Why did the player Hazard translate into ＂Azar＂ instead of ＂Hazard＂

Player Eden Hazard (Azar) Oriental IC map

Recently, Eden Hazard, the top Belgian star and player of Chelsea Football Club, has been linked with Real Madrid. Azar’s stay is really a major event in today’s football. Azar is famous for his sharp breakthrough and accurate passing ability. He is expected to become another king after Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, and has always been a hot figure in the transfer market. Many China fans will be surprised when they see Hazard’s name: Why didn’t he translate it into "Hazard" but "Azar"?

Azar Belgian national team jersey

An unorthodox Latin descendant

When Azar just rose to fame, he was indeed misinterpreted as "Hazard" by China media, and later corrected as "Azar". This is going to talk about the pronunciation of Hazard. There are three official languages in Belgium, which are distributed in different regions of Belgium, and there is a strong language in different regions, that is, the official language. The official language of Flemish in the north is Dutch, while most of Walloon in the south speaks French, while the area near Germany in the east of Walloon is German-speaking. Brussels, the capital, is bilingual in Dutch and French. Azar was born in La Louvière, Walloon Region (French: La Lou Viè re), only a dozen kilometers away from France, and is a typical French-speaking city. His native language is French, of course, and his name is naturally pronounced in French.

Belgian genius "Hazard"

Hazard is a traditional French surname, so it can’t be pronounced in English or China’s Pinyin. According to the French pronunciation rules, neither the initial consonant H nor the final consonant D of the word Hazard is pronounced, and only the part of azar is pronounced, which is pronounced as [aza]. In this way, Hazard transliterated and became "Azar".

As for why these letters are not pronounced, it is necessary to talk about the history of French pronunciation and French orthography. French belongs to the Romanesque family, and its ancestor is Latin. 52 years ago, Caesar led the Romans to conquer Gaul. Influenced by the Romans, the Celtic-speaking Gauls gradually romanized and began to use the Roman language. Roman Latin naturally became the upper language and common language in Gaul. After the Romans stayed in Gaul for hundreds of years, the Frankish tribes of the Germans invaded the Roman Empire, occupied the Gaul region and mixed with the locals. The name of this land has also become Frank. Although French is a descendant of Latin, it is far from Latin because of the influence of Gauls and later Franks. Although Italian, Spanish and French belong to Romance, the first two are obviously closer to Latin.

The expansion of the Roman Empire

With the Germanic invasion and the division of the Roman Empire, folk Latin gradually formed in various places. It is a popular variant of classical Latin in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Romania and other places, and can be regarded as a dialect of classical Latin in various countries and regions. Strictly speaking, the predecessor of French is not written Latin, but the oral language used by businessmen, soldiers and other folk people. The sound "H" in ancient Latin ceased to be pronounced as early as the end of the Roman Republic, and was even kicked out of the alphabet. This sound was restored in Gaul, which was introduced from Germanic language at the beginning of the Frankish era (481-843).

Barbarian Invasion of Rome and National Migration

With the passage of time, languages in various regions are getting farther and farther away from classical Latin, and most people can’t understand normative Latin. Since the middle of the 8th century, Gaul has even reached the point where even the priest in charge of education can’t understand the most straightforward religious texts. In 813, the church had to ask the priest to preach in the local language. In February, 842, two brothers, Charles Bald, King of the West Frankish Kingdom, and Louis Teutonic, King of the East Frankish Kingdom, swore allegiance to each other in Strasbourg, and opposed their eldest brother, lothaire, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of the Middle Frankish Kingdom. In order to make the soldiers present understand, they did not use Latin, but used Roman spoken language and ancient German spoken language respectively. From this moment on, the local Latin dialect began to be regarded as an independent language. The text of the Strasbourg Oath spoken in Roman is regarded as the earliest written record in ancient French.

The earliest written record in French "Strasbourg Oath"

Pursuing orthodoxy by carving a boat and seeking a sword

Since the ninth century, French document recorders have begun to adopt the method of consistency between words and writing, recording only the sounds they can make, and drawing a clear line with Latin. In the era of Cape Dynasty (987-1328), French developed local norms and implemented orthographic principles (that is, standardized French writing, pronunciation, grammar and other elements). Influenced by Germanic language, they wrote grandis as grant and tarde as tart. However, the first orthography soon became obsolete. Language will change with the passage of time and the change of social environment, just as Chinese has ancient sound, middle ancient sound, modern sound and modern sound, so does French. French is generally considered to be divided into three stages: ancient French (9th-l4 century), medieval French (L4 century-early 17th century) and modern French (early 17th century to present).

In a blink of an eye, in the Middle French period, the ending consonants stopped pronouncing, which became the most important phenomenon in this period. At the end of 14th century, the final r was the first to stop pronouncing, and some people began to use voix instead of voir. Since the 16th century, the Paris dialect began to be non-Germanic, and H was no longer pronounced, which gradually spread to the whole country. However, the orthography at this time did not implement the principle of consistency between words and characters. This is because the spring breeze of Renaissance blew from Italy next door to France, and the atmosphere of being thin today and thick ancient influenced France. As the dominant language on the European continent, French gradually replaced Latin as the common language in Europe and became the most influential language in Europe at that time. European nobles are all proud of speaking French.

