[HN Gopher] Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
___________________________________________________________________
Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
Author : ingve
Score : 260 points
Date : 2021-07-26 00:44 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| HuShifang wrote:
| Not a native speaker, but at least in a Beijing accent, I
| wouldn't say that "Chen" rhymes with "fun." "Cheng" or "Zheng,"
| or "Feng," sure, "fun" works as a comparison. "Chen," "Zhen,"
| etc. would rhyme more with "pen" or "hen."
| zhte415 wrote:
| That one threw me too, quite a few did, and it's certainly not
| a north/south accent thing.
|
| It might be easier just to use one of the many dictionaries
| with embedded audio.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Yeah, I don't understand this one either. One of the first few
| names in this doc too.
| Markoff wrote:
| Wrong title, should read Pronouncing Chinese and Japanese Names
| For English Speakers
|
| I thought it will be some great tool where I enter
| nationality/language of certain person, enter their name and I
| will get pronunciation in English, meanwhile all I got is some
| blog about pronouncing Chinese and Japanese names (which I
| already knew anyway)
| honie wrote:
| I was wondering if someone could comment on the pronunciation of
| "q" in Chinese (Mandarin). From time to time the advice that "q"
| is pronounced as "ch" pops up. While I have no issues with "q"
| sounding like "ch" in "quan", but it bothers me that the "q" in
| "qian" sounds nothing like "ch" to me.
|
| Thank you very much in advance!
|
| Edit: added "but", "to me".
| paradite wrote:
| Native Chinese speaker here.
|
| I tried to tell the difference between "q" and "ch" here by
| pronouncing them. As the other comment noted, "ch" is actually
| a valid pinyin as well, so they are definitely different.
|
| My observation is that for "q" your tongue tip is closer to
| your teeth and for "ch" your tongue tip is somewhere in the
| middle of the mouth. Hope that helps.
| ajuc wrote:
| Is this the difference between cz and c?
|
| https://translate.google.com/?hl=pl&sl=pl&tl=en&text=cza%20%.
| ..
|
| Click on the speaker under Polish.
| enedil wrote:
| I'm native polish speaker and after 3 years of learning
| mandarin, and I need to somehow confirm, and somehow
| rebute. Pinyin ch is almost exactly like polish cz. Pinyin
| q is quite close to c, but to make that sound you need to
| touch your lower teeth with your tongue. In polish the
| tongue stays mostly flat. There is similar difference in x
| vs s and j vs dz.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| "Pronounce q like ch" is good advice for a English speaker, but
| it's worth noting that pinyin does have another consonant
| that's actually written "ch", and the two are quite different
| from each other. To my ear they kind of "sit on either side" of
| the English "ch", and it's not surprising to me that sometimes
| they don't seem to match.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > The goal of this guide is to produce a simple guide to help you
| pronounce a surname from a non-English speaking culture that
| sounds reasonably correct.
|
| FYI, the first sentence of the article isn't proper English. It
| purports to teach how a non-English speaking culture can sound
| resonably correct.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Yup, better would be "pronounce a surname from a non-English
| speaking culture in a way that sounds reasonably correct."
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| There's a lot of redundancy in the opening part of the
| sentence.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| A family friend had parents from New Zealand and Norway. He was
| born in New Zealand, and was named Brent after his grandfather.
|
| As an adult he moved here to Norway, and immediately had an issue
| with his name. In Norwegian "brent" means burnt, and is
| pronounced almost exactly like "Brent".
|
| So, he changed his name to a fairly common Norwegian name: Bernt.
|
| Fast forward a couple of decades and he moves back to New Zealand
| and, as you can imagine, again finds himself in need of a name
| change since everyone is pronouncing his name as "burnt"...
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| That sounds a lot like Oprah. Her given name was Orpah (a
| biblical name)
| mongol wrote:
| Haha... That was quite hilarious actually. On a similar note, a
| childhood friend had last name Eld, meaning "fire" in Swedish.
| That did not work well when it was time for conscriptive
| military service....
| teekert wrote:
| My name is Freek, a sort-of common Dutch name, usually people
| call me Frank from the start (when the name is not written
| anywhere and they only hear it being said), I'll leave it at that
| for Starbucks situations. Otherwise, in a Teams chat for example,
| people see my name and they call me Freak hesitantly. If I leave
| it like that they start to use it with more confidence. For long
| term relations I tell people to pronounce it like "Frake" (like
| brake and snake), which is very close to how it sounds if a Dutch
| person says my name.
|
| Over time, I've come to see my name as a nice conversation
| starter.
| kragen wrote:
| Maybe I should submit a pull request for Spanish names. It'd be
| nice to get Arabic, Hindi, and Russian in there too.
|
| Common errors I've heard for Spanish:
|
| - Juan being pronounced as [wan] rather than [huan] or [xuan]
|
| - Jesus, of course
|
| - Javier mysteriously gets mispronounced (only by British English
| speakers!) with the akSENT on the wrong syLOBBle, as ['hav je]
| HAVyer instead of [hav 'je] hav YAIR (the closest approximation
| fitting English phonotactics to the correct [xab i 'er]).
|
| Other people in the thread mention Jaime, for which [hajmej] is
| much more reasonable than the commonly heard [dZejmi], and
| Vicente for which [bisentej] is a lot better than [vIns@nt] or
| [vintSentej]. (I'd be careful about [bithentej] though; Vicente
| might be from Latin America.) I bet Julian gets [dZuli@n] rather
| than [huli'an] pretty often, too.
|
| The only one I've noticed from Hindi is people pronouncing
| "Rohit" as "Roheat" instead of the straightforward "Rohit". Like,
| "row hit". Couldn't be easier, but for some reason English-
| speakers screw it up all the time. But then, I don't speak Hindi
| or any other Indian language (yet!) so there may be a lot of
| others I'm overlooking.
|
| Also in 02021 there is no excuse for not having some reasonable
| idea about how to pronounce "Nguyen", even if [wIn] is the best
| you can do. Don't go around saying [n@gaj@n].
| SamBam wrote:
| I would submit a small rule for almost _all_ foreign names and
| words, or at the very least European and Middle Eastern ones:
| The letter "e" is almost _never_ pronounced like "bee."
|
| Though I shouldn't be, I am continually surprised by this
| Anglophone quirk. Just yesterday I was at a book club after we
| had all read the book "Piranesi," and without failure every
| American pronounced it "Piranisi." There are two different
| vowels there, i and e. Most languages besides English have the
| expectation that different letters are pronounced differently.
| I know English is weird in this regard.
|
| My rule of thumb: if it's a foreign word and it has the letter
| "e," default to "eh" and you'll be close 90% of the time.
| kragen wrote:
| Well, it's certainly true that "e" for [i] is almost unique
| to English.
|
| But it's pretty common for languages to preserve phonetic
| distinctions in their orthography that have disappeared from
| the spoken language--Latin American Spanish has silent "h",
| "z"/"c"/"s", and "b"/"v", so "Helvecia" would be pronounced
| exactly the same way if it were spelled any of "Helbecia",
| "Helbezia", "Helbesia", "Helvezia", "Helvesia", "Elbecia",
| "Elbezia", "Elbesia", "Elvecia", "Elvezia", or "Elvesia", and
| if you think "Helvezia" is impossible I refer you to
| "azimut", "zinc", and "enzima". And on my local blacksmithing
| group on Fecebutt I regularly see people spelling "haber" as
| "aver". Not to mention "k"/"qu"/"c"--no reason "cuakerismo",
| "folklorico", and "kilovatio" couldn't be spelled
| "cuaquerismo", "folclorico", and "quilovatio", but they
| aren't. _?Kesesto?_
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4DbC1rbERg
|
| In the other direction, it's pretty common for languages to
| have more vowels than the Latin alphabet, like English's 13
| or so (14 in my idiolect). Even Latin itself had 10 vowels.
| There are several different ways to handle this problem: you
| can just hope people guess the right pronunciation from
| context (like modern English and classical Latin, though
| modern transcriptions of classical Latin often have macrons
| to help you out); you can use digraphs, as in "floe" and
| "each"; you can use a different alphabet with more vowels,
| like bopomofo (12 or 17 vowel signs, depending on whether you
| count codas that include consonants) or Cyrillic (9 or 13
| vowel signs, depending on how you feel about diacritics) or
| hangeul (10, 21, or 22 vowel signs, again depending on how
| you count); or you can use diacritics, as in Portuguese "a"
| [a], "a" [a], "a" [a], "a" [a]. Or some combination.
|
| Speaking of Portuguese, though, many dialects of Portuguese
| are an exception to your generally excellent rule: "livre" is
| _totally_ pronounced [livri] in, for example, Rio Grande do
| Sul. This is made more complicated by the fact that in
| stressed syllables it 's totally [e] and not [i].
|
| I think [e] "90% of the time" is an exaggeration given that
| only 86% of people are non-Chinese, and Chinese is another
| exception; as noted in the original article, "e" in hanyu
| pinyin is [@], as in French (another 1% of people). But [i]
| is a very rare value for "e" outside English.
| random12345678 wrote:
| do you mean Chinese and Japanese names for English speakers?
| sverhagen wrote:
| My name is "Sander". It's a common Dutch calling name, related to
| the (baptismal, in my case) name Alexander. I have always
| introduced myself in the US as "sender", which is easy and fine
| to me, but not how you pronounce it in Dutch, where the "a" is
| more like in the English "hard" (I suppose). I don't care. Until
| my mom visited, who started calling out everyone in my sphere for
| mispronouncing my name, despite my pleading to leave it alone...
| oh, well...
| Ambroos wrote:
| I wonder if you can use a rhyme to help people. Sander, rhymes
| with wander (for Americans). Bjork inspired me with her own
| brilliant rhyming word. I'll leave it up to you to discover
| what she uses: https://youtu.be/AGtMv-EQp20
|
| For my own name, Ambroos (Dutch as well), I've yet to find a
| good English rhyming word. I've just settled with telling
| people to pronounce it as Ambrose. It's better than people
| turning it into Am-bruce. For TTS I sometimes use Ahmbrohs.
