, perhaps, that it
happened in what should be a prepared speech but perhaps he didn't
follow his manuscript closely?

No, I think he knows that <j> is not [j] as in German but <dsch>, and
he hypercorrects <y> to <dsch> instead of [j].

I didn't follow much of his visit, and at no time did he speak
extemporaneously that I saw; he read all his speeches in clear and
fairly fluent but heavily accented English (with [s] and [z] for <th>).
.

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