RO-BAIR-TOE RETURN-ED from SHEE-LAY

Somehow this blog post came across my radar screen. From Dear TV News, Stop It by Roberta X.

Really. Stop it. You don't call Germany "Deutschland," do you? Then stop trying to pronounce the names of places and people in the Americas as you and Associated Press fondly imagine they are pronounced in the original Spanish. Especially stop it when it comes to Brazil.* The thought behind the deed is friendly and well-meant but it's frequently cringeworthy.

If you didn't grow up hearing and saying those phonemes, you're not going to get them right, not without years of study and immersion and even then? You'll sound like a very fluent Anglo. You're making elderly abuelitas frown at the TV screen, wondering if you really meant to say that word that way.

Just to complicate matters, Spanish is at least as rich as English in national and regional accents; Cubans and Argentines can chat as readily as Americans and Australians -- and with about as much difference in vocabulary and sound.

It is a small human frailty, wanting to signal our supposed sophistication or our specialness with our pronunciation.

SNL had a skit on this very topic a number of years ago.

I think I first encountered the phenomenon, or first noticed it, in junior year of college. As context, I lived in Venezuela when I was a small child and various members of my family speak Spanish with fluency.

I am in some high level International Economics class which has a mix of advanced undergrads as well as grad students. Among the latter was a rather attractive blond, specializing in South American development. She had just returned from a semester abroad in Chile.

Or should I say, as did she, SHEE-LAY. It was a distinct exaggeration of the customary Spanish pronunciation, made more noticeable still by the surprising frequency with which SHEE-LAY came up in conversation. She was bright, attractive but that affectation was like a speck of dust in one's eye. Irritating and hard to ignore.

There is a similar phenomenon to do with slang and turns of phrase common in one country but not others. Years later I had a Manager level consultant return from a four month project in Britain and her language had morphed with "Crikey" this and "Crikey" that and other similar distinctly English usages.

Nowadays, I mostly just notice it on NPR. Sometimes it is the exaggerated pronunciation of place names, but there are three or four journalists who make a great deal of pronouncing their own foreign name in deeply accented fashion - RO-BAIR-TOE, not Robert or Roberto.

It is an annoying affectation but speaks to the common human desire for attention, admiration, respect.