How Should We Handle Words That Are Bad In *Some* Languages?

[Ares Land]

I had electronic classes in high school. As it happens 'bit' sound just like the French word for 'dick'. You can imagine just how that went with teenagers.

Hold on... do you mean that Fr. bite sounds like English bit, with laxed [ɪ]? Or like French bit, with [i]?

(I would have expected the latter, since so far as I know French has no [ɪ] sound.)

Ah, no, I mean bit as loaned into French, so with [i]. We're not very good at laxed vowels

(That goes for European French btw. Canadian French has laxed vowels. )

In German, there's a weird norm under which some acronyms taken from English are always or almost always pronounced as if they were German acronyms (CD, DVD, PC, USA, NASA*), while others are always or almost always pronounced the English way (CIA, FBI, NSA), with no apparent rule about when to do what. (OK, wait, apparently, if it's a US or UK intelligence agency, it's pronounced the English way, while if it isn't, it's probably pronounced as if it were a German acronym.)

*"NASA" isn't treated as an acronym at all for pronunciation purposes.

In (European) French, for some reason, we pronounce FBI the English way, but CIA, CD, DVD, NSA, IRA as if they were French acronyms. NASA is /naza/. There's no clear rule but the general case is that we pronounce all acronyms as if they were French.

Canadian French is more consistent, as far as I know they allows use the English pronunciations for English-language acronyms.

[MacAnDàil]

This reminds me of the time Celtic Football Club were interested in a player called Rafael Scheidt, and the saga of his signing stretched out for several days, requiring the BBC Scotland news team to refer frequently to "Brazilian player Rafael". This prompted a late-night phone-in football radio programme called Eat My Goal to run a nightly competition for the best headline about the whole silly business. "Scheidt hits fan" was a frequent favourtite.

Funnily enough, Celtic Wiki (https://www.thecelticwiki.com/scheidt-rafael/) claims that "he seemed cursed from the moment he arrived in Glasgow".

Hmm, maybe Raphael should worry... depending on whether he's talking to Brits or Americans.

Cardinal ʌ is just unrounded ɔ... but of course that doesn't tell us much about actual English [ʌ].

My impression is that American [ʌ] is rather high, and this is confirmed by quite a few diagrams in Labov. Very often [ʌ] is not at all far from [ u], and higher than [e]. This is very unlikely to be confused with [a].

But a number of Googled diagrams, e.g. the ones here, suggest that in British English, [ʌ] is quite low, lower than cardinal [ɔ], and it's also rather centralized. That seems closer to German [a]. Brits, is that correct?

I think it's important take into account that British English only has any coherence when referring to spelling (like 'colour' v 'color') or some vocabulary items (like 'tap' v 'faucet'). In terms of pronunciation, Scottish English and RP are very far apart among English accents, among the furthest apart perhaps. [ʌ] to me is close to schwa and very distinct from [a].

I had a coworker in Luxembourg from India whose name, in French, means "pussy" (in both senses). And you don't expect someone to change their name because of an unfortunate coincidence with their name

and yet, many official name changes are due to this kind of coincidence...

Can you provide an example?

Hold on... do you mean that Fr. bite sounds like English bit, with laxed [ɪ]? Or like French bit, with [i]?

(I would have expected the latter, since so far as I know French has no [ɪ] sound.)

But do French-speakers render English bit loaned into French with [ɪ] or with [i]?

That's what I meant by French bit, which my dictionary has as [bit]. People don't usually borrow phonemes, and usually feel weird about pronouncing borrowings exactly as in the source language.

I find that French people often have difficulty realising that there is a difference between [ɪ] and . And difficulty pronouncing it. Which is probably what's going on with the German interpretation of [ʌ].

Anyway, it's a bit silly for French to just loan 'bit' because what do you then with 'byte'? A homophonous superordinate?

[Travis B.]

That is like how native English-speakers often have a hard time telling apart StG [iː] and [eː]. (I can tell them apart when Till Lindemann sings them, but there have been other German-speakers for whom I can't make heads or tails of them.)

[Raphael]

That is like how native English-speakers often have a hard time telling apart StG [iː] and [eː]. (I can tell them apart when Till Lindemann sings them, but there have been other German-speakers for whom I can't make heads or tails of them.)

Wut? Homophony can be weird.

[Ares Land]

Anyway, it's a bit silly for French to just loan 'bit' because what do you then with 'byte'? A homophonous superordinate?

No, we use octet. ('byte' is mildly confusing.)

[MacAnDàil]

I had forgotten that and ought to have checked it up.

[Raphael]

What, French computer scientists didn't go with "bouchée"? (OK, I should stop being silly. After all, it's not called "Bissen" in German, either.)

[Richard W]

What, French computer scientists didn't go with "bouchée"? (OK, I should stop being silly. After all, it's not called "Bissen" in German, either.)

So what do they do for nibble (half a byte)? On the other hand, I haven't seen snyff being used without an explanation.