‘Paree’ or ‘Paris’? It’s all well and good to round out your vowels, but conspicuous affectation when pronouncing foreign words is unforgivable.
I’ve just been in Kenya for a day. Flew there Monday, visited Tuesday, came home Wednesday. Even with my truncated attention span, I think this is pretty much my record. I was doing a story with a ferocious deadline. And here’s the thing: although I spent more time travelling than being and doing, I have a voluminous collection of memories, insights, thoughts and experiences. Far more than a day’s worth, like Mary Poppins’s carpet bag, the trip doesn’t seem to be able to fit into the time that was allotted to it. The intensity of the concentration needed to get everything seen and heard and committed to memory has made it high-definition.
I’ve always liked doing speed-tourism. Almost all travel-writing and foreign-correspondenting is about slow immersion, wallowing in your subject. It doesn’t suit me. My senses grow soggy; I lose concentration, and the whole experience becomes panoramic, but with a softer focus. Arnold Bennett, the critic, was arguing about writing with someone who claimed superior knowledge because of 20 years’ experience. No, replied Bennett, you have one year’s experience repeated 19 times. Time on its own doesn’t necessarily give you a concomitant increase in insight.
Anyway, that’s not what I was going to talk about. I went to Kenya, the first syllable sounding like the thing that opens locks. My children, and everyone else, say Kenya, with the first syllable sounding like the Spanish word for ‘what’, which is probably technically politely correct. My way sounds colonial, but it’s out of my mouth before I remember to flatten it; I don’t say ‘Injah’ or ‘Himaleeyas’ with the last two syllables truncated into an English-swallowed abbreviation.
As a general rule of epiglottis, I think people have a perfect right to choose how they’re known. If Bombay wants to be Mumbai, well and good. If Calcutta feels that the natty chic K of Kolkata suits its self-confidence, then it would be rude to cavil. I don’t mind that they still sell Peking duck in Beijing or that Mumbai has Bombay University. I know that the capital of Greenland is Nuuk, not Godthab, and I wouldn’t dream of calling Dunedin Edinburgh. I will make the best mouth I can out of the names people want to call themselves, though for liberal reasons I’m going to stick with Burma rather than Myanmar.
Winston Churchill made a feature of pronouncing foreign names with a pedantically English accent. Lyons was ‘Lions’, and Marseilles sounded like his mother was in a dinghy. I think this was done primarily to provoke the irascibly thin-skinned de Gaulle and appeal to Americans, many of whom think that foreign languages are the noise the devil makes. What I mind, and this may be ungracious and verbalist of me, is the other extreme, where names come with a boil-in-the-bag pronunciation. Or rather, I mind it inordinately, inappropriately, when people decide to pronounce somewhere with a flavour of the accent of the inhabitants, a lilting moue of polyglot garnish: an Italian spin to San Gimignano, a curt German emphasis to Bremerhaven, a Spanish lisp to Cadiz.
I don’t just mind – it drives me to paroxysms of murderous fury, which is made worse by the knowledge that it’s such a piddling small thing. It shouldn’t really bother me at all. It’s so obviously an arrant little affectation, like keeping first-class luggage tags on your briefcase, or eating a banana with a knife and fork. But despite myself, I wish nothing but foul and pestilentially slow death on the loved ones of the offenders, and then I want them in turn to be falsely accused of hideous crimes of a disgusting nature involving farm animals, and then be forced to live a life of mock-shame before going sadly mad in great squalor and poverty.
I don’t want to be irrational about this. What I mind is the silly snobbery of those who add the inverted commas and italics of a warmer tongue to their conversation to imply some extra association or intellectual ownership with the place. If I say Italian words with an Italian accent they will correctly infer that I am no stranger to southern climes. That I own a beret and can walk through peasant markets squeezing produce with the insouciance of a native. That I have canvas slip-ons with the heels trodden down and can order from a simple bourgeois menu without having to mime. This small inflection of mouthy one-upmanship is meant to tell the rest of us of a whole world of genteel, cosmopolitan, comfortably travelled sophistication, when in fact it does just the opposite. It reveals a cultural and intellectual insecurity and a brittle narrowing of world views. It is only certain countries that get the award of a music-hall accent. No one says Karachi with the exaggerated Punjabi accent, or Ulaanbaatar in the manner of the Mongol. You don’t catch the verbal tourist talking with a Yoruba accent. In fact, if they did, they’d be open to accusations of racist mimicry.
And that’s the point. There is, in the pronunciation game, an implied league table of cultures, some of whom are worth imitating, and some who frankly aren’t. So the old European countries get the nod of acceptance, and the developing world gets the mispronunciation of a purposeful snub. The kernel of what bothers me about this is that I suspect it’s a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon affliction. Although I don’t speak any other language well enough to know, I suspect that the French don’t talk of Londres with a cockney twang, and Italians aren’t referring to Birmingham by talking down their noses.
This geopolitical snobbery is just ours alone, and I’m collectively embarrassed. I expect Australians might wonder if they’ve made it into the English first division of Pommy mispronunciation. Well, funnily enough, I’ve recently noticed that both ‘Sydney’ and ‘Melbourne’ are being pronounced with a touch of open Aussie argot, but it’s done with a sort of knowing ironic comedy, in the way people sometimes refer to ‘Noo Yawk’ and ‘El Ay’. Americans, of course, are immune to all this because they pronounce everything wrong with gusto and utter certainty, and they should never ever be corrected. Imagining that Wooster sauce is actually pronounced ‘Worcestershire’ because that’s what’s written on the label is their prerogative. Far better and more honest to pronounce things in a way that suits your tongue than to pretend you have someone else’s.
I once saw a chap sing the famous Fred Astaire song, ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’. He’d never heard anyone else sing it, so he read the words from the sheet music, and falteringly started, ‘You say tomato, I say tomato. You say potato, I say potato. Tomato, tomato. Potato, potato’ – I’m sorry, but what are you all laughing at? I don’t think this is funny at all.