| eythian wrote:
| Hm, Ambroos is a tricky one. The best I could think of would
| be "arm" (assuming they're not with a rhotic-r accent, though
| I could imagine people then making it sound like aam) +
| "close" (as in dichtbij, not sluiten.)
| yosito wrote:
| I suppose you don't like the way Americans pronounce the A in
| the English word "sander". I'm multilingual and it's gotten
| difficult for me to be sure how native speakers pronounce
| things, but here are some other variations that come to mind
| that might make sense to a native English speaking American:
|
| Xander - a common nickname for Alexander. The x is pronounced
| as a z, but it still has the problem with the American a.
|
| Sunder - Not as common, but it's a name Americans might have
| heard and in my opinion is closer to the Dutch Sander than
| "sender".
|
| San Der - For the large percentage of Americans who are
| familiar with Spanish pronunciation, you might have luck with
| this spelling, but those Americans probably aren't the ones who
| mispronounce the Dutch version.
|
| "Like Shaun Der, but with an S instead of an Sh on the front" -
| The way I explain the Hungarian variant Sandor to Americans is
| "like Shaun Door".
| dhosek wrote:
| I remember when I learned how to pronounce the Dutch _ui_ which
| I had been treating as if it were Spanish (wee). Once I learned
| it corresponded to English ow, suddenly a whole host of written
| Dutch opened itself up to me.
| schoen wrote:
| If you happen to know German, ui --> au is an amazing
| discovery (huis --> Haus, uitgang --> Ausgang, various
| others).
| bjowen wrote:
| I cannot thank you enough
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree that the best mapping of Pinyin "e" is to
| the English "u".
|
| To my ears, Chinese "he" sounds closer to (non-American) English
| "her" than "huh".
|
| Same for "chen" - "chun" captures neither the Chinese phonemes
| nor the English spelling. I'd argue even "Cheng" (hard e) is less
| likely to cause confusion/disrespect.
| dialogbox wrote:
| The title reminds me my favourite yt video about Korean name.
|
| https://youtu.be/p1RKkRCiU90 Title: "having a non-white name" by
| ProZD
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| It annoys me when people use Github for blogging because that's
| what they're used to, especially if it's not the best medium.
|
| What do you think, are elaborate markdown tables the best way to
| show how to pronounce something, or... a wav file?
| freedomben wrote:
| I could see myself using Github for something like this because
| people can easily contribute by sending pull requests.
| Particularly a page like this I would hope people with language
| experience in other areas would send PRs to build a nice big
| reference.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| The main value is I think for people to stop and think about
| where they stand on the issue.
|
| I read through the post and agree with you that I still don't
| have a clear understanding of the correct sounds, but I doubt I
| would have gone sound by sound trying to hear the differences.
|
| Overall my takeaway is that there are common names and sound
| that are worth remembering, I checked a few like Nguyen, and
| will probably check others when coming across some Chinese name
| that reminds me of the article.
| felipellrocha wrote:
| I mean, that sounds like a you problem more than anything.
| Sophistifunk wrote:
| Is this the wrong link? All I see is how to pronounce 3 Chinese
| consonants.
| pelasaco wrote:
| I would love see something like that for Germans. I have the
| impression that Germans get quite lazy or simply ill will to even
| try to pronounce it and it's quite disrespectful. If you are
| German and you are reading it. That's for you.
| jldugger wrote:
| "Non-English" -> Mainland Chinese.
|
| Well, it's a start I guess. Probably worth adding Vietnamese
| considering how few people in the US know how to pronounce
| "Nguyen".
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| That's the one I looked for on the list.
|
| I knew a guy that went by "Win", is it always that?
| [deleted]
| tdeck wrote:
| Personally I can more or less do Nguyen but I still don't know
| how to pronounce Huynh.
| wink wrote:
| Be careful though, not too long ago I watched a YouTube video
| in very demeaning tone of how to not offend people yadda yadda,
| but it turns out they pronounced it completely differently than
| a guy from school pronounced his own family name. (He was born
| there and emigrated, so not some generations-old mishmash).
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Thought the same, would like to know how to pronounce some
| Polish and other Scandinavian and European pronunciations as
| well.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The one thing I've learned about pronouncing Nguyen is that
| everybody agrees English speakers pronounce it wrong. And when
| I say everybody agrees I mean you can't find an example of
| somebody saying it where there isn't further debate that
| example is also incorrect somehow. Typically because it's an
| anglicized version but also debates on dialects. At this point
| I'm not sure there is an always "right" way to say that name in
| an English context even if there is a "correct" way it should
| be said.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| Vietnamese is great, it's another really regular latinization
| scheme. A few things are a little bit different from your
| default English interpretation of letters, but all vowels etc
| are completely predictable (... once you know the rules).
| Unfortunately all the helpful diacritics telling you exactly
| how to pronounce things normally get left off names in an
| English context. :(
| axaxs wrote:
| Ng is a sound most Americans cannot make, including myself.
|
| I just say 'wen' now, which is a step up from my initial
| 'engooyin'.
| blackshaw wrote:
| The "ng" sound exists in English, it's just that we don't
| have it at the beginning of words like Vietnamese does.
|
| Say "singer", then say it again without the "si".
| Congratulations - you know how to pronounce a word that
| starts with "ng".
| [deleted]
| citrin_ru wrote:
| Useless fact about Russian names surnames - if you'll try to read
| how it is written in an ID (e. g. a password) you'll likely
| mispronounce it, but if you'll read how people write their name
| in less formal situations e. g. in email, you have more chances
| to get it right.
|
| There are multiple common ways to transliterate Russian to Latin
| alphabet [1]. For some reason for passports Russian authorities
| chose the scheme which is more confusing to English speakers than
| other popular schemes.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian
| toastal wrote:
| No one could produce the sounds for my name in Thailand, so I
| just picked a nickname (as is the local custom) and I've rolled
| with that as my primary name ever since.
| peteretep wrote:
| Having a common name they've heard before helps to some degree
| here, but also there's a Thai way of saying it and woe-betide
| you if you don't say it the Thai way...
|
| My favourite Thai pronunciation is the common Thai nickname
| "Apple" which is a loanword. However they pronounce it "ah-
| poon" because the character they use for the l sound (l) is
| pronounced as an n in the terminal position. Also, Thais like
| to shorten words, so sometimes this nickname becomes simply
| Ple, pronounced "Poon" O_o
| toastal wrote:
| The schwa + 'l' ("le") is the exact sound I'm talking about.
| As a someone wanting to practice good privacy, having an
| alias is always nice.
|
| It's pretty obvious now though. Most all 'weird' Thai
| pronunciations for English come from transliterating English
| into the RTGS Romanization system (whose sounds don't align
| with English, like 'p' being p, the unaspirated version of
| that sound which English doesn't have) an _then_ translating
| from the Romanization to the Thai abugida to be pronounced.
| Speculating, since someone misunderstood stress syllables
| always put a falling tone on the final syllable and now you
| have the Thai pronunciation. Pepsi isn 't translated as
| phonemes as ephphchi, but p-e-p-s-i as p-e-p-ch-*ii; smash in
| that falling tone and you get eppchii which honest to
| Godzilla sounds like bep-SEE instead of PEP-si. Ask someone
| to read your ID and they'll use this same system to read it
| instead of trying to think about how English writing works.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| Something that always kind of bugs me is when I am traveling at
| an airport in the US, and there is an announcement like
| "Passengers X and Y, please come to gate 7" and the announcer
| obviously has no idea how to pronounce non-English names. This is
| even in airports like LAX which see a massive number of travelers
| from Latin America and East Asia.
|
| I would think that after making those sorts of announcements
| frequently for one's job, one would learn just a few minor
| adjustments to improve accuracy.
|
| The basic ones I can think of that would increase accuracy
| measurably are:
|
| 1. How to pronounce "Nguyen"
|
| 2. Spanish 'j' is close to English 'h'
|
| 3. Spanish 'h' is silent
|
| 4. Spanish 'll' is close to English 'y'
|
| 5. Chinese 'q' is close to English 'ch'
|
| 6. Chinese 'c' is like English 'ts'
|
| 7. Chinese 'x' is close to English 'sh'
|
| 8. Most languages do not use 'a' as in the American English
| "and". If you have to guess, better is 'a' as in "father". In
| general if you have to guess, the vowels of Spanish are usually
| going to be closer than the vowels of English for most languages.
|
| If the airport announcers were taught these basics on day 1 it
| would make a tangible difference in people's lives for so little
| invested effort.
| mc32 wrote:
| And English 'r' is not 'R' despite having the same latin
| alphabet letter, with rare exceptions in certain dialects. And
| plurals are easy, just add an 's' to most.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The basic ones I can think of that would increase accuracy
| measurably are:
|
| > 1. How to pronounce "Nguyen"
|
| You say that like there's only one way to do it.
| Sophistifunk wrote:
| I've always aimed at "ngwen" although as a native English
| speaker I'm still not great at starting words with "ng"
| despite years of trying. It's more common in Australia than
| most western countries as a lot of Aboriginal words use it so
| we have it in place names, such as "Ngunawal" an area near
| Canberra. On TV (since we have a few celebrities named
| Nguyen) they just wuss out and tend to go with "Win"
| sieutsoi wrote:
| I'm Vietnamese, but I never figured out a good way to teach
| people pronouncing "ng" until a recent vocal lesson, so
| I'll give it a try here. When you say "Go", you'll find the
| back of your tongue make a quick contact with the roof of
| your mouth to make the "k" consonant. If you try to
| gradually slow that down, keeping your tongue touching the
| roof for longer, and tone down the edge in "k", and you'll
| get "ng". And hopefully you'll be saying "Ngo" after a few
| tries.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Yes, "g" and "ng" both involve the back of your tongue
| contacting the roof of your mouth. (Technically, that
| area of the roof of your mouth is the "velum", and they
| are called "velar" consonants.)
