Happy Anniversary, CNN, But…
For the love of God, get your anchors some lessons in pronouncing foreign words!
Sometimes you can tell these whitebread farmers have never seen that foreign word on the teleprompter before in their lives. For example, the name of the new French prime minister is not Villapin, like a large town in Iowa, it’s [comically_exaggerated_french_accent_with_appropriate_nasalized_sound] Villepin [/comically_exaggerated_french_accent_with_appropriate_nasalized_sound].
How hard is that?
And it’s not the first time by a long shot. Happens all the time. To fire your imagination, I will merely mention polysyllabic Arabic, Indonesian and Danish.
To be fair, it’s not limited to CNN. Here in Toronto there’s a broadcast TV station called CityTV, with a sister cable news ticker station called CP24.
There’s a City anchor called Gord Martineau who tries really, really, really hard to pronounce foreign words and names with a really, really, really foreign accent, kind of like the generic foreign accent from Mission:Impossible.
But he can’t or won’t pronounce his colleague’s name properly. Her name is Laura Di Battista, with she herself pronouncing her given name as in Italian, with the first syllable rhyming with ‘cow’. Not hard, but Gord can’t handle it. It’s really funny, and a little sad.
The worst, best, funniest example was from CP24, back when Akira Kurosawa died. Now look at the name. Say it out loud. Romanized Japanese is probably the easiest language in the world to pronounce because you say it the way it looks. And it’s almost always a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel sequence, and the exceptions are straightforward themselves.
So the name is easy to pronounce, and, and, Akira Kurosawa has been famous and admired for decades.
The dimwit newsreader on CP24 apparently had never heard of him, couldn’t pronounce basic Roman letters and hadn’t tried to read the news before she went on the air.
I’m making the unimportant part up. “Sad news for the film world today with the announcement of the death of acclaimed Japanese director Akeesha Kulawakkalakka. Akika Koshawasha. Akashakka Kulawallashallawalla. Shabba-labba-blabba-blabba.”
Swear to God.
I’m not even going to mention the spelling and factual errors that show up in the news ticker all the time.