Since last August my post about the pronunciation of "Hiroshima" has, to my surprise, gotten hundreds of page views. It pointed out that two pronunciations are current in English, "hi-ro-SHI- ma and "hi-RO-shi-ma," quoting a person with a degree in Japanese linguistics suggesting that the latter pronunciation approximates the Japanese pronunciation. And I remarked that that pronunciation appears to be more common among university-educated people, suggesting a class difference.
Yesterday a reader wrote to complain about the post, saying that she was not satisfied with my saying that you can choose your pronunciation in English, that she had done research to find that accenting the second syllable is how the Japanese say it, that she was amazed that I would make a class issue of the pronunciation, and that she regretted having wasted her time reading my post.
Bye, Felicia.
Though she does not seem likely to waste further time returning here, a couple of points are of interest.
The first is that English does not care much about the way non-English speakers pronounce words. (George Orwell observed, "Nearly every Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly.") Imagine what the French make of our pronouncing lingerie as "lahn-zhuh-RAY." And the same holds true for proper names, though perhaps not as extremely as the Tommies' pronunciation of Ypres as "Wipers" during the Great War. Germans don't say "Munich," Austrians don't say "Vienna," Italians don't say "Rome." In English we say either "ho-ro-SHI-ma" or "hi-RO-shi-ma" as it suits us, , just as we can choose between "Mos-cow" and "Mos-ko."
As to the writer's amazement that I would suggest class markers in pronunciation, I would have thought it a commonplace since Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (premiered in 1913) and My Fair Lady (premiered in 1956, film version in 1964) that English vocabulary and pronunciation abound in class markers. We simply adopt the pronunciations that are dominant in our region or in the group with which we identify. That is interesting, but hardly amazing.