|
| The difference is that, with "g", the flow of air is out
| from your mouth (and the "g" interrupts that flow, which
| is why a "g" sound cannot be held), whereas with "ng",
| the flow of air is out from your nose (which is why a
| "ng" sound can be held indefinitely).
| dirkt wrote:
| > I'm still not great at starting words with "ng" despite
| years of trying
|
| The trick that worked for me is that I know how to end on
| "ng", and that I can hold that sound. So I froze my mouth
| in that position, and used that position at the start of
| the word. After doing that a few times, it became easy.
| xeromal wrote:
| I just say "Win" and hope for the best. lol
| refurb wrote:
| Indeed. When I worked with a partner in Asia I asked how to
| pronounced "Ng" because I heard it said a few different ways
| (different from the US version of "ing"). Turns out they are
| all correct, just different dialects.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| If you were to pick any major Vietnamese dialect and learn
| that pronunciation, you will be much, much closer than the
| oft-repeated-in-America "nuh-gooyen".
|
| Most Americans who learn how to pronounce it "correctly"
| learn something like "wen", which while not quite right, is
| still a huge improvement.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| It's not even one name. Nguyen is the very popular family
| name & Nguyen is a distinct given name with a distinct
| pronunciation.
| dorkwood wrote:
| > First, if you can remember only 3 things:
|
| > Zh is like a J sound (as in "Jam") > X is like a Sh sound (as
| in "Shot") > Q is like a Ch sound (as in "China")
|
| This is very useful to know, but I have a question. When
| converting the original characters into English, why didn't the
| creators of this system choose letters which more closely match
| the native pronunciation? For example, why "Qi" instead of "Chi"?
| bmn__ wrote:
| > When converting the original characters into English
|
| Latin characters is correct, not English
|
| > why didn't the creators of this system choose letters which
| more closely match the native pronunciation?
|
| Because among other things the designers of Pinyin wanted the
| users to be able to type the letters on commonly available
| typewriters (in the 1950s).
|
| A 100% match is of course the IPA, but that was exceedingly
| difficult to type until late after the advent of personal
| computers. Pinyin is a compromise. Compare:
|
| tcki: * qi
|
| tskr * chi
| paradite wrote:
| Native Chinese speaker (though not linguist) here.
|
| For "q" and "ch", both are valid pinyin. "ch" in pinyin is
| actually the same as "ch" in English in terms of pronunciation.
| "q" in pinyin doesn't have a equivalent in English so it is
| just "q", which is similar to "q" but not really.
| tralarpa wrote:
| It was explained to me that the difference between "q" and
| "ch" (and the same for "j" and "zh") is the position of the
| tongue, that is it is rolled back in "ch" and "zh". Correct?
| paradite wrote:
| That is correct. However it's quite hard to describe how to
| pronounce it exactly in words. I guess it comes from
| hearing it and practicing it.
| GordonS wrote:
| Basic-level Mandarin speaker here, but well-versed in Pinyin.
|
| There are actually kind of 2 "sh" sounds and 2 "ch" sounds in
| Mandarin.
|
| "Sh" is a "heavy" sound, as in "shot", where your mouth makes
| an O shape, whereas "X" is a much "lighter" sound that AI don't
| believe has a comparison in English.
|
| Similarly, "Ch" is a "heavy" sound, and "q" is much lighter
| sound.
| k__ wrote:
| I know a Xue, and her pronounciation didn't sound like shoe.
|
| More like kshoe but the end was something in between an "u" and a
| German "u".
|
| Languages are hard. I just have to think about "Sh" and "Shch"
| which both sound a bit like "sh", but with subtle differences for
| English speakers.
| p1esk wrote:
| The title should be "How to pronounce Chinese surnames"
| _kst_ wrote:
| The initial commit was 2 hours ago as I type this. The author
| is probably planning to expand it.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Decades of watching cricket has given me a bit of a handle on
| South Asian names. And I enjoy watching cricket.
| kavothe wrote:
| One of us! One of us! One of us!
| qalmakka wrote:
| It always puzzles me how little knowledge of foreign languages
| the average English native speaker has.
|
| Every time I hear an English speaker trying to pronounce Italian
| or Spanish words it generally ends up in a complete disaster
| (especially Italian). For instance, lots of folks haven't
| realized that the Great Vowel Shift happened, and so try to
| pronounce vowels as in English, without realizing that 99% of
| cases, that's wrong.
|
| Also, English speakers have an incredibly hard time not only
| pronouncing but even understanding the whole concept of geminated
| consonants, which makes them funnily destroy Italian or Japanese
| names (gemination is especially important for Italian, where
| certain words are otherwise undistinguishable, se calo/callo,
| casa/cassa, pala/palla, ..).
| mmarq wrote:
| I find it very annoying when Italian speakers pronounce foreign
| names using sounds that do not exist in Italian. Pronouncing
| "Merkel" as a German would, makes it impossible to write and
| unrecognisable to 99% of Italian speakers. It is not reasonable
| to expect people to be able to pronounce and process sounds
| from all languages. It doesn't mean that one shouldn't even
| try, but if your name is " Friedrich" you should accept that
| it's unpronounceable for an Italian and that "fredrik" is
| probably good enough. Likewise I don't expect English speakers
| to pronounce my name correctly (they never will), and I'm sure
| I don't pronounce theirs as a native speaker would.
|
| As a side note, I find it funny that the English seem to enjoy
| pronouncing guttural Rs and nasal sounds when they say French
| names. The English love saying "Macron" (usually producing the
| sound of a lung exploding and being expelled through their
| nose), while they don't mind vandalising Italian or Spanish
| names.
| qalmakka wrote:
| > if your name is " Friedrich" you should accept that it's
| unpronounceable for an Italian and that "fredrik"
|
| I think that the only unpronounceable things in "Freidrich"
| for an Italian speaker are the guttural Rs and the /c/ sound
| at the end. Most Italians are acquainted to the fact that
| 'ei' is /ai/ in German thank to South Tyrol and names such as
| "Einstein" being common knowledge - nobody would ever
| pronounce it /'einstein/. Thus an Italian would probably not
| mind pronouncing it as /fraidrik/, with a rolled R (which
| isn't technically incorrect in German, AFAIK) and a /k/ sound
| in place of /c/.
| jagger27 wrote:
| I think people really overdo the idea that certain sounds
| simply cannot be replicated by non-native speakers. If
| there is any remote proximity to native speakers and a bare
| minimum effort is made to practice tricky sounds, it's
| totally doable.
|
| I certainly picked up French quite easily in school. Later,
| in university, I picked up Italian very easily (though I
| had some exposure from older relatives). More recently, I
| absorbed a tiny bit of "hey how are you" Mandarin from
| coworkers, who were surprised at my ability to accurately
| parrot some words after a little bit of practice.
| mmarq wrote:
| Of course you can replicate all sounds, I can pronounce
| Friedrich, but an Italian speaker with no exposure to
| German (which is 99% of the population) will inevitably
| butcher it, because both the R and the "voiceless palatal
| fricative" do not exist in Italian phonology. This
| hypothetical Friedrich can either accept that he is
| talking to foreigners that can't pronounce his name as
| native Germans, or he may spend 2 hours trying to explain
| how to articulate a voiceless palatal fricative, assuming
| he can put that in words (I wouldn't know where to start
| to explain how to pronounce "gli"). We all know what a
| polite person would do.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Perhaps my perspective is skewed as a Canadian
| consistently exposed to multiple languages in media and
| in casual conversation.
|
| Italy shares borders with two German majority speaking
| countries (Switzerland and Austria) and is close to
| Germany itself. Wouldn't Northern Italians especially
| have good exposure to them?
|
| As for the Italian 'gli', that was probably the hardest
| for me to pick up.
| mmarq wrote:
| No, apart from Alto Adige, which is an Austrian region
| occupied after WWI, still inhabited by Austrians, nobody
| has any exposure to German. (I honestly don't know if
| they consider themselves Italians or Austrians, but they
| usually are native German speakers and have limited
| knowledge of Italian).
|
| It is hard to find a 45+ year old Italian who knows a
| foreign language.
| qalmakka wrote:
| Sure certain sounds can definitely be picked by non-
| native speakers. I'm not an English or German native
| speaker, but I've learned to pronounce /x/, /c/, /th/,
| /d/ and the guttural Rs just fine, all sounds I didn't
| grow up with. It took time, exercise and willpower, and
| I'm kind of a language nut so I always put in some extra
| effort to get my pronunciation right. A common person
| that doesn't know the slightest amount of German is
| definitely not going to put in the effort to learn how to
| say [ch] right, just to say "Freidrich".
