Furthermore…

I saw a program last night from Polish Television about the Vatican’s art restoration and preservation programs. Real interesting, but the Polish narrator didn’t speak English real well. I bet there are some Polish-American folks who could get a job in their spare time helping the film makers pronounce things better. For tapestries the narrator would say tape-istries. There were a couple of other strange-sounding pronunciations I noticed as well, but I can’t think of them now. I suppose it is desirable in one sense to have a foreign sounding narrator, as it contributes a kind of high-sounding international quality, after the fashion of the announcers on classical music radio programs, who chatter along like Americans, then self-consciously pronounce the names of foreign composers and musicians with foreign phonemes as though instantaneously transporting everyone to Hungary, Germany or Russia. Pretty klassi.