Right before taking off for a week, your host went on a bit of a sports-related jag. Since Mark Liberman was kind enough to weigh in with the suggestion that lingua-sports blogging is an area that could be explored further (as he's been up to himself recently), there's something else that caught SC's eye during the Olympics which he would have posted about had circumstances not intervened.
It's impossible to have followed soccer in America over the last decade without being aware of Mrs. Nomar Garciaparra, aka Mia Hamm. And unless one avoids the sports pages altogether, it's also impossible to not have read about the remarkable -- albeit controversial -- gymnastics gold medal won by American competitor Paul Hamm.
Both Ms. Hamm and Hamm's beer have conditioned most American English speakers to pronounce the name "Hamm" identically to the cut of pork, which is to say "ham". The gymnast, however, pronounces it to rhyme with read-only memory, as in "ROM" (or at least the sportscasters discussing him do; SC hasn't seen Mr. Hamm interviewed live). As the linked profiles from ESPN indicate, both Hamms were born in the U.S. Presumably, both are also descended from German immigrants; it would be interesting to know the difference in the number of generations that their families have been in this country, which might be predictive of a shift between using the German and English vowel inventories. There are, of course, plenty of alternate explanations: a desire to assimilate, a desire to reassert the original ethnic pronunciation, etc. Nevertheless, one might expect that given the predominance of the "ham" pronunciation, at least some of the newscasters discussing the story would have conflated Mr. Hamm's name with Ms. Hamm's, and so far as your host could tell, that didn't happen.
And while I'm on a sports kick, this is undoubtedly my favorite baseball story of the year. At least until the Padres win the World Series.
22-0: Yesss! But we all know the Damn Yankees are going to win the pennant and Series. It's the world we live in.
Thanks for keeping language fans entertained while I was away!
Posted by: language hat | September 05, 2004 at 10:10 AM
The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride f*cking with you. F*ck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.
bbf48d4186614543e806f8bf88681864
Posted by: Ethen | April 03, 2009 at 02:49 AM
The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride f*cking with you. F*ck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.
3631cc3280442a13bef8e7d1756019ae
Posted by: Fidel | April 04, 2009 at 04:15 AM
The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride f*cking with you. F*ck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.
3631cc3280442a13bef8e7d1756019ae
Posted by: Name | April 04, 2009 at 04:30 PM
The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride f*cking with you. F*ck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.
41e80566cd376dd39274fe0e0a664ba6
Posted by: Name | April 04, 2009 at 04:30 PM
The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride f*cking with you. F*ck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.
3631cc3280442a13bef8e7d1756019ae
Posted by: Name | April 05, 2009 at 06:56 AM