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| I'd be interested in some examples for both, if you could!
|
| I'm a stupid/ignorant English speaker, because I only know
| English and German so can't pronounce Italian intuitively.
| qalmakka wrote:
| Italian is somewhat simple to pronounce (probably it is not,
| but I like believing that).
|
| - The cardinal rule is that EVERY SINGLE LETTER MUST BE READ.
| We don't write unnecessary stuff, we don't eat letters like
| in French.
|
| - The only exception is the letter h, which we use sparingly
| by itself as a Latin leftover, and is ALWAYS silent. Like
| "ho" and "o" sound the same.
|
| - there are only 7 vowels (English has around 16? 17?), and
| no "weird" consonants.
|
| - E and O have two allophones, but everyone in Italy has a
| different accent so it's quite irrelevant how you pronounce
| them as long as it's a "boring" E and O, like in the English
| "eh". The O sound is especially difficult for English
| speakers, because O is almost always pronounced like "ou"
| /oU/. Just try to drop the /U/ part. Italian vowels are
| boring and plain. They don't sound fancy or complicated. They
| are barebones and flat.
|
| - In general, _1 letter = 1 sound_. This is quite a hard
| rule, and it 's rarely broken.
|
| - There's a few gotchas to this, like [gn] and [gl] which
| sound like the Spanish [n] and [ll] respectively1.
|
| - [gh] is always a hard g, like in English "get". [gi] and
| [ge] are _always_ soft Gs, like the one in the English word
| "justice". The same applies to [c]: [ch] is hard (read it as
| k), [ci]/[ce] are like in "cherry".
|
| - [l] is never dark, while in English it often is. L in
| Italian always sounds the same, /l/, as in "litter".
|
| - Syllables are not as stressed as in English. English has
| this tendency to "squish" one part of a word together and
| then slow down at the end. Italian usually has a quite
| "constant" tempo, with a bigger emphasis on the "accent",
| which is a stress put on a specific syllable.
|
| The biggest hurdle IMHO for English speakers are geminated
| sounds (i.e. double letters), which do not exist _at all_
| AFAIK in English, and that are often fundamental to
| distinguish words in Italian. It's something conceptually
| similar to what Japanese go through when they learn English
| and discover that so many words require a distinction between
| /r/ and /l/, like right and light.
|
| For instance, "pollo" means chicken, while "polo" is pole. An
| English speaker will usually pronounce them the same.
|
| It's also important to remember that English went through the
| Great Vowel Shift, so it's whole alphabet is now way more
| messed up compared to basically every other language that
| uses the Latin alphabet. Also, the Latin alphabet was
| designed around the phonology of Latin, so it's very good at
| representing Italian phonetically, while quite bad to
| represent Germanic languages (way too many vowels). Given
| that you know German, you can use the German reading of vowel
| letters with Italian, and it would probably work better than
| the English one. German also has lots of vowels, but they
| tend to write them closer to how Romance languages do (so A
| is /a/, e is /e/, ...)
|
| 1 [gl] sounds /y/ only when followed by i, like in "sceglie".
| Otherwise, it sounds like /gl/ like in English "glue"
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| There are some geminated sounds in English, mostly in
| compounds e.g. "roommate", "midday", "misspell".
| qalmakka wrote:
| That's right, I had never realized those existed. They
| could be a good way to teach people how to pronounce
| geminated sounds.
| edanm wrote:
| You're making some _very_ broad generalizations, which is why
| you are puzzled IMO.
|
| Firstly, "English speakers" includes many people who speak
| multiple languages. Technically, English speakers also includes
| people who are non-native English speakers, who by definition
| know another language.
|
| Secondly, there are many native English speakers who speak a
| second language, or who are at least exposed enough to second
| languages to know how they sound. For example, many states in
| the United States have a very large Hispanic population, parts
| of Canada have people who speak both English and French, many
| people from England speak second languages (French is fairly
| common if I recall correctly).
|
| I think who you're thinking of are _only_ the native English-
| speaking people who are _not_ much exposed to other languages.
| There is a fairly large population of these, because the United
| States is fairly large and has lots of areas that are
| surrounded by only English speakers (as opposed to most other
| countries in the world, whose neighbors speak another
| language). Of course if you 're only looking at the subset of
| people who _aren 't_ exposed to another language, you'd expect
| to see them have little knowledge of foreign languages!
|
| (Side note: I wonder if even this phenomenon is decreasing,
| given greater immigration, the Internet, foreign TV/Movies
| being more available/popular, etc.)
| wink wrote:
| In my (limited) experience there is no discernible difference
| between Americans and British people mispronouncing Italian
| (or German, for that matter) and to a degree Spanish words.
|
| I think this is what the parent poster meant. If your native
| language is English AND you don't know any others, then your
| mispronunciations will be similar.
| qalmakka wrote:
| This, exactly. I also saw a quite big difference between
| monolingual English speakers and Italian speakers. The
| average monolingual Italian speaker that has had a basic
| exposure to certain English words through TV or media in
| general WILL definitely mispronounce the words, but the
| result is never so corrupted and garbled to result
| incomprehensible to an English speaker. For instance, the
| average Italian might pronounce a word like "cocktail" as
| /'koktel/ instead of the correct English /'kakteIl/, or
| "underground" as /ander'graund/ instead of /^nd@'graUnd/;
| I've yet to find an English speaker that hasn't studied
| Italian that doesn't do butcherings like /S@'ba:da/, which
| an Italian won't definitely recognize as "ciabatta" due to
| the fact that it is supposed to sound /tSa'batta/. I think
| it's a process somewhat similar to how Japanese corrupts
| loanwords, but in the other direction: English has a vastly
| larger array of sounds compared to Italian, so speakers
| somewhat fail to understand that Romance languages (except
| French and friends, but we don't talk about French) are
| usually much "flatter" in sound than your average Germanic
| language with 16 vowels.
| edanm wrote:
| I wonder if it is indeed a difference in base language,
| or just a difference of exposure. I assume that, even
| without "trying", almost every Italian has more exposure
| to English than English speakers have to Italian.
| qalmakka wrote:
| My personal theory is that it's mostly due to exposure
| and cultural influence. The English speaking world is
| mostly refractory towards the non-English speaking world,
| i.e., books and movies published in Italian will almost
| always never get an English translation because there
| really isn't a market for translated novels. In the same
| way, Italian singers and bands have 0 chances of success
| unless they start singing in English; that's also the
| reason why at Eurovision only a very few countries sing
| in their own languages.
|
| This causes people to hear English sounds since their
| very early childhood - in song, mostly. Movies are
| dubbed, but in general names of non translatable things
| are kept as-is, with a "flattened" but somewhat correct
| pronounciation.
|
| English is also a mandatory subject in school. While the
| vast majority of students suck badly in that subject (I
| think among my classmates only 3 people, counting myself,
| had a mark above a passing grade in high school), at
| least you get that Millennials and some Gen X at least
| can grasp how stuff is supposed to get pronounced, so
| they can correct their parents or relatives when they say
| something completely out of place. I don't think there
| are enough people knowing a foreign language in English-
| speaking countries to offset this, so the "creative"
| pronunciations tend to stick and become the norm.
| bernardv wrote:
| A great idea, and useful not just for English speakers. My French
| background doesn't make me any better at pronouncing Chinese
| names!
| tasogare wrote:
| Try searching for EFEO (Ecole francaise d'extreme Orient)
| transcriptions instead. That system was made for French
| sprakers and the resulting pronunciation should be somewhat
| understandable by a native. I wish that system would have been
| kept in use for education (a least in the beginning) because
| badly pronunced pinyin cause mistakes that stick for years in
| learners.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > My French background doesn't make me any better at
| pronouncing Chinese names!
|
| It would have, back when the sound currently written "r" was
| written "j" instead.
| enriquto wrote:
| The "opposite" side of this issue is people who intentionally
| adopt a pronounceable name of their destination country. I may
| have observed that, but I'm not really sure. Some of my Chinese
| students, who could barely speak French, were called totally
| french-sounding names like "Cedric" or "Pauline". I guess they
| invented them on the spot, to avoid people butchering their real
| names. But I never thought of a non-awkward way to ask them about
| that.
| fqye wrote:
| Chinese has this idiom Ru Xiang Sui Su , meaning in other
| people's land you follow other people's custom.
|
| It is a culture of us to make the hosts feel comfortable by
| giving ourselves a name of the hosting country, though of
| course some Chinese chose not to.
|
| A french friend who worked in China for a long time gave
| himself a very nice Chinese name Ou Da Zhuang , literally
| Europe, Big And Strong. It is a very down to earth Chinese
| name.
|
| He was liked instantly when he introduced his Chinese name.
| tremon wrote:
| At uni I had a Vietnamese classmate in my group called Thanh.
| This was easy enough to pronounce, or so we thought. One day he
| introduced us to his brother, called Than. If I remember
| correctly, the difference between their names was in the
| melodic intonation, which none of us could master.
|
| Ultimately, we ended up naming then Hans and Daan. I don't
| recall if they were bemused or bewildered by our inability to
| distinguish their names, but they accepted their new names with
| grace.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| I have my phone set up in English. Google maps is hilarious and
| basically unusable when it tries to pronounce street names.
| eythian wrote:
| While my phone is in English, I have Google Maps set to Dutch
| so that it will pronounce street names correctly (in English
| it'll butcher "Spui", but however it says "Utrechtsestraat" is
| pretty much unrecognisable.)
|
| However there's an annoying/funny bug. If you open maps and
| start navigation, it's fine. However if, while navigation is
| running, you switch to another app temporarily, the language
| voice will change to the English voice, but the direction-
| generation part will still be generating directions in Dutch.
| This then becomes the worst of all possible worlds, as not only
| are the street names being butchered, but the instructions are
| too. In particular, "sla rechtsaf" (turn right) becomes "ess
| ell aye rektsaaf" as it thinks it's an acronym.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| A majority of the street names around Santa Fe where I live are
| named in Spanish. I'm always quite impressed that (english
| language) gmaps manages to say "Suh-ree-os" for "Cerrillos",
| but every once in a while it totally goofs up some Spanish
| streetname, for no apparent reason.
| Y_Y wrote:
| This happens in Ireland too. Even though mostly people speak
| English, a lot of the place names have a spelling that's a
| compromise between the Irish Language original and the
| "Anglicised" pronunciation. Any system (including Google Maps)
| that doesn't specifically add phonetic pronunciation has no
| hope. Good examples include "Graiguenamanagh", "Dun Laoighre"
| and the classic "Cobh".
| ulfw wrote:
| Oddly enough, pronouncing non-German names is much easier for me
| as a German-native speaker as many sounds (in the linked github
| above) are pronounced the same in German as in e.g. Japanese
| (thus we'd always pronounce "a" as "ah" anyway or "i" as "ee"). I
| change how I pronounce letters for English, not for many other
| languages.
