Admittedly I'm starting to use a new username, caminus prime (my name being Cameron and at least close to caminus). But yeah best way to describe how I would pronounce it is cammy-ness or cah-mine-us. This debate has definitely sparked my interest.
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Admittedly I'm starting to use a new username, caminus prime (my name being Cameron and at least close to caminus). But yeah best way to describe how I would pronounce it is cammy-ness or cah-mine-us. This debate has definitely sparked my interest.
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As bad as cammyness sounds, it would be more (Latin) accurate than "cah-mine-us." But if you want to say it accurately then it's "KAH-mee-noos."
Or perhaps go with Cameronus Prime or Caimshrònus Prime; Caimshròn being the original Scots Gaelic form of Cameron. I think that Caimshròn might be pronounced as "calm shron" or "cow-shron"... and the "shron" may be "sron" or "sroyn," or I could be completely wrong. I'm really bad with Gaelic phonology because often the reading is so different from the spelling. Irish names are notoriously difficult to read if you've never encountered them before.
e.g.
* Sean = we all know it's "shorn," but for a lot of people who come from non-Anglo/Celtic countries they may pronounce it as "seen" (rhyming with bean, dean, lean, mean, wean etc.)
* Sinead = "shin-aid"; which non-Celts really only know because of Sinead O'Connor.
The rest of these names have their readings spoiler tagged, so click and drag to reveal!
* Áine = Awn-yeh
* Aisling = Ash-ling
* Aoife = Ee-fah
* Béibhinn = Bevin
* Brid = Brij
* Caoimhe = Kwee-vah
* Cathal = Cah-hull; Irish form of "Charles."
* Clodagh = Kloh-dah
* Dearbhail = Dervil
* Eibhilin = Aye-leen
* Grainne = Grawn-yah
* Laoise = Leesha
* Méadhbh =Mayv
* Niamh = Neev
* Oisin = Oosh-een
* Pádraig = Paw-rick
* Saoirse = See-or-shah
* Siobhan = Sher-vorn
* Tagh = Teeg
And I do have or have had students with some of these names! (it's funny when we try to render them in Kanji)
Although another cool thing about keeping Cameron in there is that it's also a reference to a planet from G1 (where Optimus Prime's original body was ultimately found on Cameron's moon of VsQs in the Matrix Quest). So if you could hybridise the name Cameron and Caminus, then you'd actually be referencing two planets from Transformers lore!Camironus Prime?
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Names are a funny thing and people can get quite personally offended by mispronunciation.
The photographer of my wedding MANY moons ago was a guy from Queensland. and upon meeting him I said "Hi Grant".
As a Kiwi we normally say the name as Gr-aunt and thus that is how I pronounced it.
He gave me the most horrible frown and said: "My name is Gr-ANT!".
It was quite an unnatural pronunciation for me but I tried my best to remember when I met him to force the Aussie accent out. It remains with me as probably the first time I encountered someone who was VERY particular about their name pronunciation.
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Gok, I want you to know that I respect you as a member of this community and for your contributions, both officially and otherwise, to the fandom. However, lately your posts regarding language and linguistics have come across as arrogant, pedantic, and ill-informed, and it's affecting the dialogue on the boards, not to mention making me angry. So I'm not going to hold back here, okay?Originally Posted by GoktimusPrime
From here:
Nobody's explicitly stated that Optimus, Prime, Ultra, Magnus, Maximus etc. are from Latin, or that other names are from other language sources. But we know it because it's common knowledge and pronunciation rules are similarly applied.
This would be true if Caminus had been absorbed into English in that form or a similar form. English pronounces words like Optimus, Prime, Ultra, Magnus and Maximus differently from Latin, but this is different because these words exist in English in these forms or similar forms. Caminus doesn't. The nearest English equivalent of caminus is "chimney" which we get from Old French cheminee, and even this pronunciation has mutated because the pronunciation of cheminee is something like "shommee-neh". In fact, RiD Optimus Prime's voice actor Neil Kaplan has a voice-character based on the original Latin pronunciation of Optimus which he calls "Optimoose."
You can't simply chalk down isolated mispronunciations as language evolution (by this logic George Dubya's mispronunciation of "nuclear" as "new-kewlar" and reference to the Greek people as "Grecians" would be correct), that's a wholly different thing. Also, as explained 2 posts ago, language evolution in languages was effectively halted after the advent of the printing press and languages like English have had relatively very little change in the past 600 years.
