Cross your T's and dot your I's. And O's. And E's.
I was reading the New Yorker’s scorching review of ‘Speed Racer’ today, (‘Our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls?’), and the following sentence jumped out at me:
There’s something about the ululating crowds who line the action in color-coördinated rows;
Coördinated?!
Ö?!
What language is this article written in?
Since living outside the U.S. on and off for the past five years, this has become one of my favorite phenomena: Americans who pepper their English with umlauts, tildes, ratatat-R's and one-word accents in an effort to appear cultured.
‘I’ve just come back from a weekend in München,’ your hungover friend from Minnesota says on a Monday.
‘They have the best tartiflette in pa-ree’ says Connecticut, scrolling through Eiffel views on his DigiCam.
‘Oh, you live in Copen-HAW-gen?’ Upstate New York knows that the insertion of a long A into a foreign word equals instant sophistication.
Maybe I’m a purist, but I don’t think there’s any shame in pronouncing words Americanly when you’re speaking, you know, English. Saying ‘Copenhagen’, or ‘Munich,’ or ‘Japan’ isn’t incorrect. It’s just English. The language you are speaking. When I speak Danish, I say København. If I was speaking German, I would gladly say München, or Neue York, or Das Szhicago or whatever.
The only reason people lapse into another language for a few syllables is to prove how worldly they are (‘What’s it called in English? Oh yes, Munich. Such philistines’). Similarly, the New Yorker is rocking the umlaut just to remind you that they know where the word cooperate comes from: Some umlautey language with polka dots above the vowels. I’ll bet they keep that gay little crown above the O in Côte as well.
They only keep the artifacts of the cool languages, though. We get words from Sanskrit and Arabic, too, but I don’t see the New Yorker writing backwards and all squiggly when they use ‘Cheetah’.
Look, word origins are interesting, but if we’re gonna steal words from other languages (and what is English if not linguistic jumbalaya?), we might as well just steal them all the way. We don’t use the Æ anymore (Hi Denmark!) for Old Latin-rooted words like encyclopedia or pedagogue. I don’t see why Naïve gets to exceed its dot quota just so the New Yorker can sound like a college freshman who just got home from ‘totally backpacking the shit out of Europa, bro’.
Comments
But that's probably because I can't roll my r's.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/diaeresis
it means the vowel is pronounced by itself, like in coördinated, Zoë, Brontë. It's not required, obviously. See Dante, no one spells it Dantë, probably because it's Italian.
Of course the fact that upstate-new-yorkers get their pronunciation of "Copenhagen" from Danny Kaye has its own perverse amusement value.
Brash Lion, actually it's pronounced "sah-keh." The "-ay" sound is a dipthong, and would be written in English as "-ei" rather than just "-e." It may not seem like much, but to the Japanese, it would be an entirely different word.
Also, there's a difference between a word in a foreign language that we use in English because we don't have our own word (sake) and a word that has changed form when borrowed by the English language and therefore become our own (Copenhagen, borrowed from German).