Casualties of War

In previous posts, we’ve flagged basketball names that are just spoken flat-out wrong, from “Vitale” to “Kobe”. One of the oddest cases of bad pronunciations in basketball is a problem that pervades all major sports in the United States and Canada: the odd first-syllable stress when we speak of “offense” or “defense”. Have you noticed that these words always receive second-syllable stress in other contexts? Try saying the phrases “Department of Defense” or “The defense rests, Your Honor.” Stress on the second syllable, right? So why, then, would we switch the emphasis in an athletic context? Other sporty permutations of the word still place emphasis on the second syllable: Try muttering “Defensive Player of the Year” (a clear case of iambic tetrameter if there ever was one, making Ben Wallace nearly Shakespearean) or “He’s a subpar defender.” Yet, the iconic chant to spur your team to guard their own goal better is “DE-fense!” (which is probably unique to basketball) and the knock on Amar’e Stoudemire is that he “can’t get back on D” (omitting the unstressed syllable entirely).

These problems recur with that word’s opposite. If I make a rude comment, I might worriedly inquire: “I hope you didn’t take offENSE” (iambic tetrameter yet again); a hagiographer might dreamily write that a politician or a military leader is “on the offENSIVE” — again, the stress is with the second syllable. But consider: For the past five seasons, the Phoenix Suns have boasted the best OFFense in the league and have led the league in OFF-ensive efficiency.

Stress shifts in spoken language are hardly unheard of, but they are usually regionally based. Consider “CON-tro-ver-sy” in the United States vs. “”con-TRO-ver-sy” in England or India. Or “FI-nance” over here vs. “fi-NANCE” across the Atlantic. Are there any other cases where these discrepancies are found only in one industry or walk of life?

Perhaps one motivation for the first-syllable stress in ‘offense’ and ‘defense’ is to distinguish: when commentators are likely to be talking simultaneously about a player’s or team’s performance at both ends of the court, it helps to stress what is different in the two concepts, and to elide what is common (the –fense part!). Also, loading all the oomph upfront in those words emphasizes the aggressive, go-get-it spirit required to succeed. Finally, it could be that these mutations just happened by chance one day and caught on, without anyone thinking much of why. The sports world has venerated John Madden and Yogi Berra as commentators, although their elocution hardly made them Laurence Olivier or Alan Keyes. Finally, some linguistic analysts argue that stress shifts are more likely at faster speaking rates. This is likely to be the case in the rough-and-tumble toil of sports announcing. If only George Blaha could just chill out.

Arriba Los Brujos

Continuing our discussion of badly pronounced basketball names, I give you: Gilbert Arenas. This one drives me crazy. He's of Cuban heritage, so his surname should be pronounced "Ah-RAY-nas", not "Ah-REE-nas". Is there a rule that says phonemes must be changed (though spelling preserved) upon immigration to America?

But on the bright side, consider: Nowitzki, Bargnani, Battier. NBA-ites (save Charles Barkley) make good-faith attempts to say all these correctly, and good for them.

Hey Mambo

Continuing our exploration of badly pronounced basketball names, I humbly offer up Dick Versace and Dick Vitale, former coaches with the Detroit Pistons. (Versace was only an assistant there, and later became a head coach with the Pacers.) Is there any good reason why the first guy's name (rhymes with “her face”) shouldn't be pronounced like that of the fashion designer? He even proudly says here that he's an Italian American. And why shouldn't Mr. Diaper Dandy have his name pronounced like, say, another redoubtable Vitale of the Michigan area?

Just saying.

What's In A Name? Part I

In a recent post I touched briefly on the difficult pronunciation of the name of Mike Krzyzewski. It made me realize that the NBA is full of a wonderful wealth of prolix names that don’t get enough appreciation. Sadly, these names are too often mangled by those who are paid to speak about them.

For several years, ESPN/ABC's Mike Breen has sent me into excruciating pain every time he mispronounces the surname of Fabricio Oberto. (Those are all Youtube links) Note to Mike: The second syllable of the guy’s name rhymes with English "bear", not the third U.S. Vice President. Why can't he get it right? Spanish vowels are easy. Has nobody bothered to correct him?

Then there’s Kobe Bryant, who got his name from a steakhouse in Pennsylvania, which is named after a particular style of beef, which is named after a city in western Japan. Rightly, the name should be pronounced “KOH-beh” (rhymes with “OK”), not “Ko-bee” (rhymes with “holy”). Given that he’s used the latter all his life, I wouldn’t try to change it now, but it certainly takes a lot of chutzpah to walk around with somebody else’s city attached to you and give it a new sound. Granted, we don’t pronounce “Paris” or “Montreal” or any number of place names as the locals do, but that’s because those names employ silent letters or weird sounds that don’t fit in English. It’s not hard to simply get a vowel right. (Then again, before I lived in Manhattan, I thought there was only one way to say “Houston”…)

My co-bloggers once mocked me at a restaurant for correcting a waitress who pronounced “karaoke” the American way, rather than the simple and phonetic “ka-ra-o-keh”. Fine, I'm a pedantic dweeb. But why would anyone deliberately mangle a word that is patent and clear?

Slavic names have long posed a problem for NBA commentators. Stojakovic, Divac, Petrovic, Vujacic: is the final sound “-itz”, “-ik”, or “-ich” ? My understanding is that the latter is most right, but I remain open to additional education. Charles Barkley, who seems like a smart guy but often remains gleefully and obstinately ignorant of basic facts on the ground, prefers the “-ik” ending.

Then you have Walter Herrmann, whose parents came from Germany, who grew up in Argentina, and now plays in the States. Shall we pronounce his name the German way (“HEHR-mahn”), the Spanish way (“ehr-mahn”), or the American way (like the surname of Pee-Wee)? I actually don’t know how he chooses to say it. Perhaps the example of Walter brings to absurdity my fealty to ethnic essentialism. My hunch is that he identifies as being more Latin than German, just as when I travel abroad I feel more American than … (well, in the interest of remaining Everyblogger, I won’t discuss my own origins here). Carlos Slim, the richest guy in Mexico, had a Lebanese father named Salem, so when I meet him in America, shall I say his name the Spanish way (“sleem”), American (“slim”), or in the Arabic fashion? He might punch me in the face if I tried to be all Orientalist “I know your people” on him.

To be sure, NBA-ites have done a good job of learning the right way to say many tangy names. Mostly everyone (save Charles Barkley) says “Nowitzki” correctly. Deng, Dalembert, Turkoglu, Bargnani: None are phonetic in an English scheme (and, while the latter three of those come from languages that use Roman alphabet, for Luol's name I question a transliteration scheme that results in an English spelling that makes no sense) but everyone knows roughly how to say those guys’ names. Even many TV pundits have learned to roll “Ahmadinejad” off their tongue. I don’t question the good faith of NBA personalities who talk about these players, but I do wonder, sincerely, why some names get Americanized and some don’t. Oh, and returning to my most recent post, did you know Mark Cuban’s original family name was Chabenisky?

In further posts, I will attempt to examine the wondrous diversity in nomenclature of American-born players.