| ithinkso wrote:
| People are giving pronunciation tips for other languages in the
| comments, here are tips for polish. Polish often seems
| incomprehensible for english speakers because of the sheer amount
| of consonants though it actually flows quite nicely if you know
| the rules
|
| 'sz', 'cz' - those are equivalent to 'sh' (shop,shell) and 'ch'
| (chop, check)
|
| 'w' - it's a hard 'v' as in 'very', 'vary'. Always, no exceptions
| and never anything else, it's Ko-v-alski (Kowalski) and Le-v-
| ando-v-ski (Lewandowski). This is, I think, the most common
| mistake when reading polish names because english speakers often
| soften the 'w' to english 'w' as in 'when'/'why'
|
| 'L or l' - that's the thing you think of when you see 'w' in
| english. It's the same sound as in 'when'/'why'/'when'. It's not
| a weird accent on 'L', for some reason we don't have 'v' in our
| alphabet and we moved 'v' sound to 'w' and 'w' sound to 'l'
|
| o - it's called 'closed u', the same as normal, open u,
| pronounced as in 'put'/'dude'. The only difference between open
| and closed 'u' is in writing, none in speaking
|
| y - a vowel, I don't think the sound exists in english but often
| 'yyyyyy...' in polish is used as 'ummmmm...' in english
|
| a, c, e, n, s, z, z - good luck ;)
|
| One thing that makes polish a bit easier is that it's
| pronunciation is 98% consistent, you need to learn the sound of
| each letter or digraph once and it will never change so every
| polish person will pronounce even made-up words in the same way
| because there's only one way (you may write it incorrectly as in
| the open/closed u above, or z/rz, but you will read it back
| correctly so just don't show anyone how you've written it :) )
| felipelemos wrote:
| z has the sound of soft g, as in germs
| ajuc wrote:
| g in germs would be "dz" not "z" in Polish. Same sound as j
| in English - for example in "jungle" (dzungla in Polish). As
| usual - English encodes it in many ways Polish always as
| "dz".
|
| Polish "z" without "d" before it is more like French j for
| example in "je taim".
| jgtrosh wrote:
| Sorry but it's << je t'aime >>
| pomian wrote:
| Zak = Jacques in French. Which is easier?
| ajuc wrote:
| Yup Polish is actually quite regular in pronunciation, there
| are very few exceptions and only about a dozen rules to
| remember to be able to pronounce any word.
|
| The reputation comes from different conventions. In English
| letter+h is the escape code (gh, th, sh, ch) in Polish it's
| letter+z (rz,sz,cz,dz,dz,dz,dzi).
|
| Especially vowels are much easier than in English. Each vowel
| in Polish maps to exactly one sound and vice versa.
|
| > y - a vowel, I don't think the sound exists in english
|
| it's the English short i like in bIt. As is the rule- Polish
| has a special letter for that sound and English has 2 sounds
| encoded the same way and you have to remember which is which :)
|
| Another difference is that Polish j is English y. And English j
| is Polish dz (dzungla = jungle).
|
| n is the same sound as the funny n in Spanish word for Spain:
| Espana
|
| > w is v [..] Always, no exceptions and never anything else
|
| There actually are exceptions, but they are regular as well - w
| before last syllable is often devoiced to f. Levandofski. But
| even most Polish speakers don't know that it's the rule, they
| just speak that way without thinking :) And if you ignore it
| you are fine, it sounds unnatural but it's still correct. Like
| saying "I am" instead of "I'm" in English.
|
| BTW I think all that additional complexity in English writing
| system is the reason you have to teach kids to read for so
| long. In Polish kids are usually taught reading in preschool or
| first class at school and they are expected to be able to
| correctly read any text after 6 months to 1 year.
|
| There are some gotchas the other way around (hear something and
| write it) because that way the mapping isn't unique (there are
| sounds that have 2 ways to write them), but reading is easy.
| ithinkso wrote:
| >There actually are exceptions, but they are regular as well
| - w before last syllable is often devoiced to f. Levandofski.
| But even most Polish speakers doesn't know that it's the
| rule, they just speak that way without thinking :)
|
| Well, true, but I don't think devoicing w in 'Levandofski' is
| correct, sounds a bit sloppy but hard to hear the distinction
| to be honest so maybe
|
| There is though a clear devoicing not only before the last
| syllable but before 'sz' as in 'wszystko'(all),
| 'wszedzie'(everywhere). Not sure if there's a surname that
| that applies to.
| mkotowski wrote:
| Wszystko and Lewandowski both are subjected to the same
| principle, namely: in Polish consonant clusters, including
| across a word boundary, the obstruents are all voiced or
| all voiceless.[1]
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_phonology#Voicing
| _and_d...
| ithinkso wrote:
| Yup, thanks, that's the rule.
|
| I think I should change the 99.99% in my original post to
| 98%
| mkotowski wrote:
| I wouldn't be so strict with it to be honest -- it is
| still a rule that is internally consistent, and as far as
| I know it lacks any significant exceptions.
| ajuc wrote:
| I wonder if there is a rule that lets people get away
| with "Lewandoski" :)
| andrewl-hn wrote:
| Rule of thumb of consonant clusters in mos languages:
| break the cluster. Don't try to pronounce "VSK" directly.
| Instead, split it and add different parts to syllables
| before and after: Le-van-dov-ski. Adding "ski" after the
| word is much easier than dealing with three consonants in
| a row
| mbel wrote:
| There is, it's called ,,dialekt malopolski" ;)
| ithinkso wrote:
| Ej, co kurwa? Jeszcze mi powiesz ze wychodzi sie na dwor
| a nie na pole ;)
| Markoff wrote:
| What about rz, is it same as r in Czech? Good luck with this
| letter to any native English speaker. :-))
| Vaphell wrote:
| no, it traces back to the same thing pretty much, but in
| modern Polish it's indistinguishable from z (z?) I assume
| that long time ago it went like this r' -> r -> rz -> z,
| which effectively removed the foundational r-ness of the
| thing.
|
| Off the top of my head, the Polish language has lost the
| phonetic distinction between
|
| rz and z -> z,
|
| h and ch -> ch,
|
| u and o (flat u vs long o) -> u
|
| In some regional dialects near southern/eastern borders you
| could still find some of these distinctions, but in modern
| Polish it's gone.
|
| at a glance shit looks unnecessarily confusing especially for
| non-slavic foreigners, but once you look more into it
| explains many things and helps greatly with writing of
| related words, declination and conjugation, eg where grammar
| mandates sound substitution (assuming you are Czech you are
| probably aware of this effect already) For example there are
| clusters of sounds that often change one into another.
|
| g/h/z are one such cluster of closely related sounds
|
| noga (leg, noun) vs nozny (adjective)
|
| drugi (second) vs druh (friend, companion) druzba (guy
| helping the newlyweds with wedding)
|
| Sapieha (noble name of Ukrainian origin) vs Sapiezanka
| (daughter of Sapieha)
|
| rz/r:
|
| drzewo (tree) vs drewno (wood)
|
| ch/sz is another:
|
| mucha (fly) -> muszka (diminutive)
|
| o/o/e is another:
|
| bog (god) vs bozek (lesser god)
|
| pioro (feather) vs pierzyna (bed cover stuffed with feathers)
|
| It also helps seeing similarities between Slavic languages,
| as this stuff preserves a ton of the common roots. Any Slav
| seeing 'gora' will know what's up, not so much with
| phonetically equivalent 'gura'.
| ajuc wrote:
| No, it's either the same as "z" (in most cases) or the same
| as "sz" (after devoiced consonants). And there's like 3 words
| where it's pronounced as separate r and z letters (tarzan,
| marznac, I don't remember the 3rd :) ).
| Kosirich wrote:
| For south Slavic last names: c- "ch" as in cheddar or the
| choose so same as "cz" in polish c - "tj" ...this one is hard,
| and only some dialects pronounce it differently enough so using
| "c" is good enough z - same as "J" in french names "Jeanne
| d'Arc" or Jean-Luc Picard dz - same as "J" in the word "John"
| or "Jordan" or G in "George" d - just use dz s - "sh" as in
| short
| ithinkso wrote:
| Do you guys also have the open/closed u distinction?
| Kosirich wrote:
| Nope. That is why people struggle with Danish o,o,a,y,u and
| a,ae.
|
| But in reality, at least for Croatia, the differences in
| dialects mean that in some dialects some words with "o" are
| pronounced as "o", or "a" as "ae"...
|
| Anyway, reading Slavic compared to English/Danish is a
| piece of cake. Grammar on the other hand...
| [deleted]
| mkotowski wrote:
| To elaborate on <l> - there is quite a good reason for the way
| it is spelled. Originally, its pronunciation was /l/ ("dark l"
| in English) so it was very close to /l/ in sound quality.
|
| It evolved to /w/ over time. During the first part of 20th
| century, it was already used only in dialects and by
| professionals such as actors and singers (because of it, it is
| also called "scenic l" -- ,,sceniczne l").
|
| Ironically, if I remember correctly the original sound quality
| of <v> in Latin was also /w/, so in some roundabout way you
| could say that English and Polish both swapped traditional
| pronunciation of their letters.
|
| <y> is often transcribed as /i/ but it is in practice closer
| to English schwa.
|
| And to correct one thing: because of Polish orthography rules,
| <w> can also be pronounced:
|
| * as /f/ if preceding consonants are voiceless as in the second
| w in Lewando__w__ski, although I think one would still be
| understood if that rule was ignored
|
| * as /w/ if the word is an English loanword, as in ,,weekend"
| /wikent/
| narag wrote:
| _the original sound quality of <v> in Latin was also /w/_
|
| IIRC, there wasn't a U letter in Latin, so the vowel was
| written as V. I guess it tended to souns like W when starting
| a syllabe, as in versus.
| ajuc wrote:
| > there wasn't a U letter in Latin
|
| Yup they used V for both. This is probably why German (and
| then Polish) uses W instead of V - to distinguish it from
| U.
