THAT's A TORINO!!!!!........
Remeber how exciting the Roma games were?
THAT's A TORINO!!!!!........
NPR does that. Any reports from South America seen pretty normal, with some journalist reporting from the slum of a major city, but, when they refer to the government official who is concerned about slums, they say his name with the THICKEST POSSIBLE spanish accent. Gimme a break.
Every time I hear "Torino" I think, "Latrino", the nickname for the Ford Torino.
Article Last Updated: 2/09/2006 07:37 AM
'Torino' vs. 'Turin': Anglicized name of Olympic city wins argument here
By Ellen Fagg
The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake Tribune
Either, Eyether. Neither, nyther. Potato, potaeto. Tomato, tomaeto.
Maybe it's time to add the "Torino" vs. "Turin" Olympic face-off to "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," the Gershwin brothers' classic song of pronunciation differences.
Torino, of course, is how Italian natives refer to the city that will open its sports venues to the world this weekend, says Adriano Comollo, the founder of Salt Lake's Italian Center for the West, a nonprofit group that helped create bocce ball courts in Pioneer Park, as well as promoting all things Italiano.
But there's no confusion for natives, like Comollo, who understand that it's linguistically correct for Americans to refer to Turin, which is the Anglicized name of his hometown, just as the city of Roma is known outside of Italy as Rome.
Turin is how The Associated Press (AP) and newspapers that follow the news cooperative's stylebook - including The Salt Lake Tribune - will refer to the Olympic city, according to an explanation by the AP's sports editor, Terry Taylor.
"We use Turin in accordance with our long-standing style to use English names on English-language wires," Taylor explained last month in a wire service story. "It's the Shroud of Turin, for instance, not the Shroud of Torino. And when the World Cup comes to Germany this summer, we will write that games will be played in Munich, not Muenchen.
"Of course, in the interest of accuracy, we will not Anglicize the name in full references to the Olympic organizing committee, which uses Torino, and we will not change Torino to Turin in quotations."
So, the question of the pronunciation of the Northern Italy city would seem mostly settled - for Americans, anyway - except for the simple beauty of the original Italian pronunciation, which charmed Dick Ebersol, the head honcho of NBC Sports.
''When I went there for the first time two weeks after they got the Games in the summer of '99, I was just swept away with how that sounded, 'Torino,' '' Ebersole told television critics last month while promoting the network's upcoming coverage. "It just rolls off your mouth. It talks about a wonderful part of the world. It has a romanticism to it. And I just thought that that was a wonderful way to name these Games."
So local TV stations, like KSL and KUTV, have elected to go with the authentic Italian pronunciation, as has the U.S. Olympic Committee, while local NPR station KUER is sticking with AP style.
While it might seem we're being ''ugly Americans'' when we translate a city's proper name into English, that's simply the way languages work, says Marianna Di Paolo, a University of Utah professor of linguistics. Di Paolo grew up in Colorado, but her first language was the southern Italian dialect of Abruzzesse. "We Anglicize everything," Di Paolo says. "That's what happens when languages borrow. It's not necessarily arrogant, and it's not denigrating Italians to do it. It's an attempt to have the word work well in our language. Every language does it."
One linguistic puzzle might be how the name of the ancient city, founded by the Roman Emperor Augustus about 2,000 years ago to protect the state's northern borders, was translated into English with the "uhr" sound of Turin from the "o" sound of Torino. One guess, according to Steven Sternfeld, a U. linguistics professor: "Many of the names we have for Italian cities we adopted not from the Italians but from the French."
And just as every language is likely to transform its own borrowed words, most Italians will understand when Americans refer to the northwestern city of Turin, says Utah transplant Emanuele Bobbio, executive secretary of the Italian Consulate in Salt Lake City. "That pronunciation is not correct but the Italian people, who live in the middle of Europe, are very open and very helpful. We talk a lot by body language because for many, many years, we have contacts with many, many cultures and many, many languages."
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Then again, the Japanese do a pretty good job of butchering "Engrish" all the time.
I do like how Rudi Bakhtiar pronounces Middle Eastern words so nicely... :)
I vote to deport anyone who, while residing in America, refers to "Nueva York."
So, can we agree now that it will be the Peking Olympics?
Go to South America and buy a map of the US. It'll be labeled "Estados Unidos de Norteamerica." There will be Nueva York, Nueva Jersey, Filadelfia, etc.
So, since translation of placenames is in vogue, why, on US-produced maps, isn't Argentina listed as "Silverland," or its capital as "Good Airs," or Rio de Janeiro, Brazil as "River of January," or Montevideo, Uruguay as "Mountain View," or Santiago, Chile as "St. James," or La Paz, Bolivia as "Peace," etc.
I totally agree with the earlier posts in which Latin proper and place-names are heavily accented by NPR, and not spoken in an anglicized way. But it only applies to Latin America it seems.
No NPR reporter says "Deutschland" instead of Germany. None says Sverje for Sweden, or Norge for Norway.
Listen to NPR reports by Maria Hinajosa or Mandalit del Barco. Their reports are done in standard English until they come to a proper or place name. Then, their accents become so thick that they knock you over. Yet when a reporter named Sean O'Flaherty, for example, reports he doesn't pronounce his name with a lilting Lucky Charms-type brogue (not that NPR would ever hire such a person--because to be hired at NPR, it seems you must be a woman, a non-Christian, or a non-white).
So, what is the common thread: it is NPR's condescension toward the Latins. Evidently the NPR reporters must secretly feel that our Latin brothers are in some way inferior and would suffer if we were to anglicize their proper and place names.
In the past several years, I've noticed media-types dropping the use of Anglicized names for a variety of places (presumably b/c they wanted to sound smarter than the rest of us).
At some point, Qatar (Kah-tar) became "cutter" or "gutter." Bombay became Mumbai. And, now Turin is Torino. WTH?
The selectiveness with which the media approaches thes pronunciations is very foolish, IMHO. I mean, I don't see anyone rushing to say Deutschland or Espana or Sverige. So why one and not the other? What gives?
How about "tarmac". Every U. S. news clown who covers a story near or at an airport has to to insert the European term "tarmac" into their report to sound like a world traveler, when what they are referring to at a U. S. facility, or for U. S. news consumers should be called an apron, ramp, taxiway, or runway. We don't install "tarmac" in the U. S.
bumpin
Just out of curiosity, has anyone EVER heard anyone pronounce potato "po-tah-to"?
And there lies the answer. The media wants to minimize Google hits on "Shroud of Turin."
I've noticed some people will switch into a Spanish accent to say "NEE-hah-RAGHHHH-waw", instead of just saying "Nicka ra gwa". Why do they do that? Are they putting on airs?
I don't expect a French speaker to switch into an American accent to say "United States" instead of "Etats Unis".
Close. My understanding is Turin is similar to the name in Piedmontese, which is heavily influenced by French.