Kiribati, pronounced Kiribas

[Rossmoyne]

I believe I read in a book years ago that one of the reasons for the anomaly between the spelling and pronunciation of this island was because the young 'administrator' posted to the island found no letter 's' on his typewriter, therefore typed 'ti' instead. There is a huge amount of information and all sorts of other explanations to be had from Google, but nothing about the typewriter story. Is this a complete figment of my imagination or does anyone else remember the "typewriter" version?

[mallam]

The typewriter story. may not be a figment of your imagination, but doesnt it shriek at you that it's a figment of somebody's?

As I ply my trade in Theoretical and General Linguistics, and unlike so many such tradesmen, actually know a lot of languages, my polyglot instinct at once told me that this is bound to be a matter of contextually determined allophony, in which the realizations (roughly, pronunciations) of a phoneme are determined by the proximity of another. Native speakers are quite often not aware that this happens, and unable by mere volition to make the difference out of context or not infrequently even hear it.

This is particularly likely to happen with /t /and /i / in all sorts of languages, and typically the /t/ is then realized more or less like English 'ts' or 'ch' , or as in this case, 's'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbertese_langua ge is right there for us to confirm that this is indeed the case with Kiribati. It says "/t/ is lenited to [s] before /i/", and has a linked explanation for 'lenited', but you don't really need to bother with that, as it's more or less what I have written above.

What is so delightful (and typical) about this is that it is claimed that the pronunciation with s was intended from the start to approximate to the pronunciation of 'Gilberts', since it is the nearest the speakers of the language can get to it.

Perhaps more familair examples of this sort of thing would be Japanese "Meri-Kurisumasu" or Hawaiian "Mele Kalikimaka," for Merry Christmas.

[mallam]

I feel I must add to my above account that Wiki doesnt get it quite right, as it says "The word Kiribati is just the modern rendition for "Gilberts", so the name is not usually translated into English. "Gilberts" comes from Captain Thomas Gilbert, who along with Captain John Marshall were the first Europeans to discover the Gilbert Islands in 1788."

Unless perhaps 'the modern rendition' means the original and only native rendition which we have to be modern and use instead of the un-PC Gilbertese, or Gilbert Islands

[Rossmoyne]

Many thanks for taking the trouble to answer with such erudition and so comprehensively. Now you mention it, this story may have been a joke in Arthur Grimble's book "A Pattern of Islands" - will check. I 'm not convinced that they were called the Gilberts, they were actually called the Gilbert and Ellis Islands or the Gilbert Islands. Might be that Kiribati might have started off as Gilbert I. If ti really becomes s, then Kiribati is actually pronounced Giribers.
The Kiribati language has these letters:
Letter A B E I K M N NG O R T U W
IPA /�/ /p/ /e/ /i/ /k/ /m/ /n/ /ŋ/ /o/ /ɾ/ /t/ /u/ /βˠ/
Anyway, thanks again, I've learnt a lot following my chance throw away remark to a much travelled colleague!