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| When the Latin alphabet was first used in Old English,
| Latin w had already come to be pronounced v. The was no
| need for it in English at that stage, because v was just
| considered a variant of f.
|
| But English made good use of w, and there were two ways
| of writing the w sound: either as two u's (because that
| way you can indicate the consonantalness of it, even
| before consonants as in writan) or using the old rune
| wynn. The uu approach spread to the continent and Old
| High German (which still used the English sound) adopted
| it. Old High German also didn't have a v sound at that
| time, and v was considered a variant of f - which it
| still is in modern German (e.g. Vater = father,
| pronounced fah-ta). Meanwhile, uu fell out of use in
| England, and the runic wynn dominated. But the English
| spelling system was gradually replaced following the
| Norman invasion, which led w to dominate over wynn. And v
| was now considered its own sound, so the letter began to
| be used for a v sound. So even though English seems to be
| a bit of a exception, with w=/w/, it's a practice that
| came from England and came back to England and was a
| medieval norm.
|
| But the w sound changed to v in German too. They didn't
| have such a radical interruption to their orthographic
| tradition as the English did, so the idea that V=F
| remained, and the letter w just come to be used for the
| new v sound. It spread from there.
|
| So it's not really w instead of v to distinguish /v/ from
| /u/. It's more w instead of v to distinguish /w/ from
| v=/f/.
|
| The crazy thing about that is it wasn't until several
| centuries after all that transpired that v and u became
| separate letters. So the Germans were using u for the
| sound of Buch and the sound of Uater (=Vater), and a
| different letter w for the sound of Wasser, when W and
| U=Buch were very similar and U=Buch and U=Vater were very
| different.
| wink wrote:
| What kinda gets me is the name Lukasz, because in German and
| English it is indeed an L and all the ones I know actually use
| the L (maybe unless talking to other native speakers).
| ithinkso wrote:
| Yeah, Lukasz is the same name as Lucas and because ASCII and
| internet it's very common to just write it as Lukasz because
| no matter if you're talking to the native or not, they will
| know what you mean (it is very common for polish people to
| omit polish letter altogether when texting/writing informally
| online because the correct letters can be inferred from the
| context so why bother pressing that alt key). If you were to
| pronounce it correctly though it would be something like
| 'Wookash' (which looks ridiculous in written form but hey)
| ajuc wrote:
| > it is very common for polish people to omit polish letter
|
| Is it still common? It was popular when there were many
| encodings that always broke and when people wrote SMS by
| pressing number keys 5 times for 1 letter, now I don't see
| it that often. I'd say it's about as common as writting l8r
| in English :)
| mkotowski wrote:
| Less common than it used to be, but still happens. Mostly
| when writing in a hurry (of course without auto-
| correction turned on) or interacting with older systems
| and applications. Also, it is so rare to use Polish
| letters in a URL, that if you were to dictate one based
| on a Polish word(s) most people would simply spell it
| without them (l - l, a - a, etc.).
|
| By the way, never try to use Polish letters in a Windows
| username. It works, but every once in a while something
| third-party or rarely used breaks unexpectedly.
| ithinkso wrote:
| I think I rarely use polish letters when I write on
| whatsapp/signal etc. and I don't think I often see them
| written. I don't pay that much attention though so it may
| be that I'm the only one
| OldOneEye wrote:
| Thank you very much for this summary! I have a lot of polish
| colleagues in my work, and I always feel bad for not knowing
| how to start pronouncing their names aside from memorization
| (which I will promptly forget). This will definitively help me.
| ithinkso wrote:
| > and I always feel bad for not knowing how to start
| pronouncing their names
|
| No worries, give it your best approximation and if it's way
| off or if someone cares a bit too much they will correct you,
| use the corrected version since then and you're golden.
|
| We know it may be hard, no problem whatsoever and no one
| cares, don't worry about it one bit and definitely don't feel
| bad about it. I think poles actually prefer if you say their
| name in 'english way' rather than super-correctly in polish
| because it sounds more natural instead of being suddenly
| jerked back into polish for a millisecond and then back into
| english. Just remember the 'w'->'v' and you will get a lot of
| street cred for free
| narag wrote:
| _' w' - it's a hard 'v' as in 'very', 'vary'. Always, no
| exceptions and never anything else_
|
| I've been interacting with a Polish web and got very confused
| because what happens with stand-alone _w_ , that seems to mean
| _in_. Indeed Google Translate pronounces it as a v. First time
| I see a word in any language that consists only of consonants
| :-m
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| English has a couple of pure examples: 'Mrs' and 'Nth' I can
| think of.
|
| You can extend this with exclamations/onomatopoeia (eg:
| 'hmm', 'shh', 'brr'), but can see that these are not 'normal
| words'.
| bloak wrote:
| Interjections can contain sounds that don't occur in
| ordinary words. In German there's "tja", and in English
| there's "tsk", which is a click, quite an unusual sound:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_click
| mkotowski wrote:
| It is quite funny, because when I was learning English, it
| was so bizarre that the first-person pronoun was only one
| letter (putting aside the required capitalization). On the
| other hand, having to write _and_ instead of _i_ still seems
| quite unwieldy to me.
| ajuc wrote:
| Well in English it's actually 2 sounds (a+i) they just have
| them mixed into one letter :)
|
| Not unlike Russian where the reversed R is the same sounds
| just in reversed order (i+a) and it also means I.
|
| Polish prefers to have sounds separated so it's "ja". And
| it's never capitalized, English is very egocentric about
| it's pronouns :)
| ajuc wrote:
| > First time I see a word in any language that consists only
| of consonants
|
| Polish is quite tame with these as far as Slavic languages
| go. "Strc prst skrz krk" is a proper sentence in Czech and
| Slovak :)
| carlob wrote:
| Except in most Slavic languages r can work as a vowel.
|
| (if you are confused think about how the y in year is a
| vowel sound but works as a consonant in the syllable)
| andrewshadura wrote:
| Y in year does not represent a vowel sound.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Phonetically, it is a vowel (a sound produced with an
| open vowel tract), but phonologically, it is a consonant
| (a sound that forms the onset of a syllable).
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Romanian has the opposite oddity: we have whole words made
| up of vowels, with a proper sentence like that: "Aia e o
| oaie" ("that is a sheep", pronounced roughly 'ah-ya ye awe
| wa-ye').
| skipants wrote:
| I took a Ukrainian class but this also applies to Polish:
|
| The tip they gave English speakers for pronouncing "szcz", was
| that it sounded like the sh-ch connection between the words
| "Fresh Cheese".
|
| Ironically, I didn't know how to pronounce it properly until
| then and it's in my last name! I always anglicized its
| pronunciation to "sha".
| m12k wrote:
| Also, in Polish a regular 'c' is pronounced approximately like
| an English 'ts'
| smcl wrote:
| > It's the same sound as in 'when'/'why'/'when'
|
| Note: this is ONLY applicable if your "wh" is non-aspirated. If
| you pronounce Lukasz as "Whookash" you're going to get some
| funny looks :) I'd have written this as "It's the same sound as
| in 'wise' or 'weather'"
| mkotowski wrote:
| Also, if we are talking about aspiration, word-initial p and
| t are also left un-aspirated in Polish, contrary to many
| (most?) English dialects.
| smcl wrote:
| That is interesting, I can't think how else to pronounce
| the word-initial "t"s in something like "Tu jest carrefour,
| a tu jest kurwa jez" (a phrase that has entered the canon
| of my friend group) any other way, I wonder if I'm already
| saying it unaspirated.
|
| :D
| ithinkso wrote:
| I'll be honest, I'm very interested in knowing how that
| polish phrase entered a Scotsman's, living in Czech
| Republic, canon and what it means
| smcl wrote:
| It's all down to this video where a Polish guy was amazed
| at a hedgehog he saw in some city centre somewhere:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwR6KS6vJWg
|
| Edit: oh and it means "Here's the carrefour (supermarket
| chain), and here's the fucking hedgehog"
| ithinkso wrote:
| Lol, first time I'm seeing this. But the very top
| recommendation from yt was 'Jez kurwa - czeska parodia!'.
| I love how memes travel. I think the last very popular
| Czech meme in Poland was Jozin z bazin
| ithinkso wrote:
| That's interesting, could you elaborate on the difference in
| 'w' between 'wise' and 'when'? I'd say 'Wookash' as in star-
| wars 'Wookie' is a good way (way, hehe) to say Lukasz.
|
| I'm not a linguist though so I'm curious
| ajuc wrote:
| Some English speakers pronounce "w" differently than "wh".
| They will say sth that sounds like "hwhen" instead of
| "when" for example. I think it's a dialect thing I only met
| like 5 people online who spoke like that but they were all
| native English speakers so it must be correct?
| Veen wrote:
| It's "correct" but quite rare. The wh was originally a
| digraph pronounced with a voiceless labial-velar, but but
| most variants of English have undergone what linguists
| call the whine-wine merger so those words sound the same.
| Exceptions are Scots, Irish, and some Southern US
| varieties.
| ajuc wrote:
| The guys I met are from Canada.
| aasasd wrote:
| IIRC the 'History of English' podcast mentions that
| pronunciation like 'hwat' was the norm either in Old
| English or before that. Then it changed, and the spelling
| was changed accordingly.
| blackshaw wrote:
| Obligatory Family Guy link:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMopBpOfv_E
|
| I'm not sure I've ever met anyone in real life who says
| "hwen", "hwere", etc., although you can hear it in some
| Johnny Cash songs. I'm not sure exactly where in America
| you can hear it - is it a southern thing? You'll never
| hear anyone say "hwen" in the UK.
| smcl wrote:
| That's a _much_ better example! I 'm not sure how to
| accurately describe the w/wh difference in text. A comment
| in this thread suggested that it's like prepending a "h",
| like "hwhen" which is actually incorrect - this exists but
| it's what you'd do as part of an over-the-top impression of
| an old fashioned upper class accent :) In reality the
| pronunciation is just like blowing a tiny little bit of air
| when your mouth makes the shape for the "w". I didn't know
| it was largely just a Scottish/Irish thing nowadays,
| though.
|
| Also while we're all gathered in our shared appreciation of
| pronunciation weirdness I have one more "wh" example. Where
| I'm from (Northeast Scotland) English words following a
| "wh-" pattern are transformed in the local dialect to be
| spelled and pronounced differently as "f-". So "fit"
| instead of "what" ("fit like?" = "how's it going"), "far"
| instead of "where" ("far dae ye bide" = "where do you
| live") etc. Dialects are weird :)
| blackshaw wrote:
| > pronounced as in 'put'/'dude'.
|
| FYI: "put" and "dude" have a different vowel sound in most
| dialects of English.
| ithinkso wrote:
| Yeah, that's why you can hear 'polish/slavic accent' because
| it's hard for us to say it differently
| aasasd wrote:
| Now practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaMcIbIWt_4
| canjobear wrote:
| If you're interested in learning to pronounce non-English things,
| I highly recommend learning the IPA
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...
|
| You can get away from this vague stuff like 'an "ah" vowel', and
| learn (1) the real way the pronounce the names, including sounds
| that aren't in English, and (2) the precise closest English
| approximation, without having to go through analogies and
| metaphors that won't be valid across English dialects.
| hazbot wrote:
| I was chatting to a speech pathologist the other day,
| apparently when they were being awarded their degrees, the
| entire class submitted the IPA transcription of their names to
| be read out at the graduation ceremony.
| lmm wrote:
| I lost enthusiasm for IPA once I found out that there's no
| unambiguous way to denote a rolled r. It sounds like IPA has
| already accumulated its own historical baggage and recommends
| users to specify what they mean by each symbol, so you're just
| trading one set of vague analogies and metaphors for another.
| bradrn wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by this. In phonetic
| transcription, rolled r is unambiguously [r]. In phonemic
| transcription... well, /r/ can be ambiguous depending on what
| language you're transcribing, but that's OK because phonemic
| transcription isn't supposed to represent specific sounds
| anyway.
| canjobear wrote:
| Sometimes linguists transcribing particular languages have
| developed conventions so they don't have to hunt around in
| the special characters. For example the English r sound is
| really r but people writing about English might write it as
| r. But in standard IPA, rolled r is the symbol r and nothing
| else.
|
| Some of the other things that look like nonstandard IPA are
| actually Americanist notation, which a lot of older linguists
| were trained in rather than IPA:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation
|
| Still it's a lot less ambiguous than "sounds like 'ah'" which
| could be just about anything.
| qalmakka wrote:
| This, exactly. The rolled r is only r in IPA, but way too
| often people reach out for the wrong symbols when
| representing English pronunciation. Often I also see *k
| being often left out when a consonant is usually aspirated,
| and so on.
| reirob wrote:
| I agree fully, and I wish, for written communication (chat,
| emails) people could use some latin/ascii based transliteration
| of IPA. There is X-SAMPA [1], though it's not much used yet. I
| think a simple input method, available on all keyboards and
| maybe some textual annotation for text sections being in IPA,
| might give this a much bigger audience. Many people are often
| in meetings where they don't know how to pronounce the names of
| meeting participants - would be really great to have an ASCII
| based IPA notation.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA
| bradrn wrote:
| This would be a bad idea, due to inter-dialectal variation.
| As I said in an earlier comment
| [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27070624]:
|
| > Phonetic spelling is useless when you've got more than one
| dialect. For instance, consider the word 'castle'. Is this
| [kaesl], or [ka:sl], or [ka:su] (as it is for me), or
| something else entirely? Having an orthography which is not
| purely phonetic avoids this problem.
| jollybean wrote:
| Question for someone knowledgeable - why doesn't Chinese
| transliteration make rational use of vowels and consonants?
|
| Why Q? Why not simply 'Ch'?
| kleton wrote:
| In the older Wade-Giles system, they indeed tried to maintain
| some similarity with how English uses the Latin alphabet. Ch
| was used, for example Ssu-ma Ch'ien, which is now Sima Qian.
| Using Latin q for a ch sound isn't unheard of in European
| languages, for example, in Albanian. Mandarin pinyin is
| "rational" in the sense that any other language with phonemic
| values for the Latin alphabet widely divergent from Latin or
| English, like Turkish, Albanian, or Irish.
| physicles wrote:
| As always, "rational" is subjective. Pinyin, the
| transliteration scheme in use in this post (in use in the PRC
| since the 50s or so), is necessarily full of trade-offs.
|
| Ch is already needed to represent a sound which is much closer
| to the English "Ch", as in Chen. But then there is this other
| sound, which sounds superficially like Ch to a non-native
| speaker, but actually is quite different (and if you mix them
| up, you might not be understood by a native speaker). What
| letter do you use for that?
|
| Originally people used Ts, as in Tsingtao the beer, named for
| the city on the coast (but that wasn't perfect either, because
| the sound also has very little in common with T). Then in the
| 50s Pinyin came along and it was changed to Q, so Qingdao (the
| final consonant was changed too).
|
| Btw this change in transliteration schemes is why Peking Duck
| is still a thing: even though the city's name is now spelled
| Beijing, the old spelling of Peking lives on in the name of the
| dish (and a few other places).
| bdon wrote:
| It does use almost all vowels and consonants. "Ching" CHIENG is
| a technically valid syllable in the Pinyin system but does not
| correspond to any word in the dictionary.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > "Ching" CHIENG is a technically valid syllable in the
| Pinyin system
|
| No, it isn't; "ch" cannot be followed by a front vowel.
|
| There are plenty of theoretically-valid but nonexistent
| syllables such as seng or nu, but "ching" is not such a
| syllable.
| bdon wrote:
| Yes, I mean that it is a valid syllable in the orthography
| rules but that does not imply it can be pronounced
| sensibly.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| But it isn't a valid syllable in the orthography rules.
| Pinyin has a set of syllable onsets and a set of rimes.
| You determine the spelling of a syllable by choosing the
| onset/rime combination you want and looking it up in a
| table. Thus, the spelling of n-/-u is "nu", and the
| spelling of [?]-/-u is "yu". Same syllable column; zero
| characters in common in the spelling.
|
| And if you look up ch-/-ing, the table will tell you "no
| such syllable", just like it will for "m-/-iang" or
| "h-/-weng".
|
| All three of those are invalid in terms of orthography --
| the standard specifically defines that there is no way to
| spell them. But "miang" is perfectly valid conceptually,
| and "ching" isn't even that.
| bdon wrote:
| So by your definition, are "biang", "kiang" and "duang"
| valid pinyin, considering those are pronounceable and
| understandable to millions of people, though they don't
| appear in your table?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Not being defined by "the Pinyin system", they cannot be
| valid elements of the Pinyin system.
|
| I know that biang is the name of a particular noodle; I'm
| not aware of kiang; and I believe that duang is a sound
| Jackie Chan made once. Which leads into a tangential
| question -- "duang" has no meaning. What would it mean to
| say it is "understandable" to millions of people?
| bdon wrote:
| A cursory search of media published in the last month
| [1][2] shows those can be used to productively
| communicate in Chinese languages. You can argue that it
| is outside of what is prescribed in a table, but if not
| Pinyin, then what writing system is being used here?
|
| [1]
| http://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202107151999911843.html
| [2] https://www.marieclaire.com.tw/lifestyle/art/58762
| Clewza313 wrote:
| Chinese has both, and they're different sounds: ch [tsk] vs q
| [tck]. Unfortunately the Chinese "q" doesn't exist in English,
| so "ch" is the closest approximation.
|
| https://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/break-through-chine...
| legerdemain wrote:
| Because the standard transliteration used for Mandarin (pinyin)
| already has a CH. Q sounds similar, but not identical to CH.
| Similar enough that "just pronounce Q as CH" is ok advice,
| different enough to make a huge difference when actually
| speaking Mandarin.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| I am no expert, I asked the same question.
|
| It seems this system is the Pinyin system common to mainland
| China, there are other transliteration systems used in Taiwan
| (Bopomofo) and Wade-Giles (which seems to create more
| phonetically obvious transliterations).
|
| This link has a nice table in the symbology section.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
| legerdemain wrote:
| Bopomofo is not a transliteration system. It's a phonetic
| spelling system used to teach reading to young children in
| Taiwanese schools. The characters it uses are not meaningful
| outside of Taiwan.
| bdon wrote:
| There are plenty of other uses of Bopomofo: 1) as a faster
| electronic input method for Mandarin and other Chinese
| languages 2) in casual or abbreviated writing 3) in
| overseas education
| hermannj314 wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying.
| tasogare wrote:
| > why doesn't Chinese transliteration make rational use of
| vowels and consonants
|
| Usage is way more rational than in English where the number of
| graphemes and phonemes associations is mind blowing. Save for a
| few contextual allophones, vowels is very regular, and
| consonant letters has a 1:1 mapping to consonant which is very
| rational in pinyin.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Chinese has (at least) two different sounds that map to "Ch" in
| English. Pinyin has both a "Ch" and a "Q" to capture this
| nuance. Of course, when you translate it to native English
| phonemes that difference is lost.
|
| You can listen here:
|
| https://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/transla...
|
| https://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/transla...
