Tag Archives: english orthography

THE COLONIAL NAME OF MONTRÉAL IN ENGLISH: ACCENT OR NO?

So ai live in Montréal, Québec. That’s the colonial name of this place, of course, but also the name by which the vast majority of people who live around here know this place, and that’s almost certainly even more true for people who don’t live around here, who only know it from photos or maps or tourist guides. The indigenous name of this place, coming from Kanien’kéha, is «Tioh:tiàke» – and ai’m going to talk about that too, though not as much. Ai don’t think ai’d have that much to say about it, anyway, other than: if you live here and you didn’t know that name, you should LEARN IT. NOW!

But first, let’s discuss the colonial name a bit. For simplicity’s sake, ai am just going to talk about the name of the city specifically, but literally everything ai’m about to say applies to the name of the province as well. Basically, there is a widespread understanding that the proper way to write the name of Montréal in English is to do the opposite of what ai’ve been doing in the entirety of this post (and this blog) so far. Instead of including the accent aigu over the letter-ee [e, E], as ai do, you should drop it. Thus, according to the folks that have this understanding, the name of this city should be written “Montreal”.

How widespread is this understanding? It’s hard to say. Let’s imagine someone from Los Angeles goes on vacation to Montréal and writes a blog post about it. Or let’s imagine an English-language author from Mumbai writes an espionage novel that includes a short scene in Montréal for some reason. Or let’s imagine some teenager in Kamloops decides to text her best friend about how she wants to go university in Montréal after high school. Ai am going to guess that none of these people will use an accent aigu, but when it comes to these folks, ai don’t think any of them is likely to have a thought-out position on the proper orthography for this city’s English name. They either don’t care, or they’re using the style that they’re likely to see whenever they look at an atlas or read a tourist guide, or it’s a slight hassle to type that character and they figure the editor can catch it, or whatever. My point is this: while these people might not spell out Montréal’s name with the accent, they don’t necessarily think it absolutely should not be written out with the accent when writing in English.

But the understanding that, indeed, the name of Montréal simply cannot be written with an accent when writing in English is fairly widespread among Canadian anglophones that consider themselves literate and who pride themselves on the professionalism of their emails and the care they put into their spelling. In the areas of Ottawa and Montréal specifically, there are quite a few of these anglophones who, as a part of their job or perhaps as a part of other activities they are involved in, actually find themselves writing emails or other sorts of documents in French quite often; such folks may either use a French-language keyboard all the time, as ai do, or they may have a toggle on their desktop that allows them to switch between French mode and English mode at will.

This understanding is backed up by certain anglophone institutions, too, and the most conspicuous of these are those that have significant connections to Montréal, such as The Gazette (Montréal’s most widely circulated English-language newspaper) and McGill-Queen’s University Press. Both of these institutions produce a lot of material that is read by a lot of people, and the standards they set are bound to be seen as somewhat authoritative.

But me, personally? Ai just don’t get it. For me, at least on one level, this isn’t even really political; it’s simply a matter of what looks good. Let’s consider the first sentence of the Wikipedia article about Projet Montréal for a moment: “Projet Montréal is a municipal political party in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.” If you’re going to add an accent to the first word that needs an accent, why the fuck wouldn’t you add accents to the second and third words? Again, it would be one thing if you were simply lazy and didn’t feel like adding the accents at all, perhaps because your keyboard isn’t set up to make it easy, perhaps because just fuck it. Ai see this all the time in bombastic National Post editorials that talk about “Rene Levesque” or whatever. But if you’re going to take the time to put an accent in one part of the sentence, why not just be consistent?

“Because,” you might be saying, “the accent indicates whether you’re supposedly to pronounce it in an English way or in a French way.”

Okay, fair enough, at least if we’re talking about Montréal – because, of course, this doesn’t apply to the name of the province. Whereas the French pronunciation of Montréal’s name is markedly different from the English pronunciation (notwithstanding the way that the narrator pronounces the name of the city in Street Politics 101, lol), the standard English pronunciation of Québec’s name is identical to the French pronunciation – at least around these parts. Ai’ve heard some Americans say KWI-bek rather than the proper KAY-bek, but hey, they’re Americans!

