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From: donn@sdchema.UUCP (Donn Seeley)
Newsgroups: net.misc,net.nlang
Subject: Re: Pronunciation of 'Honda'
Message-ID: <851@sdchema.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 4-Sep-83 22:26:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdchema.851
Posted: Sun Sep  4 22:26:54 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 5-Sep-83 22:37:54 EDT
References: <357@mhuxj.UUCP>
Organization: UC San Diego Chemistry Dept. NIH Research Resource
Lines: 32

Joe Presley is certainly right about the pronunciation of 'Honda' (as
hone-dah) but anyone who wants to remedy this mistake has a lot of work
to do; even the (American) spokesmen and advertisers for the company
pronounce it the other way (as hahn-duh).

I had a programmer friend once whose last name was 'Handa' (she was an
American of Japanese extraction).  Of course her name was pronounced
almost exactly like the name of the car maker usually is in English.
She owned (naturally) a Honda automobile and had the lettering on the
back adjusted so that the 'o' was turned into an 'a'...

My current gripe is about the pronunciation of the name of the fish,
'piranha'.  There was a movie called 'Piranha' on the other night and
all the announcers pronounced the word 'purranuh'.  My knowledge of
Portuguese ain't too great but I'm pretty sure that the word is
pronounced 'peerahnyah'...  (Such a pity that ASCII doesn't have enough
useful characters to do a decent phonetic transcription.)

Many of the funny pronunciations Americans emit when they read foreign
words are a result of the infamous 'Great English Vowel Shift', which
haunts us to this day.  At some point in the past speakers of English
would have pronounced 'Honda' the way it's supposed to be pronounced,
but the vowel shift screwed us all up.  Since our vowels changed but
our spelling stayed the same, we 'overgeneralize' and expect that all
foreign languages have also had their vowels mucked up...  Of course,
who is saying or spelling it wrong depends on your point of view.  (The
vowel shift is also partially responsible for such horrors as
pronounce/pronunciation...)

Chairman of Americans for the Repeal of the Vowel Shift,

Donn Seeley  UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF  ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn