Hydra-cephalic Phonology

I have so little to complain about that the blog is suffering. I could write about the apparent epidemic of somewhat inept and apathetic volunteer coordinators in this city -- but that's more boring than writing nothing. I could tell you that I a) actually went to a Barnes & Noble today (very specific desire, and one best met by a warehouse of a store, yet always still a deeply tragic voyage) and b) was forced to leave before making my purchase because the music was that intolerable. (I don't know her name, but yet another of the baby-voiced, on-the-verge-of-tears female singer-songwriters.) Or I could describe how the neighborhood sphinx is causing me to be cognitively impaired and narcoleptic with his indecipherable and unslakeable cries for something at all hours of the night. Or that, as a result of this ongoing REM deprivation, I slept from one AM to four PM today and could thus not go out for a glass of wine with a friend, as that would have meant having wine for breakfast, even if breakfast were being served at eight at night.

However, in an earlier post when writing about ways not to seem alternately boorish and mincing in the handling of import words in English, I mentioned 'Paree' as always being de trop, and 'intaglio/seraglio' as keeping some, but not all, of their Italian heritage in the course of their Anglicization. While looking for something entirely different today (why I speak Spanish like a Salvadoran) I came upon an old thread on phonoblog in which a few posters struggle mildly to figure out through what principle or principles in US English 'Chartres' comes close-ish (minus the difficult Gallic r's, that is) to the original, while 'Paris' never does, and why a more native pronunciation of Latin American place-names seems to mark one as a leftist still, and also does not carry over into the individual's pronunciation of words in other languages with which he might be equally familiar. I also learned that the English pronunciation of 'Catalan' is supposedly the same as for the primitive plastic. Since the time I first knew what Catalan was, it seems I have been pronouncing it in an off-putting way for most native English speakers -- but, luckily, perhaps, equally in a manner not likely to suggest to antique dealers that I am in the market for an earring-and-brooch set in the shape of a raspberry cluster.

Nothing was resolved in my mind as to why we use foreign endonyms for some things and exonyms for others, nor why we say 'Filleep/Feeleep Paytann' and 'Sharl d'Gall' (I don't have easy IPA access, so we'll make do) in reasonable, good-faith, and (also important) not unduly encumbering English approximations of 'Phillipe Pétain' and 'Charles de Gaulle' yet also canonically say 'Catherine the Great' ('of Russia' at times) and 'Philip of Macedon.'

I think in casual conversation the rules vary according to the group, but for what it's worth, I do say ΥΔΡΑ, with a thelta sound and minus an 'h,' for the island I lived on, instead of 'Hydra' with the 'h' and with an unaspirated 'd' -- the way Americans pronounce the mythological monster. But I don't in English say 'Makeδonίa' for the area of Greece, or any variant of 'Makedonija' for what nationalistic Greeks derogatingly call 'FYROM' and which many other people call 'Macedonia' or 'the Republic of Macedonia.' And I still don't know the ways in which I sound Salvadoran except for one, and now due to my abortive mission to the hideous book barn, I can't use a new Latin-American Spanish Dictionary to figure out the mystery. At least I am well-slept!