Friday, April 19, 2013
Foreignish backwards
Normally our Satanic media decide on a foreignish pronunciation for foreign names, then insist that everyone must follow their lead. In a few cases the foreignish version is closer to the original than the English version, but most of the time it's worse than either the normal English or the real foreign.
With the Chechen bomber brothers, the Satanic media have gone the other way. They insist that someone's bad English version is the only way to say the name. They call the second brother "Joe Car", and then throw in as a disdainful sidenote that "His friends call him Jahár for some reason." Well, his friends are right. Jahár is simply the proper way of saying Джохар. "Joe Car" is a piss-poor anglicization typical of BBC.
= = = = =
Couple days later: Some of the American media have figured out the right pronunciation, but BBC reliably says "Joe Car". All's right with the world.
Later thought. This confusion could have been obviated by a more sensible transliteration. I don't know if the Tsarnaev family made their own transliteration, or the immigration officials did it... but in either case, there's no reason to mechanically replace Дж with Dzh, and x with kh. Russians habitually use Дж to represent the English J sound, and use Х to represent the English H. For instance, if Pravda mentioned an American named Joe Hart, he'd be Джо Харт. Applying the same mapping inversely, it would have been easier on everyone if someone had respelled the boy's name as Johar instead of transliterating as Dzhokhar.
¶ 12:16 PM 
