J.K. Rowling is my hero. Ok, not really, but I do admire her at the very least. She is a former French teacher, and as such, has managed to work many plays-on-words into her Harry Potter series. My favorite was Remus Lupin, whose secret I had figured out way before the main characters did. Voldemort is especially creepy to me, and I am very much looking forward to seeing the manifestation of the "big-boned" Madame Maxime and her students from Beauxbatons on the big screen later this year. I think Rowling did master the art of writing English in a French accent, but she unwittingly contributed to the ignorance of anglophone tongues by naming one of her main characters Fleur Delacour.
My aunt, a bibliophile who works in a library and also reads the HP series to her 10-year-old son, pronounces the name "Floor Delacoor". I suppose there is a certain linguistic satisfaction in reading aloud a name that rhymes, but the problem here is that it subsequently serves as a point of reference, giving one license to always pronounce "fleur" as "floor" based on this mistaken assumption.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment