A pigeon come home to roost

I was smugly glad to be proved right last week when a BBC newreader ascribed to the  Vice President an undeserved punctuation mark for a name. In May 2021 The Times published  a profile of Kamala Harris, originally published in a US journal. An American English speaker said something like 'It's pronounced  'Comma-la'. I wrote about this at the time.

Long-time readers of this blog will be accustomed to my banging on about how misleading 'sounds-like' pronunciation guides can be, especially in a teaching context. For the full pro-IPA rant see here,  but my point is simple: 'sounds-like' pronunciaton guides are useful only when they refer – and are understood to refer – to a particular speech event. In the case of that article, the speech event was between users of American English. For a user of British English Kamala is NOT pronounced 'Comma-la'. Here's the letter I wrote to The Times back in 2021:

<prescript> 
As a retired teacher of English as a foreign language I was disappointed to read Dana Goodyear's misleading and unhelpful pronunciation advice ('it's Comma-la'). 'Sounds-like' pronunciation aids, as I was always telling my fellow teachers, are no better than the memory of  a speech event. This speech event involved two people who were both speakers of American English. So 'comma-la' tells us about the stress but nothing about the vowels. A speaker of British English will be misled by this memory aid:

• there is no /ɒ/ in the first syllable
  

  <HD24 type="afterthought>
  /ɒ/ is the vowel sound in 'bot', 'cot', 'dot' etc. I realize I am hoist by my own petard here but I've got to allow for the lack of IPA-fluency in my readers
  </HD24>

• the schwa at the end of  'comma' is more-or-less the same in British English and in American English
• even a speaker of American English would have no idea about the last syllable (/ɑ/, /ɑ:/, or /ə/)
  

  <HD24 type="afterthought>
  It doesn't much matter what these represent, as I now realize there are many more possibilities. 

  </HD24> 

When I first read the Goodyear article I wronged the writer, assuming she was British and had  misled her readers by slavishly regurgitating her notes of what Harris had said. But what she wrote turns out to have been true for her speech community, and just misleading for speakers of British English (as I presume most of your readers are).

</prescript>

The 'Sounds like "Comma-la"' guide works only for stress, not vowel sounds. But some BBC Newsreaders (not all), presumably having read that article, insist on the /ɒ/.

<tangent subject="word-stress">
And while I'm on the subject of word-stress, Wimbledon is a regular source of linguistic entertainment: foreign names that Radio Five Live commentators have been blithely mispronouncing for the rest of the year suddently get the Radio Four treatment. Their newsreaders turn to the Pronunciation Unit on, for example, Medvedev:

In the case of Medvedev, we have had to compromise: we cannot expect non-Russians to pronounce this name in a perfectly Russian way because this would require broadcasters to have detailed knowledge of Russian pronunciation, which is not feasible.

Having carried out detailed research and consulted with Russian speakers, including a Russian phonetician, we concluded that correct stress placement and reflection of the soft (palatalised) 'v' in the stressed syllable were the most important aspects to highlight in our anglicised pronunciation.

The surname Medvedev stems from the Russian word for 'bear' medved' (with stress on the second syllable), so that it is important to retain this stress in the surname, hence our recommendation muhd-VYED-uhff.

Source 

For years tennis commentators have been using this name. For all I know, Medvedev himself may have abandoned all hope of getting Anglophone commentators to stress the second syllable. But when Wimbledon comes around the Pronunciation Unit comes to the fore; and BBC radio reports on different often have headlines that seem to refer to two different people.
</tangent>

Returning to Kamala. Trump, of course, gets it wrong. This may be intentional, as a Harris campaign video deals expressly with the name's pronunciiation; or it may just be the old political trick of deliberately mispronouncing an opponents name, as Churchill did with the Nazis and Thatcher did with Gal-ti-e-ri.

<tangent>
(which ...

<whatExactly>
[the sound /eə/]
</whatExactly>

... reminds me of the 'Spanish' speaker in a recent radio play I heard, who in the course of his espeech used the uniquely English /eə/ sound when saying the third syllable of 'Buenos Aires'; it's a diphthong all right, but the spelling is a clue to which one. I wish soi-disant foreigners in plays put a bit of effort into getting it right. Perhaps they could ask the Pronunciation Unit...
</tangent>

'Nuff said.

b

PS

My translations have gone off. Now I just have to wait by the phone for a few months