When in Buda…Pesky pronunciation & the BBC

On Saturday, while listening to BBC Radio 4, a long held suspicion of mine was confirmed.

This suspicion stems from the coverage of last November's US elections and revolves around the winning candidate's name. I spent part of the evening watching the BBC coverage before switching to CNN online and noticed that the BBC journalists at home and in the States seemed to be having a feud amongst themselves. Observe:

BBC journo in UK: And how is it looking for BARR-ack Obama in North Carolina?

BBC journo in NC: Well, as you can see, this student union is full of supporters and volunteers in the Ba-RAWK Obama campaign and they're clearly hoping for victory.

And back and forth the evening's coverage went, competing pronunciations over the eventual winner's name parried back and forth like a game of syntactical tennis. Having just discovered the BBC Have Your Say message boards, I made the mistake of submitting this observation to the conversation. The BBC message boards should come with a disclaimer discouraging foreigners from contributing their views as any such opinions will be dismissed out of hand despite their validity. I was variously accused of trying to teach the British how to speak, as if I'd suggested a complete overhaul of pronunciation, rather than merely suggest that British journalists do President Obama the courtesty of pronouncing his name the way he does. I was not suggesting that the pronunciation of the second syllable in the name Natasha should rhyme with "posh", not "trash", as it frequently does here, nor that the first syllable of my last name is Mick, not Muck or Mac. I didn't suggest that the entire Anglophone world start dropping the 's' in Paris. It was just that the BBC could perhaps stop mispronouncing the name of the most famous man in the world at the moment. It's not even difficult. If English tongues can handle Ahmadinijad and Medvedev, surely Barack is possible?

Clearly the majority of the English think their pronunciation's perfect. Where does this certitude come from? This Saturday, I learned the answer – from my old friends the BBC!

In the ten o'clock hour, a program on Budapest that would air later in the day was being discussed. When the program actually came on, the presenter said she'd received messages from listeners saying they thought she'd find it was actually "Budapesht". Never one to assume competence in others, she phoned the BBC Pronunciation Bureau (It exists! I knew it!), who told her that the British say "Budapest". "Others," she announced, somewhat disdainfully, "may call it Budapesht [never mind that those "others" include the Hungarians] but WE say BudaPEST!"