P.S.: if authors don't want people to notice hold standards of pronunciation for names, then just invent entirely fictitious ones. If you're going to draw references from the real world then of course people will naturally refer to them. It's like how Spider-Man 2 claimed that you can make nuclear fission from a single atom of tritium (H3O)... you literally cannot! On the other hand you can imbue fictitious metals like adamantium, vibranium or even transformium with magical properties because they're not real - there's no real world reference for anyone to disclaim it.
I'm going to start with the highlighted part, because this is some of the most flagrant bull**** you've ever spouted. Language evolution flagrantly did not halt with the invention of the printing press 600 years ago. Don't believe me? I only need provide one example: Shakespeare. One only need look at how difficult it is for modern audiences and students of Shakespeare to understand his works clearly to see that language has changed. Additionally, Shakespeare's works are the recorded first use of many words and phrases that are now common. They also contain words and phrases that have now disappeared from use. We no longer say "thou" when we mean "you", for instance, and this is only the most basic example. Additionally, do you think Shakespeare - or a person inventing a printing press 600 years ago - would have had any comprehension of words like "internet", "feminist", or "headphones" at all, let alone in their modern usage? Language changes, and it changes all the time. The chimney wasn't even invented until the middle ages, so the idea that a Latin word like "Caminus" could mean chimney as we understand it today is ridiculous.
Now, my problem is that you're taking a position which, among linguists, is known as prescriptivist. This basically means that you're treating language as a set of rules - grammar, punctuation, pronunciation - which have to be followed at all costs, lest we fail to comprehend one another and society descends into chaos. Unfortunately, a more thorough study of language reveals this is not the case, because of the above mentioned evolution. If one does not follow a particularly grammatical rule - such as for instance writing "I" or "you" instead of "one" - then the whole sentence doesn't necessarily fall apart. You'd still be able to follow me, even if I didn't use the exact correct term. Unfortunately, prescriptivism suggests otherwise, and that's how we end up with vestigial parts of language that are somehow still hanging on, such as "whom", a word which never does anything to actually improve the clarity of a sentence or phrase, and which only serves to bump up the ego of pedants when they notice it's being used (or not) incorrectly. Prescriptivists behave as if making an error regarding some grammatical rule will result in the failure of society, whilst believing that so long as they are "correct" at all times, they will somehow be rewarded by some all-powerful god who handed down language to man at the invention of the printing press 600 years ago. This simply isn't the case.
The same is true of pronunciation as it is of grammar. Pronouncing a word wrong doesn't necessarily mean it won't be understood. It might mean people will laugh at you, but it doesn't mean you're suddenly talking nonsense. A good example is the word "maroon", referring to the colour worn by Queensland's State of Origin* team. In the UK - where I'm from, and where we have a country called England where we speak English, by the way, not that that's my only qualification here - that word is pronounced with a long double-u sound, such as in "moon", "balloon", or "platoon". In Australia, it's pronounced with a different long-oh sound, as in "loan", "moan", or "float". Neither pronunciation is any more correct than the other (no matter how I may tease my Australian housemates for their bizarre colonial way of speaking). Yes, you could look back and discover that the ancient Vikings wore a deep shade of purple when pillaging Britain, and their leader was a man called "Mahroney" and his name was pronounced one way or the other and anyway this was all before the great vowel shift and I'm making this up, but that would have very little bearing on the fact that one state in one part of the world laughs at people who say "marune" and in the opposite hemisphere they shake their heads at "marone". The same is true of Caminus. Just because it's drawn from a Latin word doesn't mean that we necessarily pronounce it that way today, or that fictional robots on a fictional planet wouldn't pronounce it differently. It's drawn from that word for literary reasons that have little to do with actual linguistics - or pronunciation - in this case, because it means "engine" in Latin, and a few of our other characters and concepts have Latin names, and it's all about machines, so let's go with that. No-one is a native Latin speaker, so talking about the "correct" pronunciation of the word is a fallacy; at the time the word was invented, one accent may have pronounced it exactly like they do on the Machinima show.
The names of Transformers concepts and characters needn't be drawn from any linguistic or literary source. Yes, Optimus Prime and Ultra Magnus have meanings in Latin. Hardhead and Silverstreak are common phrases repurposed as names. But names like "Iacon", "Furos", or "Emirate Xaaron"? They're made up, cut from whole cloth, invented. "Furos" was chosen because it sounds a bit like "Duros", the characters original name, and also a bit like furious. It was never intended to mean this or that in any language whatsoever, so getting all in a tiz about it meaning something or other or not at all is not just pedantic, it's a waste of time.
Gok, I recognise that you are interested in this are and I recognise that you've admitted you're a pedant, but please, educate yourself a bit further about language and linguistics before you go any further. It isn't necessarily about the number of languages you speak, it's about your understanding of language and how it works. You obviously have insight and analysis, but you need to understand that language isn't a prescribed set of rules sent from on high, but rather a flawed and beautiful human invention that changes according to the whims and needs of human beings. Otherwise, you're just going to continue coming across as a pedant, and continue getting on people's nerves.
*formally speaking, this event should be called "The States of the Origins", but nobody calls it that. You see my point?
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Much of what you're saying is in response to stuff that I did not explicitly say. Perhaps I did not articulate myself clearly enough, so I shall attempt to clarify my stance.
I didn't say that language evolution absolutely halted, I said that it "effectively halted," perhaps hampered or slowed down might've been gooder (sic) words. And the measure that I use for this is intelligibility. Although there are certainly many differences between Early Modern English and current Modern English, Early Modern English is still intelligible to current Modern English speakers. We do still teach Shakespeare in junior high school in NSW, typically from Year 9 onwards. While it's true that there are many archaic words and expressions, they are still intelligible. I've taught Shakespeare before to Year 9 English students in a socioeconomically disadvantaged public school, and students were still able to comprehend the text. No, it's not as immediately intelligible as other forms of current Modern English, like say American English, British English etc., so yeah, it can be a bit trickier to understand, but it is - overall - reasonably intelligible. Old and Middle English on the other hand are no longer intelligible with current Modern English -- they are effectively foreign languages. As I said, the nearest living relative to Old English is current day Frisian, and if you listen to someone speaking Frisian it's completely unintelligible to Modern English speakers. You might be able to detect some familiar cognates, such as fog, blue, mist, cheese etc., but otherwise the two languages are mutually unintelligible.
You may not agree with this measure that I'm using, but I'm just explaining that this is what I've based my assertion on. The fact that Australian students can read and study Shakespearean texts without having to learn Early Modern English as you would learn languages like German, Japanese, French, Latin etc. demonstrates that they are mutually intelligible. Imagine reading Romeo & Juliet translated in Middle English, Italian, Korean, Spanish, Chinese etc. -- a student who doesn't speak any of those languages would find it impossible to analyse and study the play if it were written in any of those languages. While Shakespearean English may initially appear daunting, it is still inherently intelligible. As someone who's taught both Shakespeare and foreign languages, I can tell you that teaching Shakespeare is nothing like teaching in another language, even teaching integrated content in an immersive language class. e.g. teaching physics in Japanese to my Year 8 class (see more detailed notes on the Teaching Thread).
As I said, chimney arrived to English from Latin via French. It wasn't directly transmitted from Latin to English. It evolved from Kaminos (Greek) to caminus (Latin) to cheminee (Old French) to chimenai (Middle English) to chimney (Modern English).
References:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chimney
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=chimney
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/chimney
I suspect that if you were to speak to a non-English speaking Latin speaker and pronounced caminus as "cammyness," they would probably not understand what you mean. You may need to repeat yourself and maybe make gestures or point at a forge or an image of a forge, but I suspect that it would impair your ability to be understood, at least to be easily and efficiently understood.
e.g. sometimes I deliberately mispronounce "apologies" as "apple-logies" (as in the Logie awards), and it throws people off because they initially don't know what I'm saying. Or I say "Avengers" as in rhyming with "scavenger," e.g. "I can't wait for the next "Avvenger" movie," and again, people usually don't know what I'm saying, until I repeat these words again and again and again and usually (but not always) they work out what I meant.
So I think by pronouncing "caminus" as "cammyness," you're likely to decrease the ease by which others can understand what you mean. So this is linked to what is known as communicative competence. Okay, you may be able to maintain communication with poor pronunciation and grammar, but would it be effective communication? What is the level of competency? How would you grade or compare a person who speaks with correct pronunciation and grammar vs someone who doesn't? Would you rate them as being of equal competency or proficiency? So it's not to say that a person with incorrect pronunciation, grammar etc. is necessarily completely incompetent (i.e. unintelligible), but possibly less competent that someone who can speak gooderer (sic).
I have a book called "Japanese Slanguage" which has heavily Anglocised forms of Japanese expressions, which I sometimes use on native speakers for laughs to see if they can understand what I'm saying. e.g. for どういたしまして (doh-ee-tah-shee-mah-shteh), it says "Don't touch my moustache." I went around saying to all these native speakers, "Don't touch my moustache!" and none of them initially understood what I was trying to say. A few of them worked it out and had a laugh. As you said, it may not come across as nonsense, but people will laugh. And if you're trying to be a competent communicator and maintain sustained communication or conversation with another speaker, then I think that having reasonably correct pronunciation and grammar would help with that.
Yes, I've already stated this. See my previous comments about language evolution. You may disagree, but I don't think that isolated incidents of mispronunciation are sufficient to classify it as an actual evolution of the word. Unless you consider my "apple-logies" pronunciation of "apologies" to be equally correct as the standard pronunciation. Then I apple-low-guise.
Latin has certainly evolved too. As I said my previous post, some of the main variants are Classical, Vulgar and Ecclesiastic Latin, and even then there are many variants within some of these variants, especially within Vulgar Latin. Even Classical Latin varies depending on which period you're looking at. Classical Latin was spoken among the upper classes in Rome, but your average Roman commoner would've spoken Vulgar Latin, and as such modern day Romance languages are more commonly descendant from Vulgar Latin than Classical Latin, which would partially account for why words like "cheminee" looks and sounds so different from Classical Latin "caminus." I don't know what the Vulgar Latin form of caminus is, I don't know if Vulgar Latin was as well documented as Classical Latin. Ecclesiastic Latin is what is used by many Christians such as the population of the Vatican. When I lived in Japan I saw many church services conducted bilingually in Japanese and Ecclesiastic Latin (because many Christian immigrants in Japan come from different language backgrounds and Latin acts as their lingua franca).
Yep, I've already stated this in a previous post (see my comparison with fictitious elements/metals like adamantium, vibranium etc.). If people are going to invent completely fictitious stuff for which there is no real life reference, then fine, you can do whatever you want with it because there's nothing to compare. But if you're going to draw something from reality, then people will compare it with real life because there are reference points. Like say the geographic inaccuracies in Revenge of the Fallen - you could argue that in the cinematic Transformers universe that certain things are located differently or perhaps certain countries just don't exist, or borders are different... but when you set events in real places like Washington, Jordan, Egypt etc., then there are real points of references that people will relate to. Having Doctor Octopus generate nuclear fission from a single atom of tritium -- you could argue that in that movie's universe perhaps tritium is somehow radioactive. But not in the real world. And if you're going to explicitly refer to a real compound like tritium, then it's natural for people to make references.
For example, in the languages of Middle Earth, most names containing /i/ pronounce it as "ee" - Isildur (ee-seel-doohr), Minas Tirith (meenas tee reeth), Mithrandir (meeth run deer), Sindarin (seen-dah-reen), Bilbo Baggins (beel-boh bag-geenz), Glorfindel (glor-feen-dell) etc., yet Isengard is pronounced "eye-zuhn-gahd" and not "ee-zuhn-gahd." Apparently there are recordings of Tolkien himself pronouncing it as "eye-zuhn-gahd," although he has stated that Isengard does not come from the same languages which use the short "i" sound. I don't know if the fictitious etymology of Isengard was ever explained by Tolkien beyond it being "what Men call it." But if Tolkien has been recorded as pronouncing it as "eye-zuhn-gahd" then that's the official pronunciation. Some fans have theorised that it may be inspired by the German word for iron, "Eisen."
But I totally agree, fictitiously invented words like Iacon, Xaaron etc. have no other "correct" pronunciation beyond what is presented in these media (and in the case of printed text it may be open to interpretation), unless the author has explicitly stated otherwise (such as in fictitiously constructed languages).
Much of what you're saying is mostly stuff that I would generally agree with. There's certainly nothing you're saying that I would outright disagree with.My apple-low-gheez if I had not articulated them clearly enough before.
P.S.: I would like to propose an experiment over this weekend: would you care to spend some time speaking to your friends where almost every word is deliberately mispronounced? Don't give them any warning or tell them what you're doing, just randomly drop it out of the blue and see what happens. I sometimes do this in Japanese where I speak Japanese with a deliberately thick Bogan Aussie 'Strine accent; I used to do this with my daughter sometimes and it drove her mental! Just yesterday I was doing this with a native Japanese student and he couldn't stop laughing. I might try this on the weekend with some native speaking Japanese adults and see what reactions I get.
P.P.S. The French police man from 'Allo 'Allo! "Good moaning, I was p......g by your door."
Last edited by GoktimusPrime; 12th August 2016 at 06:03 PM.
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Interesting there, as my first assumption seeing the name "Grant" would be "Gr-aunt " as well. A bit immature of him to frown and be all grumpy at what is possibly a pretty common situation.
I always pronounce dance as "Darnce" as opposed to "dants" and often got teased (friendliy like) by my friends for saying "yoh-gurt" instead of "yoe-gurt."
But this name talk reminds me of an episode of the Next Generation where the old doctor lady calls Data "Darta" and Data asks her why she calls him Darta when his name is Dayta. At that moment, I was all like
"that makes sense, so if an American is call Grant, he's probably not a Grarnt"
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It can depend on which part of Australia you're from. On the East Coast words like grant, dance and answer would be pronounced as "gran't," "dan-ss" and "ann-sir" respectively, whereas in other parts of Australia like SA they would be respectively pronounced as "grahn't," "dahn-ss" and "ahn-sir." But yeah, in Queensland 'Grant' rhymes with 'ant,' not 'aunt.'
Regional variations occur in all languages everywhere. In the UK and the US we can hear a wide variety of variations in different parts of those countries, and the same thing happens elsewhere. As you know there are also regional variations in Japanese. Last year my daughter's Japanese teacher was from Osaka, and for a while my daughter actually started picking up a slight Osaka accent in her Japanese.When I took her to Kyoto (she was 2 at the time), she thanked a store lady in standard Japanese (the only dialect that she knows), and the store lady corrected her in Kyoto-ben.
When we were in Osaka we met a Chinese lady who'd been living there for over 20 years. But because she moved there as an adult she must've learnt most if not all of her Japanese informally from her Japanese husband and other friends, because she could only speak in Osaka-ben. She could understand Hyoujungo but was unable to produce it. It was tricky for me to understand her, but overall I could understand the main gist of what she was saying (similar to someone encountering Shakespearean English for the first time). People like Ode to a Grasshopper would be fluent in Osaka-ben (and presumably in Hyoujungo too
How about where you live? Are there any dialectal differences there? I lived in Saitama where there are no differences, although I sometimes confuse native Japanese speakers by telling them that I'm fluent in Saitama-ben. It's often followed by a confused pause and comments like, "There's a Saitama-ben?" or "But there isn't a Saitama-ben" (especially when I'm speaking to native Saitama people
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roflmfao, said no person out loud, ever, probably more than 10 years ago. The fact that the way in which we type, message, text, communicate with each other has changed so dramatically in the last 15 years (how many lol, omg, btw, atm do you see?) is proof of how much our language is evolving. I have overheard younger people having full conversations where most of it was in "text speak". I couldn't understand it all but they all clearly could and they were all speaking English.
btw this thread makes me lmfao
And I pronounce is kam-ee-nus
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Actually a few of those terms may be older than suspected. Some go back as far as the early 20th Century (possibly late 19th). The earliest known person to use "OMG" was Admiral of the Fleet, Lord John Fisher (1841-1920).
I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis - O.M.G. - Shower it on the Admiralty!!
- Lord Fisher, 9/9/1917
These aren't necessarily new words but rather popular expressions made from long existing words. It's an evolution in trend, but it doesn't drastically affect the intelligibility of the language. And this trend has existed since ancient times. There are plenty of such abbreviations and acronyms from Latin such as:
am (ante meridiem = before midday)
et al (et alii = and others)
etc (et cetera = and other things)
eg (exempli gratia = for example)
ie (id est = that is, in other words)
INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum = Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews)
MA (magister artium = Master of Arts)
NB (nota bene = note well)
pa (per annum = in a year)
PhD (Philosophiae Doctor = Doctor of Philosophy)
pm (post meridiem = after midday)
PS (post scriptum = after what has been written)
re (in re = concerning)
RIP (requiescat in pace = may s/he rest in peace)
sic (sic erat scriptum = thus it is written)
SPQR (Senatus Populus Que Romanus = The Roman Senate and People)
stat (statium = immediately)
vs (versus = against)
And something that can often happen with some forms of colloquialisms is that they can be fleeting. Just last night I was watching an episode of Transformers Animated with Henry Masterson who of course taunts his opponents with catchphrases like, "Total ownage, noobs!" Remember how popular this expression used to be? Another one that I don't hear any more is "GG" (Good Game; used in sarcasm when someone does something bad or stupid), as well as combinations of these like, "GG, noobs." And remember when one-three-three-seven-five-pee-three-four-kay (13375P34K) used to be popular with kids? (WhY My 5h0U1d3Rs hUr7?)
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A lot of those terms you just mentioned are still quite popular in online gaming. My point is that these acronyms are working their way into society, in my opinion, much more frequently. Whilst some may not stay, we seem to be using more in direct speech. Overall, leading to an evolution of speech by way of shorter communication.
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