primularossa

Of course no one knows how the Romans pronounced ALIBI but it is a latin word that exists in English and also in Italian - and in Italian it has not transported from English - and the Italian pronunciation follows the Italian phonetics - and it is not a mispronunciation of the English: so A is A like the italian Albero and not as in "apple" and I is I as in India and not "I" as in "I am".

jonwel

But I wouldn't be surprised if Italian journalists and politicians did start to import the English pronunciation of "alibi". Some do it with "media" (midia).
I had a discussion yesterday about the Greek letter we use in calculating the area or circumference of a circle (can't find it at the moment but everyone knows what letter it is). The name of this letter in Greek is exactly the same as our P. Someone decided to write the pronunciation phonetically as "pi" ("pit" without the "t"), but we Anglo-Saxons, being very intelligent, read it like the English word "pie". True that it's quicker to say than "Greek P" (the italians say "p greco") but we shouldn't really imagine it's called "pie".
With biblical names we really get ridiculous. Take the prophet called Elia in Italian (stress on the "i"). The Italian pronunciation is a simplification; give it a twang in passing from the I to the A: Eliya. You can use a J instead of the Y and put an aspirated sound on the end: Elijah, pronounced El-ee-yah. Perfect! No, we have to anglicise it and make it rhyme with "obliger". Don't tell El-ee-yah Wood!

PS I can imagine some preacher in the American Bible Belt standing up to defend this good red-blooded Anglo-Saxon name!

Maybe1day

I learnt Latin at school for several years and when I first came to Italy without speaking Italian, I used to knock around with my wifes cousin who had also learnt Latin. So we spoke Latin, the differences between our pronunciation were quite extreme. It was a good laugh too, people thought we were a pair of womanising priests !

MarkRD

I suppose it would quite amusing for schoolchildren if they started calling it a 'Greek pee' (or pea) in English speaking countries.

jonwel

Found the "pie": π Actually the Italians are not blameless with Greek letters (the pronunciation, not the name). They make no distinction between θ (th) and τ or between χ (like a German ch) and κ. A Greek friend was amused to hear Italians call θ "teta" - to him it sounded like "tetta" (in Greek it's called thita).
Probably the Latin pronunciation taught in schools in the UK has improved, but I shudder to think of how judges and lawyers pronounce expressions like "sub judice" and "sub poena".

garfagnino

I was also learnt latin at school, to my mind the English pronunciation of latin is ugly to say the least. Possibly the nearest to the original pronunciation is when Italians speak it (with variances due to dialects) as after all some must be distant decendents of the Romans. How the Romans pronounced latin we will never know, according to some historians/archeologists the ruling Roman classes actually preferred to use Greek (a bit like the English royalty in the past using French to show off their superior education). There was one Historian who used the latin greeting Ave, which he pronounced Awey.
As for Pi, the greek letter, why not save any confusion and resort to maths, i.e. 22 over 7 or 3.142 - job done, Omega Kappa?!

Garbatellamike

FIFY

garfagnino

Omega Kappa, va bene!

primularossa

Dear all, I find this conversation quite interesting as it confirms to me the urgency of a deep reform in English about the translitterisation (or spelling) of vowels. Until some clear rules about how to write (or: from the opposite point of view, on how to pronounce) vowels are set, the mess is going to increase more and more!! (lots of :-) follow...)

ononno

Oh no! Just think how the vowel shift makes spoken English as she is spoke in different parts of the world; and indeed in different parts of the British Isles; so interesting.

HADENOUGHPIZZA

There are rules , or at least guidelines , on how to write it but there is no way you can impose rules on pronuciation , how boring would life be if that were the case !

jonwel

Depends on what you're used to. I think that if English had developed differently you'd find it just as interesting as you do now. Here, though, we're not talking about English names but about how foreign names and words are transcribed into English. What happens is that one person decides how to represent the sound according to his idea of phonetics and then someone else comes along with a different idea of how that spelling should be pronounced, so we end up with a pronunciation that's completely different from the original.
Nowadays I think an absurd pronunciation like "Elijah" rhyming with "obliger" wouldn't happen, but these are leftovers from ignorant times and it's difficult to change them. Still, I'm not so sure about that with BBC sports commentators talking about Padge-yew-a and Pee-acenza! But no worse than Menchester and Glesgow, I suppose.

primularossa

Well....my daughter spent a long part of this school year in doing boring spelling exercises, at school an at home. Kids would enjoy more to spend their time in doing something less boring, once precise spelling rules were decided once for all.

Why - for example - words like "dough" and "rough" are pronounced so differently? this is not a matter of transliteration of foreign words. They are - I think - both anglo-saxon words. Think of it. It will let people that are learning English - included native speakers in primary schools - spare the time that now they have instead to dedicate to spelling :-))

jonwel

Rough, dough, plough, through, cough, thorough! Six different pronunciations!
Yes, I don't think our lives would be empty or that we would die of boredom if we revised the spelling system. The question is: who would do the revision and would the others take any notice?
The Americans have made a few attempts over the years with some of the most ridiculous spellings, like gaol -> jail, but very few and the British haven't adopted them.
We had a similar discussion in another forum. Someone asked why a language should adapt to foreign learners, but English is in a special position as the international language. While other nations are striving to learn English as a foreign language it would cost us only a tenth of that effort to make it easier for them!

Lorna at Vicenza

My kids spent a long part of their first years in Italian primary school doing spelling exercises ...... all the double letters, all the cià ciò ciù sci scia scio cu and qu etc. I had 10 spellings to learn each week in Junior school and apart from also having a book to read at home with mum, that was the only homework we got then. My kids quickly moved on to grammar analisi in primary school and that was bloody long, boring and hard work. I know grammar is important, but is it really necessary at age 9 to know if an adjective is qualificativo, quantitativo, dismostrativo etc? Calling a noun "nome" one year and "sostantivo" another year is just confusing.