The Football Tragic

When English-language football commentators encounter foreign names, you can often count on some interesting interpretations.

It's a little unfair to make an example of SBS, whose commentators generally do far better than most in this regard, but this morning's Champions' League telecast showed up some common errors. Interestingly enough, many of these seem to stem from a desire to make everyone's name sound just that little bit Brazilian.

Dan O'Hagan, in the course of the Manchester United v. Roma game, repeatedly referred to one of the away team's midfielders as "Aquiliani" rather than "Aquilani"; perhaps a result of encountering those Portuguese names with "-lh-" in them (Carvalho, for instance), which do demand a palatalization of the "l". Or the Slavic names with "lj" prominent (Ljubljana).

This palatalization (that is, moving the tongue towards the hard roof of the mouth from the front) is quite a feature of Brazilian Portuguese. It often sounds, one might say, quite sexy; Antonio Carlos Jobim's famous song "Dindi" sounds so much more intimate with the titular girl's name pronounced in that elongated way: "Oh...Djeen-djee..."

(It follows from this, incidentally, that Ronaldinho's name is actually pronounced with the "d" virtually becoming a "j". But I digress.)

One instance of such palatalization is the transformation of a final -s or -z sound into -sh or -zh. David Basheer did this with the name of Stuttgart's striker Mario Gomez throughout, even though Gomez, of course, is not Brazilian. In the past, Craig Foster has attempted to do the same with names such as Reyes and Pires.

The same thing can be observed with names ending in "-ino" or "-eno" instead of the ubiquitous Portuguese "-inho": Marcelino, a Spanish central defender who played for Newcastle United for a few years, must have felt like a Brazilian by the time he returned to Spain, so often had his name been mispronounced by English commentators.

Then there's initial "r": of course, in Rio (though not in some other parts of Brazil, I'm told), this sound is made at the back of the mouth, so that it resembles an "h". Plenty of commentators have picked up on this, but, once again, it occasionally gets applied to Spanish names as well.

It's not a big issue, of course, but it deserves a mention. Les Murray, whose pronunciation of foreign names is always scrupulously correct (if a little unctuous at times), made the point in his autobiography that correct rendering of foreign names implies respect, for both the player and the culture. I'd agree.

The above are all pretty minor indiscretions, incidentally, compared to the mangling of Chinese midfielder Li Tie's name when he arrived at Everton. He became, in turn, Lee Tie, Lie Tea (courtesy Alan Parry), Leeya Teeya, and even something that sounded vaguely like Leotard. For the record, the correct pronunciation is roughly "Lee tyair".

The commentators must have breathed a sigh of relief when he fell out of favour at Goodison Park.