One of nine
Hey what’s the deal with people having names that are spelled funny? Huh? What are they trying to do? Are they crazy or something?
Three days into his first term as a Republican congressman, Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, then just 33, pulled on a smoke hood and fled the Capitol as rioters invaded the House chamber on January 6. He later voted to certify the election results and ended up being one of nine Republicans to vote to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection. Since then, Meijer has suffered death threats, a Trump-endorsed primary challenge, and now the indignity of having Trump make fun of his last name at a political rally in his home state.
Well. Be fair. “Meijer” – did you ever? I mean, really.
Last night, Trump appeared at a sports hall outside Detroit to promote the candidacy of a couple of low-level Republican candidates for state attorney general and secretary of state. As is often the case when he shows up to help another candidate, Trump spent most of the time talking about himself and insulting one of his enemies, in this case, fellow Republican Meijer.
Talking about himself and insulting other people – sums him up.
“A guy who spells his name `M-E-I-J-E-R’ but they pronounce it `MY-er,’” Trump said. “The hell kind of a spelling is that? `MY-er.’ I said: `How the hell do you pronounce this guy’s name?’”
“Nobody knows him,” Trump said of Meijer. “He’s done nothing in Washington. I said `How do you pronounce his name? Is it ‘MAY-jer? MY-jer?’ They said it’s `MY-er.’ How the hell do you get `MY-er’ out of it?”
Same way you get “Yohan” out of “Johan” – you learn that several languages, like for instance Dutch and Swedish and (cough) German, pronounce J the way Anglophones pronounce Y.
But that won’t do, because that’s foreign. Foreign means bad.
The congressman’s last name is Dutch, and there’s a decent sized Dutch-American community in Western Michigan that tends to vote conservative Republican—a constituency Trump’s advisors apparently didn’t bother to brief him on. Meijer is also a household name in Michigan that adorns a beloved local chain of supermarkets that have, among other things, given away millions of dollars worth of free prescription drugs to treat diabetes and heart disease, as well as antibiotics and prenatal vitamins, the sort of meaningful philanthropy the Trump family has never even contemplated.
Another fun fact: Trump’s grandfather immigrated to the US from Germany.
It may be so that his grandfather immigrated, but at least he had the decency to change is name from Drumph to Trump.
Some of my relatives had changed the spelling of our last name from Haubrich to Haubrick during World War I to make it easier to sell their liberty cabbage and salisbury steaks. My great-grandparents didn’t. They may as well have for how many times it gets spelled that way.
To be fair, the move from ‘Drumpf’ to ‘Trump’ was a smart one, as ‘Drumpf’ has a certain flatulence about it, as in
Oncef inf, couldf bef af habitf hardf tof kickf.
Mike – and I can’t help reading your name as pronounced ich rather than ick. The result of a couple of semesters of German in college I guess.
I once heard the line: Trump isn’t a US citizen, because both (a) New York wasn’t a state yet in 1946, and (b) he was born in Germany, anyway.
New York wasn’t a state yet in 1946!?! That would have come as a surprise to Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt for one.
Aren’t they all?
I’d love to hear Trump attempt to pronounce “worcestershire”.
I had a colleague called Anja. I rang her up and said, Hi Anya. She said, I’m Anja. She was of Indian descent, not Scandi or German.
Ophelia – we hosted an exchange student from Hamburg and she taught us how it is pronounced in Germany, and I’ll be honest, the “ch” at the end is a great way to clear your throat.
One of my brothers has a friend named Teja Arboleda. Short guy, black curly-ish hair, cinnamon skin. Not one iota Hispanic. I embarrassed myself greeting him in Spanish. Not the first time for him.
Turns out Teja is some kind of Germanic name, with that j like a y. And, no, he doesn’t want to join the Hispanic student association. Desculpe, tomodachi.
And there’s Thea in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. Thea Kronborg. Her family of course pronounces it Taya but everyone else in town calls her Theea…except Doctor Archie.
There’s a Thea in Hedda Gabler, and the copy of the play I first read has the pronunciation in it. More like Taya, if I remember correctly. Hard T, no H.
@Omar – a Scottish person could have taucht ye’ that. You hawk and spit the following:-
Och, it’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht t’nicht by the loch.
Southern English lost that sound around the fifteenth century.
Ancient Greek didn’t have a “th” sound (/θ/ or /ð/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)). That’s not surprising–those aren’t common sounds, which is why one characteristic of non-native English (along with many native dialects of English) is pronouncing them as /f/ or /s/ or /t/.