So yes, in the aforementioned sentence from Wikipedia, the “Montréal” in “Projet Montréal” is supposed to be pronounced mon-RAY-al (in rough phonetic English) and the “Montreal” in “Montreal, Quebec, Canada” is supposed to be pronounced MUN-tree-all (in precise phonetic English). One could definitely argue that the orthographic difference helps to make the difference in pronunciation more clear. But personally, ai feel like it isn’t really necessary, and it leads to some unnecessary ugliness. Maybe this is just me, but when ai read “Montréal” (accented) in an article, ai still pronounce it in my mind like MUN-tree-all. If ai see it next to a word like «projet», ai probably pronounce it differently. This is almost certainly because ai am a pretty word-based person, and because ai know more than a rudimentary bit of French, but ai also don’t think this would be hard to learn for most people. Ai certainly don’t think it would be hard for those pedantic Canadian anglophones who are actually very bilingual but nevertheless insist on an accentless orthography in English.

Now ai’m obviously coming from a place of simply thinking it looks nicer with an accent; in fact, ai like accents in general. Ai think they spice up a sentence, visually speaking. There are some who may say that this aesthetic predilection of mine is not shared by all, and shouldn’t be taken into consideration for design choices, especially when it makes the language somewhat more complicated to read aloud. Such folks are generally in favour of a more phonetic language. But ai don’t buy that shit. If we’re going to try to make written English and spoken English less divergent, there are much more important places to start than the name of this city. Hell, ai would even argue that it’s not such a bad thing for us to be constantly reminded that things don’t necessarily correspond perfectly between text and speech, and that it’s actually fine to be familiar with words in writing without being familiar with how they are actually pronounced. If you know where Shenzhen is on a map, you know that – and can even talk about it – whether you know how to pronounce the name of that city or not.

Ai used the example of a Chinese city in the last paragraph because the rules of Hanyu pinyin, which are actually very consistent and exist in order to make it very easy to pronounce Chinese words, are nevertheless quite non-intuitive for English-speakers who don’t know yet know those rules. Ai happen to be familiar with the rules of this pinyin, so ai can be all smug if ai want to be, but ai don’t consider myself familiar with how Kanien’kéha orthography relates to Kanien’kéha pronunciation. Like, in the word «Kanien’kéha» itself, ai have no idea what the apostrophe is supposed to represent. Ai am sure that it wouldn’t be too hard to learn, but at the moment, ai’m clueless. Nor do ai have any sense of what the colon in «Tioh:tiàke» is supposed to represent pronunciation-wise. For all ai know, these characters could have no impact on pronunciation whatsoever, and are instead there much like the accent aigu in the way ai spell the name of Montréal in English – in other words, there for decoration only. (Ai suspect that this is not the case, but again, ai’m clueless.)

Besides, toponyms seem to be an area of language where there is particular divergence between pronunciation and orthography. Did you know that the name of Kiribati, a country in the Pacific Ocean, is pronounced kee-REE-bus? Assuming you were somewhere in Beaver Empire last October and you were having any decent political conversations at all, did you have any idea about how to properly pronounce the name of Elsipogtog until you heard someone say it out loud to you?

But of course, Montréal is not like these places. It is different. There is, in fact, a narrative that it is a bilingual city, a city that is equally “English” and “French”. Thus, it should have a bilingual name. But again, ai don’t buy this shit. The original colonial settlement was entirely French, and while it later came under British sovereignty, it would have originally been referred to exclusively as “Montréal” – except perhaps by Americans, Englishpeople, and Scots who simply didn’t care to add the accent aigu. After conquest, buildings were built in Montréal that had an accentless MONTREAL engraved on them somewhere, along with other words in English – and ai can only interpret this as a sort of dickishness on the part of anglophones against francophones. Things are very different now from what it was like here in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, obviously, and the local power dynamic between francophone and anglophone has changed enormously. And yet this small, subtle dickishness is now seen as “only natural” by people who will add purely aesthetic accents elsewhere in sentences, as in: “Hey, can the two of us meet up at that cute little Parisian-style café in Old Montreal?”

Language is never natural. Language emerges from decisions that people make.

