Query Details

Query Subject:	Question: Dyslexia, Asian languages
Author:	Agnes Gruz
Submitter Email:	click here to access email

Linguistic LingField(s):	Phonetics Sociolinguistics

Query:	I was at my College graduation last week, and I found myself fascinated by the variety of students' names, and by my own frustrating inability to predict how a particular name would get anglicized - how, that is, would it turn out that a student preferred to pronounce, say, ''Sharmistha Patnaik,'' or ''Stephanie Vermeychuk,'' or ''Erica Lynn Veinsreideris''? Now I know there must be sociolinguistic factors here, the desire to assimilate pronunciation or the desire not to etc. But I wondered also whether there were phonetic ones that would help predict, for a given name's sound in the language of its origin, how it would sound (in what ways it might or might not sound) in American English. Is there any extant research on this, or do people have ideas that haven't been written down yet? If there's enough interest, I'll cheerfully (and more promptly than the last time) post a summary. Best, Larry Rosenwald, Department of English, Wellesley College
LL Issue:	8.849
Date posted:	10-Jun-1997
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