What Ancient Greek did have was a three-way distinction between voiced, unvoiced, and aspirated stops. E.g., /d/ (voiced, similar to English /d/), /t/ (unvoiced but not aspirated, similar to the /t/ in “stop”) and /tʰ/. The latter is aspirated, which means there’s a little puff of air after the /t/ is released. If you put your hand in front of your mouth and say “top”, you’ll feel it; that’s what the superscript h represents in IPA /tʰ/. In Greek, that sound was represented by the letter theta (θ); the Romans transliterated it as “th”. But then sometime in late antiquity, the Greek pronunciation changed from a voiceless fricative to the “th” sound, and eventually English orthography picked up on it. But most other languages that use the Roman alphabet don’t have a “th” sound*, and so they still pronounce the digraph “th” the old fashioned way (French “Theo”, for example).
*Northern peninsular Spanish being one example, where /θ/ is spelled “z” or “c” before “e” or “i”, and “d” is often pronounced /ð/, as in “Madrid”.
Also, if you want to hear the difference between voiceless /θ/ and voiced /ð/, say “teeth” and “teethe”.
Speaking of Scottish – a Scottish accent is the most contagious one I know of. I can never hear it without wanting to adopt it. US Southern is a little like that but nowhere near as intensely. I’m not the only one, either.
No kidding, I could listen to Billy Connolly all day, or Elaine Miller, even if they weren’t funny.
@Ophelia – it’s a hard one to adopt though, at least I’ve never managed.
OTOH the Australian/South African/New Zealand is very easy to pick up, though nobody wants to adopt them.
@Ophelia, KB, there’s also the question of whether you’re trying to adopt a Scottish accent in English, or the Scots language.
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I used to work for a “head hunter”, recruiting Physical Therapists. My job was to call prospective clients and explain why they should sign with us. I was dating a guy then that would say sometimes when he picked me up “You’ve been calling Texas again, haven’t you?” He was always right. I’d pick up just enough of the Texas sound to make it obvious.
@WhataMaroon “there’s also the question of whether you’re trying to adopt a Scottish accent in English, or the Scots language.”
I don’t understand what point you are making. There are arguments about whether Scots is a separate language or an English dialect. The Scottish government, being nationalists, are trying to sell it as a separate language – they had a question on the census form about whether you could speak or understand Scots. A lot of the specifically Scots words are disappearing from speech, sadly.
There are of course various Scots accents – the Highland, the Orkney/Shetland, Doric from around Aberdeenshire, Glasgow/West Coast and Edinburgh, and there’s the class differences as well. My neighbour has a strong working-class Edinburgh accent, and most people from other parts of the UK would find it hard to understand him, whereas my colleagues sound more posh English. These days you don’t hear much of the Edinburgh accent as portrayed in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which has a thoroughly definite, superior sound. The Scots on films and television is Glasgow mostly, Glasgow having the largest population.
KB Player,
As a good linguist, I take no stand on whether Scots is a separate language from English, or whether their dialects of the same language; I’ll just note that at present, Scotland doesn’t have it’s own army and navy.
And yes, I’m aware that there are dialectal differences within Scotland. But my point is that there’s a difference between Scots, which seems to be what your neighbor is speaking, and Scottish English, which is what Jean Brodie was speaking.
More discussion here.
@Maroon – I don’t think having an army or navy, by which you mean a separate state, has much bearing on a language. Gaelic is spoken in the Western Isles, who don’t have their own army or navy, (or ferries under SNP mismanagement), Welsh in Wales, Basque in the Basque country and so on.
“Scottish English” is a new term to me, and though the Scottish language issue is contested quite vehemently, I have never seen it used.
Jean Brodie spoke refined Edinburgh, a very agreeable sound to my ears, and as I said, rarer than it used to be. It is mocked as Morningside English, and thought of as snobbish. If my neighbour, born in working-class Edinburgh speaks with one accent, and Jean Brodie, born where Muriel Spark was born (Bruntsfield) speaks with another, they are still the same language/dialect as far as I’m concerned.
KBPlayer,
It’s an old linguistic joke: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
The west Germanic languages spoken in Britain show a classic dialect continuum, and whether and where you draw a line to say “here is a language divide” is arbitrary, even if the extremes are clearly different (e.g., in northern Spain, Galego is clearly distinct from Catalan, but where Galego fades into Austuriano fades into Castellano fades into Aragones fades into Catalan isn’t so clear).
As for the other examples you mention, Welsh and Gaelic are Celtic languages that are only distantly related to English (and somewhat less distantly related to each other), while Basque is a linguistic isolate with no known relations (most likely it’s the last remnant of the languages spoken in Europe before the various Indo-European groups moved in).
I suspect all the people with linguistics degrees have seen this by now, but for everybody else:
xkcd: Linguistics Degree
Mine was “siwoti”. Which is odd, because the internet hadn’t even been created yet.
Not only do I have the most stereotypically Anglo-Saxon name imaginable – Smith – but the first recorded instance of the name is from Durham, close to where I live.
My ancestors need to get out more.