There is a tragic lack of aural awareness that has grown since literacy became widespread.
When you have no letters you are reliant on sounds and speaking. This ability to listen has long since been lost among many English, a literate language for many centuries. This is not the case with Welsh, which has been a literate language less long. In Welsh the linguistic changes are recorded. I believe this is the case with the other Celtic languages, where mutations are listed according to position in a sentence and elision. When sounds run together it is called collision. Examples of this may be found in English in the word ‘Potatoes’, for example, where the ‘P’ frequently becomes replaced by ‘b’, as in the phrase ‘a plate full of botatoes’. The English are very lazy in their pronunciation.
As soon as phonetic letters, rather than pictograms, are introduced conventions become rules for the pronunciation of combinations.
‘Sh’ makes a hissing sound ; ‘ch’ becomes a biting or chopping sound.
But these are English conventions only. Other languages have different rules.
So it comes as no surprise but a disappointment, following the rather sorry effort by one of the winter olympic announcers. Watching the nations enter the parade he spoke repeatedly about ‘Chetchia’ despite the sign reading ‘Cechia’. One wonders what he would have made of ‘Czechia’.
He spoke of ‘checks’ (czechs) but of ‘chetchia’, as if he was speaking of Chechnya. .
I thought it was sad he was unable to develop his primitive understanding of language, and that no editor or producer, or other colleague, thought to correct him.
Even in Scotland ‘-ch’ is pronounced as ‘-ckh’ loch, for example. Not to mention the Germanic languages.
What is saddest of all is that the BBC no longer seems to be interested in the quality of instruction given to their announcers. This was a single example but there are many others that could be cited. I sympathise with those struggling with foreign names of competitors but surely Nation names should be rehearsed. Particularly if they appear in a foreign language form, in this case Italian.
