Bloodthirsty psychopath Ralph Peters may hold a grudge against Germany, but most Americans — Christian Americans — have long since moved on. Over 15% of Americans are fully German in ancestry, and many more are part-German. Even non-Germans have deep respect for German classical music and other aspects of German arts and letters. Germany has 82 million people and the fifth largest economy in the world. It is presently suffering economically first because a fourth of the country was occupied by Communists for 45 years — how sound would our economy be if everything from Denver west had been devastated by Communism for half a century? — second, because it is the focus of immigration from the poorest regions of Eastern Europe and Turkey, and third, because globalization is exporting jobs from Germany just as it is exporting jobs from the U.S.

Had we listened respectfully to Germany two years ago, Americans wouldn't be dying in Iraq today, and 140,000 Iraqis now dead would still be alive.
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Not content to insult Germany alone, Peters also uses the word "Teutonic" sneeringly, thus attacking the Dutch, Belgians, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Anglo-Saxons, etc. — tens of millions more Americans.
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To compare Germany to Liberia or Myanmar is not just stupid. It is insulting to the 60 million and more Americans who are proud of their "Teutonic" ancestors — the people who pretty much invented this country, wrote all its basic documents, and created most of its economic and charitable institutions. Perhaps Mr. Peters should write his slanders in Hebrew or French rather than the Teutonic language of the Angles and Saxons.

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How the Heck Is That Pronounced? The Associated Press yesterday, in a story on the winner of Iran's presidential election, tried to give readers a cue as to how to pronounce his last name, but the folk phonetics they employed left at least four things unclear.
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AP wrote, "Ahmadinejad (pronounced 'Aah-MA-dee-ni-JAHD'')". Clear as mud.
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(1) Does the "Aa" represent short-A, as in "bad"? Or does "Aah" represent short-O (broad-A), as in "Open your mouth and say aah"? (2) Is the H in "Aah" pronounced, or is it just there to show that the sound of the vowel is as in "say aah" or "oohed and aahed"? (3) Is "MA" supposed to be pronounced like the English informal word for "mother", or is the A supposed to be seen as short ("lad"), not broad ("father")? (4) Do the A's in the first syllable ("Aah") and last syllable ("AH") match or differ? and (5) Which of the two syllables shown in block caps bears the primary stress and which the secondary stress?
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Folk phonetics doesn't work. We need some agreed way to show, unambiguously, the sounds of English for situations like this, even if we don't use that system for overall spelling reform.
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Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that I just happen to have a system that will do that handily.
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Called "Fanetik", it is a one-to-one representation of the phonemes of English (that is, the individual speech sounds, independent of context), which is based on standard ways of representing those sounds that we see in Traditional Orthography ("T.O.", the spelling we have suffered with for hundreds of years).
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As you might guess, "Fanetik" is a Fanetik rendering of the word "phonetic". If you guessed right before being told, then you have seen the key thing about Fanetik: that most people who have already learned to read T.O. can guess right almost all the time when they see Fanetik text, even if they have never seen the rules.
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In Fanetik, the name of the new president of Iran would be written "Omodinijod" if the A's in the first two syllables of the Associated Press's's folk-phonetic rendering are broad or "Aamodinijod" if the first A is short and the second broad. (This also assumes that the H's that AP used are supposed to be silent.) That accounts for the sounds. What about stress?
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There is a form of Fanetik with accents to show syllabic stress, for use in pronunciation keys (as here) or to teach reading, especially to students of English as a Second Language. Augméntad Fanétik employs the three familiar accents of French, acute, grave (usually pronounced "grov"), and circumflex.
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Acute shows primary stress; grave, secondary; and circumflex, tertiary stress. Most words have only a primary stress, which Augméntad Fanétik shows by the most familiar accent, acute, which is also used in Spanish for this purpose, if stress falls someplace you wouldn't expect it to according to the ordinary rules of Spanish: Pérez, sábado.
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In medium-long English words, there is also often a secondary stress (for instance, ìnconsístency, mùltitúdinous). In very long words, there is even tertiary stress (àntidiscrîminátion) — tho it is sometimes difficult to distinguish which of two or more lesser-stressed syllables is more stressed than the others, in which case you would use the acute accent for the primary stress, which is easy to agree on, and only the grave accent for all other stressed syllables (àntidiscrìminátion).
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Augméntad Fanétik would thus (if the H's in AP's rendering are silent) render the name of the new president of Iran as either "Omódinijòd" or "Aamódinijòd" if the second syllable takes the heavier stress, or "Omòdinijód" or Aamòdinijód" if the last syllable takes the heavier stress.
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If the H is pronounced, it would be written once if it is just a mild H, as in ordinary English; twice (HH) if it is like the CH in German "ich"; or KH if it is a strong, guttural, throat-clearing H.
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Alas, not everyone on television has heeded AP's guidance, and I have heard Ókhmodìnajod (where A represents schwa, the short, unstressed neutral vowel in "about"), Ómadìnajod, Òmadéenajod, and other pronunciations. I think any of those Augméntad Fanétik renderings, however, is clearer than "Aah-MA-dee-ni-JAHD", and thus that it would be really convenient for everybody if we had a single agreed way of showing the sounds of English, including syllabic stress, to guide readers in pronunciation keys.
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Augméntad Fanétik would serve that function handily, with the only issue left being how to represent the accents in ordinary text, as in emails or typewritten materials.
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Computer keyboards show the grave accent (to the extreme left of the top row, below the Function keys) and the circumflex accent (over the 6, also on the top row). The apostrophe stands in for the acute accent.
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Most ordinary typists on computers, however, do not know how to form overstrike characters in email programs, as to put the accent directly over the relevant vowel. They can simply put the accent immediately after the relevant syllable: Omod'inijod` or Omod`inijod'.
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Many typewriters, however, do not have either grave or circumflex accents. Typists could nonetheless easily show primary and secondary stress — they'd probably have to forget about showing tertiary stress — by using an apostrophe for primary and a quotation mark (": like two apostrophes, side-by-side) for secondary stress, at the end of the syllable: Omod'inijod" / Omod"inijod'. In handwriting, of course, we can easily put the accent right over the vowel.
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Augméntad Fanétik can, as these examples show, clearly and easily indicate the pronunciation of even the most un-English of words or names, in the speech sounds closest to the original language's sounds that speakers of English can replicate.
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Folk phonetics, however, can't.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,742.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:51 AM