Kiribati
Kiribati is a group of islands in the Pacific, including Christmas Island. My question is this: Why is it pronounced "Ki-ri-bas"? Why not spell it that way? I e-mailed William Safire, but so far have received no response. And that was several years ago.
posted by Occidentally @ 12:23 AM
3 Comments:
It's pronounced keyree bah(like the lamb says) sea. Say it fast and roll your r and the sea is really soft. It's pronounced like this because ti is pronounced like see in their language. Why is tion is the english language pronounced shun, we do the same thing.
benteti5-
Thanks for responding. I understand what you're saying about "tion/shun", but I don't think it's quite the same. We used to say Peking, but now we say Beijing to more closely pronounce the name of that city as it is pronounced in China which has not only a different language, but a different alphabet altogether. Why we called it Peking in the first place is equally a mystery to me. (And, to the best of my limited knowledge, "China" is pronounced "JoongGua" in Mandarin though the English word "China" derives from the Qin (pronounced "Chin") Dynasty).
Kirabati has its own language and, certainly before colonization (colonizashun?) had a distinct written language as well. I'm still baffled as to why, when English speaking people arrived, they chose to spell "keyree bah(like the lamb says) sea" as Kirabati... occ
Actually, Kiribati is the native way of saying what the English named the place, the Gilbert islands. They have only 13 letters in their alphabet so they improvised. It was called gilbert islands until 1979.
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