However, at this time, the French found that their language was drifting away from classical Latin. Just as many dialects in China like to compete for the orthodoxy of ancient Chinese, the French sprouted the heart of fighting for the orthodoxy of Latin. They believe that if words are abbreviated according to their actual pronunciation, it will change the language of French and create a huge gap between French and Latin. French linguists struggled to stop the disappearance of consonants at the end of words from the beginning, and they succeeded in the fourteenth century. They adopted a kind of orthography contrary to the principle of "consistent words and writing" before, and did the opposite, adopting the orthography of carving a boat and seeking a sword. The new orthography not only does not record the new evolution trend of language, but carries out retro. In this way, grant and tart become grand and tard； respectively; H has also been preserved.

Indo-European family tree

Deeply influenced by Latin, in order to achieve the retro "beauty of words" and, more importantly, to increase their labor income, the copying people adopted the writing method with the most components and kept a large number of silent letters at the end of the word. This has formed a wonderful phenomenon: the orthography of French lags far behind the phonetic changes, and many letters are still preserved in words even if they are not pronounced. Ironically, as the birthplace of Latin, Italy doesn’t even write H, but French still insists on writing. For example, homo in Latin evolved into uomo in modern Italian and homme in modern French, and Italian directly omitted H in spelling. Ferdinand de Saussure, a famous Swiss linguist and known as the "father of modern linguistics", ridiculed the orthography of French as a commemorative return.

"Henry" should be "Only" instead of "Henry"

H in modern French can be divided into two situations. A kind of H is just like no H. The vowels after H can be recited with the previous syllables. The other H is like a tight throat, which is inseparable from the previous syllable. Nevertheless, what they have in common is silence. If readers meet the French who can pronounce H, I’m afraid he is an Arab immigrant from North Africa or his descendants.

After reading this, the reader must have known that Thierry Henry, a famous French football player, translated "Henry" incorrectly. How did this happen? In the 1990s, the foreign language level of sports media practitioners was generally not high. Most people have only been exposed to English as a foreign language, and they read all foreign names according to the pronunciation rules of rules of english pronunciation and even Chinese Pinyin. However, in linguistics, there is a principle that a name follows the master, and the name should be read according to his mother tongue. When "Henry" is pronounced as [ɑ i] in French, it should be transliterated as "Only". However, in my impression, the transliteration of "Only" seems to have been translated correctly by Shanghai Five-Star Sports Channel and titan sports. Relatively speaking, the probability of making mistakes in other industries will be much lower. For example, Henri Léon Lebesgue, a French mathematician, was translated as "Henri Leon Lebesgue" by people in the industry.

1998 French national team jersey

As mentioned above, in addition to the initial H, orthography in French leads to a large number of silent consonants left at the end of words. Except for f, l, r and q, other letters appearing at the end of consonants are usually silent. A typical example is that Paris, the French capital, is pronounced [pai], and the Chinese transliteration is "Paris", not "Paris". In the sports world, there are a lot of mistranslated names because they don’t know the pronunciation rules. Deschamps, a famous player who led the French team to win the football World Cup for the first time, is pronounced [de.] in French. But on November 6th, 2003, unknown so’s Sina Sports transliterated him as the head coach of Monaco team according to English rules. Laurent Blanc, the main member of another World Cup champion in 1998, pronounced in French [lo ɑ bl ɑ], should be translated as "Laurent Brown"; Not "Laurent branko". The same surname is Robert, which is translated by the British and Robert by the French.

Monaco coach "Deschamps"

It can be seen that the defects of affixation brought by French orthography are very obvious. These silent letters are more redundant than affixes. In addition to increasing learners’ memory and writing costs, they also easily lead to misreading and mistranslation by people from other countries who don’t know the truth. André Martinet, a French linguist, was disgusted with this. He once criticized rudely: "Grammatical affixation in French is an obstacle for French speakers. If the time wasted in mastering it is used to learn something else, then this the French will not be such a gentleman. He knows nothing about geography and his intelligence is so low. " Even so, the French people’s awareness of reform is still very weak. They even think that French is famous for its "accurate and clear" words and beautiful pronunciation. Due to the great resistance of conservatives in the ruling and opposition circles, the reform of writing is a thorny issue for France, and the phenomenon of affixing words has not been dealt with.

The French Academy, the institution responsible for standardizing French.

The mistranslations of "Henry" and "Blanco" have been widely used, which is almost "a long story makes a long story", but "widely used mistranslation" does not mean that this mistranslation is correct. It is a major principle to pronounce and translate a name according to its owner, just as Chinese’s name cannot be pronounced and transliterated in Latin according to the Chinese characters of Japan, South Korea and Vietnam in the Chinese writing circle. Now, with the increasing familiarity of Chinese people with languages other than English, it is really gratifying to translate Hazard into Azar instead of Hazard.