[Magdalen] Homing Pigeons.

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

That pronunciation is actually correct.  Eye ZAY uh is wrong.  It's merely
due to our assuming the A has the long Ay sound, and it does not.  The
actual pronunciation would Eye ZAH (ee) uh, which of course everyone hears
as Eye ZIGH ah  The long I (eye) is actually two vowels sounded one after
the other, AH and a brief EE.

Everybody says eye ZAY uh, but that does not make it right. It's not.

On the other hand, there are handbooks of pronunciation of Biblical terms,
and I'm guessing some of them have the wrong solution for Isaiah.

What do we want from them?  First we take all the Hebrew names and
arbitrarily change them according to really f*-ed up ideas of language, and
now we know better, but we still insist on using the wrong terms, and now
we even say how a word is pronounced is due to how we'd pronounce English
words, which of course is irrelevant.

I say it's time to repent of our jingoism and return to the correct words.
And while we're at it, why not call the places what they are actually
called, e.g., Moskva, Rossiya, Yerushalayim, Yisrael (not, please note,
"yishrael". Tho yerushalayim and Yisrael appear to be spelled with the same
letter, in Yisrael, you'll find it has  a dot over the lefthand side,
meaning it takes an ESS sound. Were the dot over the righthand side, it
would take the SH sound.
I'm not making this up, you know!
It seems like a lot, but actually it's just a matter of getting accustomed
to it. It is not rocket science. It's just one of those things that shows
the effects of American privilege.

http://www.dictionary.co.il/israel_jerusalem.htm

James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy

On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 4:12 PM, Scott Knitter <scottknitter at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I dislike some of our lectors' insistence on pronouncing Isaiah as
> "eye-ZIGH-uh." An annoying affectation unless you're British. A minor
> thing, but I'm always happy to have a chance to say eye-ZAY-uh.
>
> Then there's the lector who tries to make Hebrew names sound Hebrew,
> even though they're Anglicized in terms of spelling: Israel comes out
> YEESH-ro-el. I want to ask him if he would say, "A reading from the
> book of the prophet Yeremiyahu" instead of Jeremiah.
>
> On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 2:41 PM, Ann Markle <ann.markle at aya.yale.edu>
> wrote:
> > I'm always very careful to say
> > TRESS-PASSes (that's the word, here in America, folks, where most of the
> > ones discussing this live and pray).
>
>
>
>
> --
> Scott R. Knitter
> Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois USA
>