If we are to use a colonial name for this city at all – and, for the record, ai am open to the idea that we shouldn’t – then ai think it makes sense to just use a single name, to give up on this bilingual shit. The whole “two official languages” thing that the Liberals of the 1960s and ’70s implemented federation-wide is a vapid farce that, despite its total artificiality, has helped to keep the Canadian state together. We should therefore take objection to it.

The implication, for the name of Montréal, is that it doesn’t need two colonial names, one for each official language. It only has one colonial name. Whether you actually care to write that name out or not, ai don’t know. Again, if you’re lazy or you don’t have the right keyboard or you simply give no fucks, that’s all legit. Even if you buy my arguments but would like to keep writing out this city’s name without the accent because you think it’s funny to annoy people who give as much of a fuck about orthography as ai do, well, that’s legit too (though obviously you’re a brat). But if you DO care about writing it out properly, and you’re adding accents to things anyway, then you MAY AS FUCKING WELL add an accent to the name of the city. Ai kind of apply this logic to the Kanieh’kéha name as well. Both on my computer and on my phone, it’s pretty easy for me to add the accented letter (whether the ‘é’ or the ‘à’ in the words ai’ve used in this post), so ai’m gonna do it, cuz that’s how ai roll. Ai am less likely to go to the trouble, though, of using the right characters to spell a Polish or Vietnamese place name that has some intense diacritics going on, and that’s especially true if it’s for, like, a text message to a friend. Like, if ai want to speak about places like Łódź or Hải Phòng City and use the correct characters while doing so, ai pretty much need to copy and paste from Wikipedia.

In conclusion, please do you want, and please don’t feel like ai’m bossing you around. But if you’re making the decision to care about orthography, don’t be selective about it?

“AI” – AN ALTERNATIVE FIRST-PERSON PERSONAL PRONOUN IN ENGLISH

Years ago, on an English-language primitivist internet forum ai would occasionally lurk, there was a user who never used the standard capital letter-ai [i, I] for their first-person personal pronoun. Instead, they wrote out “ai”. This word followed standard capitalization rules, only getting capitalized at the beginning of sentences. In other words, it was pretty much the same as «je», the first-person personal pronoun in French.

This user intrigued me. In fact, for some time after, on and off from 2009 to 2011 or so, ai used the same form for my own first-person personal pronoun – and ai have decided that ai am going to use this form again for this blog.

As a lurker on that forum, who never even signed up for an account, ai never had a conversation with that original user about the logic behind their use of this pronoun. The thing that interested me, and that still interests me, may not have anything to do with their logic. It’s also entirely possible that, unlike myself, that user didn’t understand “ai” to have an identical pronunciation to “I”. They might have thought it was pronounced like ay or something. For me, though, it seems clear that “ai” is supposed to be pronounced in the same way as those two letters would be in the English transliteration of Japanese or Chinese words – as a homonym to “eye” and “I”. This means that the phrases “I ate a sandwich” and “ai ate a sandwich” are homophonic when spoken, even if the orthography is slightly different.

Ai am a fan of this orthographic shift, and this is because, on a symbolic level, ai really don’t like the standard form of the first-person personal pronoun in English, the capital letter-ai. First off, it looks phallic to me. It also looks like a tower – a structure that is cut off from the surrounding world, that alienates whoever is on top of it from the rest of what’s going on around. These are throwaway criticisms, of course, but it also strikes me as strange that it is one of only two words in the English language that consists of a single letter, and that, unlike the other word in that category, “a”, it is always capitalized.

While this can certainly be explained as simply a spelling convention that is used, it is also undeniable that, in many (most?) European languages, the capitalization of certain words can be understood to convey greater importance to the things those words describe in comparison to other words. There is certainly a reason why, in anarchist, radical left, and onkwehón:we sovereigntist circles, writers and propagandists will often conspicuously capitalize certain words (like “Black”, “Indigenous”, even “Anarchism” sometimes) and just as conspicuously choose not to capitalize certain other words (like “canada”, “the u.s.”, “european”, “marxist”). Ai would argue that the first-person personal pronoun’s consistent capitalization in English has the effect of symbolically valorizing the individual, and ai think it is worth changing for precisely that reason, especially if there is another option available to us.

