Pronunciation...

[RuthieG]

How do you pronounce Andromache, then? I have always pronounced both with the stress on the second syllable, as:

http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=andromache&submit=Submit
http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=andromeda&submit=Submit

Ruth

[Availle]

From wikipedia's entry here:

In Greek mythology, Andromache (/ænˈdrɒməkiː/; Ancient Greek: Ἀνδρομάχη) was the wife of Hector and daughter of Eetion, and sister to Podes.

I would guess the stress is on the ending -ee?

Now, where is Rapunzelina when you need her?

[Rapunzelina]

I can say them in Greek, but I can't say them in their americanized/englishized versions

[pjlandau]

AN-dro-mock-ee is what I was taught by a now deceased fellow who was a college professor and an annoying stickler for precise knowledge, so I trust that he was correct.

[RuthieG]

Allowing genuine respect for your deceased gentleman, who undoubtedly knew more about the pronunciation of Ancient Greek than most academics, I think I shall stick with An-DROM-a-kee, in accordance with https://archive.org/stream/universalpronou00thomgoog#page/n152/mode/1up and http://slb-ltsu.hull.ac.uk/awe/index.php?title=Pronunciation_of_Greek_Proper_Names

The latter states:

The rules for the accent are the same as the rules for the stress accent in Classical Latin. If a name has two syllables, the accent is on the first syllable (as in 'Cyrus', 'Timon', 'Laches', 'Zeno'). If a name has more than two syllables, the accent is on the second syllable from the end if the syllable is long (as in 'Aphrodite', 'Dionysus'); if the syllable is short, the accent is on the third syllable from the end (as in 'Demosthenes', 'Socrates', 'Herodotus'). Since the second last syllable in many of the commonest endings - e.g., '-ides', '-ines', '-anes', '-icles', '-acles', '-ates' - is short, this means that many Greek names have their accent on the third syllable from the end.

Ruth

[pjlandau]

Allowing genuine respect for your deceased gentleman, who undoubtedly knew more about the pronunciation of Ancient Greek than most academics, I think I shall stick with An-DROM-a-kee, in accordance with https://archive.org/stream/universalpronou00thomgoog#page/n152/mode/1up and http://slb-ltsu.hull.ac.uk/awe/index.php?title=Pronunciation_of_Greek_Proper_Names
Ruth

I wish he was still alive. They say not to speak ill of the dead but he certainly would not have refrained from doing so. He spoke ill of most everyone. He held a doctorate in psych, a doctorate in economics, but his favorite subject was history, which he appeared to know in infinite detail. He was an insufferable prick-knowitall, and I would have loved to catch him in an error. In fact his yacht was named Andromache, so I figured he had to be right.

Apparently I was right all along, that the pronunciation is parallel to that of Andromeda. Makes sense to me.

I'm glad this topic came up. Thank you for posting those rules.

[Leni]

Just read this article and found it extremely interesting still in the pronunciation topic.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/11/pronunciation-errors-english-language

[carolb]

Thank you Leni.

All I can say is 'thank heavens for Howjsay!'

Carol

[pjlandau]

Hmm. Well now that I've carefully read all of the posts above and the referenced links, I see that there is no clear answer to the Andromache question. In fact it appears that the majority of sources, including Wikipedia, are in agreement with my insufferable, obnoxious, overeducated, deceased friend. (Fear not, he would have heartily agreed with my assessment. He enjoyed being an obnoxious sort.) In his memory, I think I'll stick with AN-dro-mock-ee.

[Availle]

Just read this article and found it extremely interesting still in the pronunciation topic.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/11/pronunciation-errors-english-language

How interesting! It says there that the original spelling/pronunciation of WASP was WAPS... Note that in German, the little beast is called WESPE - and in Austrian German, we still call it WEPSEN...

[scout]

Content retracted.

Daniel

[Mike001]

Just read this article and found it extremely interesting still in the pronunciation topic.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/11/pronunciation-errors-english-language

How interesting! It says there that the original spelling/pronunciation of WASP was WAPS... Note that in German, the little beast is called WESPE - and in Austrian German, we still call it WEPSEN...

That sounds possible (I haven't checked the OED and I'm not a philologist). But certainly adjacent phonemes can swap places. IIRC, burnt/brent (the latter being at one time a dialectical version of the former) might be another pair, although which came first …

In Sussex dialect, which was still spoken before WWI (and probably between the wars) though which has been moribund for many years, a wasp was a waps and the plural was wapses.

Sussex people also knew the fairies as the pharisees, which seems to involve a complex confusion between misheard sounds and incorrectly applied written texts.


And in that short post two peculiarities of modern English pronunciation raise their heads.

1. The loss of R in much of England (at any rate the East and South) and further afield. There effectively is no consonantal R in burnt to get moved now.

2. Shifts occurring to vowels that follow W or R. So here the A that follows the W in wasp sounds like the "short" O of "cot".



On the latter shift -- I was listening to a very good choir singing something recently, and while they sung very well I couldn't help noticing that they mispronounced the word "wonted" as "wanted". There's a potential confusion there. Traditionally it was pronounced as in "wonder", of course. I don't know whether that was caused by a sound shift or whether substituting "o" for "u" in the spelling was a scribal/compositor's dodge to get around too many clashing short up and down strokes -- I've seen both claimed -- but in sound a ʌ it was, as in wonder, honey, etc.

There's a deeper change here. That's this. We now have a language that's perhaps as much a read as a spoken one. people don't necessarily hear a word that's new to them first; they just as likely read it. Consequently, what they tend to do is spell it out. So you get a "spelling pronunciation" rather than a "received" pronunciation. The Germans being great linguistic scholars, there's a German word for that that escapes my memory.

[Leni]

I also found the article interesting because most of those phenomena are not, of course, exclusive of English. Many of them happened and still happen as well in Portuguese and Spanish, I am sure. They happened in Latin even.

And for the record, in Portuguese, wasp is vespa (as in Italian), which means we probably also inverted it at one point.

[annise]

So Vespas were so named because they buzzed around and were pesky

Anne

[pjlandau]

And in Spanish, avispa.