Please note: ai’m not arguing that we need to switch over to “ai” because the current form has some kind of powerful psychological effect on the unconscious mind of all anglophones. The problem is symbolic, and that is it. Ai can imagine others thinking of me as a similar sort of conspiracist who believes that this spelling convention was set long ago by decided partisans of egocentric patriarchy, and that ai think they are socializing us, brainwashing us, to be like them through their orthographic evil – something that ai personally must stop! So that would be funny, but really, it’s simply a matter of the orthography conflicting with my values in pretty much the same way as the existence of an avenue Christophe-Colomb in my city conflicts with my values.

What ai mean is this: ai don’t think it matters much, but ai’d still rather that the situation be different. It’s not that the status quo – in either the case of the first-person personal pronoun being a capital letter-ai or the case of avenue Christophe-Colomb simply existing – directly does anything to reinforce things that are bad in this society. That said, ai do think that changing the situation, or trying to, might have a positive effect in terms of calling attention to a problem.

That positive effect might be very small, but hey, it would at least make me feel better! And perhaps some other people too.

There needs to be a viable alternative to the previously existing standard, though. In the case of avenue Christophe-Colomb, it’s easy: just name it “avenue de l’Île Tortue”, or even something less explicitly anti-colonial, since pretty much anything would be better than what it is now. With the first-person personal pronoun in English, though, what are we supposed to do? This is the place of “ai”.

Of course, there are other possibilities. Kuwasi Balagoon, for example, makes a conscious effort of not capitalizing his first-person personal pronoun in at least some of his writing. Ai think, though, that most people will read an uncapitalized letter-ai in a sentence like “Before becoming a clandestine revolutionary i was a tenant organizer…” as simply being a mistake. This is why ai like “ai”. When ai use “ai” as a pronoun, and especially when ai do so very consistently, it’s pretty obvious that ai have consciously and decidedly added a letter-ae [a, A] to the word, something which is more noticeable than the mere absence of capitalization in Balagoon’s writing.

There is, in fact, another benefit to using “ai” that has little to do with anything political. In text messages and emails and what-have-you, you sometimes CAPITALIZE a word in order put emphasis on it. This is because you often don’t have the option of italicizing words to place emphasis in these situations. Unfortunately, it is pretty much impossible to emphasize a single capitalized letter-ai in this way; you need to do other things, such as placing asterisks on either side of it. Example: “Well, what *I* think is that we should throw popcorn at them.”

With “ai”, though, it IS possible to place emphasis on the first-person personal pronoun with simply capital letters. Like: “He might have had tea with a bear, but AI once fucking wrestled a rainbow.”

Ai stopped using “ai” a few years ago because it was sometimes difficult to remember whether ai was emailing a person in a “professional capacity” or emailing a friend, and so ai would often get it mixed up. For obvious reasons, ai didn’t want to use “ai” with some stranger from whom ai was trying to get work, and as a result, this represented something of a problem. Ai also just stopped caring, and in fact, had already passed through my phase of writing out words like “persynal”, “womyn”, “wimmin”, and other things of the sort. But now, for this blog, ai am bringing it back – largely because ai still actually like it.

Ai am pretty certain that very few people, if any, will adopt the style of using “ai” as their own based on any of these reasons, but that would be okay by me. What ai have presented thus far are just the reasons that ai like using this style, and there should be space for me to use the style that ai like – even if it doesn’t fit others’ dictates of what constitutes proper English orthography – without having the content of what ai am saying be dismissed. Here, ai am asking that, even if you find this style immediately ugly, you don’t dismiss me based on that alone – and ai am also saying that the same good grace should be extended to those who pronounce words somewhat incorrectly, commit unknowing spelling errors, use certain terms in ways that are unfamiliar to us or simply different from the ways we use them, and whatever else that doesn’t actually make the words of such people any less comprehensible.

A great deal of this blog will make arguments that, indeed, people other than myself should do whatever ridiculous thing ai am arguing for. A great deal of this blog will deal with problems of language that, at least in my estimation, are important for all of us. But ai am also engaging in this project because ai want to do so, because ai like language, because ai like having fun with language. That includes writing things in the way ai want to write them, and not necessarily the way that it is most conducive to being understood – though ai think it shouldn’t be very hard to understand, from context, what “ai” means even if you don’t read this post. It’s not necessarily the approach ai’d take for a flyer to be handed out on the street, but it’s the approach ai’m going to take here.