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| > The vast majority of Chinese people in the world today writing
| their names using the English alphabet use a system called Pinyin
|
| Pet peeve of man, but roman script is not the 'English alphabet'.
| Unless you think people write Spanish in 'English'...
|
| If you want to be super pedantic and say you can write pinyin
| using the subset of the roman alphabet that English uses, I can
| in turn be even more pedantic and say Pinyin is meant to be
| written with tone marks.
| SlapperKoala wrote:
| Pinyin uses English style punctuation, which is different from
| what is used in other Latin alphabet languages
| njharman wrote:
| Why the fuck is "zh" not transliterated into "j" if it suppose to
| be a Jay sound?
| pierrec wrote:
| "j" is already used to represent another consonant that
| arguably sounds closer to Jay (not that it's supposed to
| specifically match how English uses the Latin alphabet, but in
| this case it doesn't matter). Both of these consonants could
| maybe have been represented by "j" since they're always used in
| different contexts (IIRC), but pinyin avoids writing multiple
| sounds in the same way.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Nguyen... I've been told how it's pronouned several times but I
| always forget.
| ptha wrote:
| I've heard it's pronounced "Win", but don't take my word for
| it.
| Kiro wrote:
| I don't want my name to be pronounced natively outside my native
| language. It would feel strange. I very much prefer the English
| bastardisation of it, which fits better in an English sentence.
| unsigner wrote:
| Slavic pet peeve: Ivan is ee-`vahn, not `eye-vun.
| ape4 wrote:
| Perhaps add the phonetic pronunciation beside the name. Of course
| people would need to lean the phonetic alphabet.
| [deleted]
| robocat wrote:
| At least English speakers often try to pronounce names correctly,
| for example celebrities and well known sports stars. Not that we
| always succeed, and many people don't care! Bach, Cezzane, Jesus,
| Jahn etcetera.
|
| I notice Spanish people don't seem to try, I think in part
| because there is a one-to-one correspondence between words and
| pronunciation in Spanish. The common Spanish pronunciation of
| Michael Jackson is unintelligible to a native English speaker for
| example. Pirata Drake was another I didn't recognise, but should
| have.
|
| If I had more examples of the pronunciation of pinyin names, I
| would naturally start to pronounce those names more correctly
| given pinyin.
|
| I suspect many native English speakers grok some of the rules
| associated with foreign languages without specific training.
| happy_path wrote:
| Don't know what kind of Spanish speaker you spoke to, but no
| Spaniard/Latin-American I know would pronounce a famouse people
| name lke Michael Jackson "wrong".
| robocat wrote:
| It was in Spain, say 20 years ago, and they pronounced it as
| though it was Spanish words. I suspect you know a different
| demographic from that I knew.
| lou1306 wrote:
| Not the original commenter, but I'll try to explain because
| something similar happens in Italy as well
|
| It's not a "wrong" pronunciation, but it's clearly influenced
| by how Spanish/Italian stresses individual letters way more
| than English.
|
| Let's take Hillary Clinton as another example: Italians
| pronounce it "Heel-lah-ree Clean-tone" (/'ilari 'klinton/),
| which is way different from the actual pronunciation.
| oblio wrote:
| I don't think they pronounce it "Clean-tone", though.
| Knowing Italian, it's more likely to be Clean-tohn.
| lou1306 wrote:
| Indeed, it's more like "tohn" (is there any common
| English word with that sound?)
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Is this actually true for English speakers? Especially
| prominent Latin names have been totally butchered. For example
| Markus Antonius always gets butchered as Mark Anthony which
| clearly isn't a name anyone in Rome would have had. This also
| seems to go hand in hand with the general ignorance of the huge
| problem that's the great vowel shift that messes everything up
| for native English speakers pronouncing words from other
| languages.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| Mark Anthony is a transliteration rather than a
| mispronunciation is it not?
| seszett wrote:
| It's more of a translation than transliteration.
|
| Mark and Anthony are just the English translations of
| Marcus and Antonius. In French he's called Marc Antoine, in
| Spanish and Italian Marco Antonio, etc.
|
| All Latin languages do that for names (at least historical
| names, but it's common enough for other names too) it's
| just less common for Germanic languages except English
| which is like always a bit in-between the two.
| kingofpandora wrote:
| No one is reading "Markus Antonius" and pronouncing it as
| "Marc Anthony".
|
| A few historical figures have Anglicized names for whatever
| reasons, so we use those.
| robocat wrote:
| That is some Latin name translation thing. Christopher
| Columbus (EN), Cristobal Colon (ES), Christophe Colomb
| (FR), and Cristoforo Colombo (IT) are all Christophorus
| Columbus (his original Latin name). Edit: the same things
| happen with Ancient Greek names - one person has different
| spellings and pronunciations in different languages -- look
| up He Ma or sokuratesu.
| dhosek wrote:
| It varies. The American practice is generally to try and get it
| horribly wrong. The English practice is to try to get it
| horribly wrong. In Byron's poem _Don Juan_ , the title
| character's name is pronounced Don Jew-on. This is, of course,
| just one example of many.
|
| Assuming you're speaking of Spanish speakers from Spain (and
| not Latin America), they may be reacting to the customary
| mangling of Spanish by their UK counterparts. Most of the Latin
| Americans I've met have no problem with English names. They may
| say them with some odd vowels on occasion, but they're no
| unintelligible. It could be heavy exposure to American media.
| gonzus wrote:
| This reminds me of the movie The Name of the Rose, which I
| love. One of the characters was named "Jorge", and he was
| from Spain, so it was really baffling to hear everyone
| calling him "Yorgeh"... I guess they didn't have anyone on
| board who knew any better. Still love it.
| yosito wrote:
| Spanish speakers in the Dominican Republic often leave our S
| sounds in words, and some do it in foreign names as well. I
| remember a friend excitedly asking me if I like what I heard as
| "Brooli". It took me a good 5 minutes to realize that he was
| asking if I liked Bruce Lee.
| feintruled wrote:
| Youtube is surprisingly great for this, has a "how to pronounce"
| video for just about every name going. (Usually more than one, so
| you can verify).
| morebortplates wrote:
| It is definitly a good advice to check out more than one source
| in that regard ;) :
|
| https://youtu.be/d3_DjiLLDfo
| koyote wrote:
| > For example, in the US, many families that immigrated many
| years ago have changed the way their name was pronounced from its
| original heritage pronunciation
|
| As a native German and French speaker, this is actually an issue
| for me.
|
| If I see a common German or French name, I do not actually know
| how it would be pronounced in English and it's very difficult for
| me to guess or get my head to think of that pronunciation in an
| 'English' way.
|
| This is especially difficult when talking about a third person
| who you might not know well/at all: "I think a John Dubois, based
| in the X Office, is tech lead for that service"
| tasogare wrote:
| Except for obvious cases I go for the French or Alsatian
| pronunciation and let the person correct me. This is what
| English speakers are doing too after all. Conversely I don't
| take it personally when people mispronounce my names (given and
| family) the first time, especially since the family name is
| problematic even in France. That being said, it pisses me to no
| end when someone doesn't make any efforts after a given period
| of time (like my thesis director who still mispronounce it
| after 3 years, or can't align few letters properly).
| dhosek wrote:
| I generally go with a native pronunciation unless told
| otherwise. So I would pronounce it John Dubwah, but I've
| learned that it's W.E.B. Du-boys.
|
| But the single most important thing to do is ask how to
| pronounce and keep trying to get it right. My wife's first name
| is a Mexican name with an ll in the middle that should be
| pronounced as j/y (most Spanish speakers don't really hear a
| difference between the two English phonemes so it's perfectly
| fine to use either in working towards the correct sound, but j
| is probably the better choice for most English speakers since y
| between vowels tends to disappear, at least in Midwestern
| pronunciation). It's really not a hard name to say, but it does
| take paying attention for one whole second and remembering
| something that's not in the standard repertoire of American
| first names so a huge number of people get it wrong and don't
| care or say things like, "can I call you -- instead?" (the
| answer, of course, is NO, what the -- is wrong with you, you
| lazy twit).
|
| Take the time to learn how people pronounce their names and
| give them the courtesy of getting it right. I doubt that most
| Croats, for example, will care if you don't pronounce c and c
| differently, but if you insist on pretending that either makes
| a k or s sound, you _will_ annoy them.
| apurtbapurt wrote:
| So, it is really easy and almost no one manages to do it
| right even after instructions?
|
| And after failing to do it right after instructions, it is
| the other people who are arrogant for asking to use something
| they are able to pronounce, not you for insisting on making
| them uncomfortable?
|
| Names are just sounds people make when they want someones
| attention. Respect goes two ways.
| SamBam wrote:
| The sounds may be easy to pronounce. The people may just
| not be devoting the attention to remember it. They've been
| told it's "Isabeya," say, but they just keep forgetting
| it's not "Isabella."
|
| I would treat this as similar to forgetting someone's name.
| Yes, plenty of people have a "terrible memory for names,"
| but at the end of the day it's a matter of respect. If you
| really care -- if it's someone who's becoming a friend, if
| it's someone you ought to know for your job, if it's
| someone who's been introduced to you five times -- it's on
| you to remember the name, unless you have a genuine
| neurological condition.
| dhosek wrote:
| The most basic form of respect is to get someone's name
| right. Or at least make the effort.
| dynamic_sausage wrote:
| I've had some luck with looking up name pronunciations on
| forvo.com. For common names, you can sometimes get several
| different recordings by native speakers, which may also help with
| regional variations.
| seventytwo wrote:
| Pinyin has done more harm than good for translation.
| est wrote:
| > Zh is like a J sound (as in "Jam")
|
| More like the "dg" sound, as in "Draw"
| rendall wrote:
| If you speak any non-English language, you will know that this
| obsession with getting English-language speakers to pronounce
| foreign words "correctly" is unique. No speaker of any other
| language in the world even tries to pronounce foreign words like
| foreigners do, nor are they expected to.
|
| Just pronounce it the way it's spelled, and if you're speaking
| English, that is the correct way. Join me in my militant quest to
| aggressively redefine what it means to "correctly" pronounce
| foreign words in English: go ahead and proudly say "g'nock-chi"
| for _gnocchi_ and "buy frost" when you mean the _Bifrost
| Bridge_.
|
| If someone gives you a hard time, smirk at them for being the
| unsophisticated provincial they are. "When I speak Japanese, I
| will say _Kyoto_ with only two syllables, even accent on each.
| When I speak English, I shall proudly, without shame, pronounce
| it _KEE-oh-toe_. When I speak Dutch, I will pronounce _Van Gogh_
| with a soft consonant at the end. While speaking English, it
| shall remain _van go_. "
| ithinkso wrote:
| Celebrating incorrectness, eh? Nothing wrong with being wrong,
| but not willing to learn... I don't know.
|
| > If you speak any non-English language, you will know that
| this obsession with getting English-language speakers to
| pronounce foreign words "correctly" is unique
|
| It's not unique, you think is unique because you are English-
| language speaker. Anyone speaking X natively will correct
| others learning X if they ask, but they will not mention it or
| pay attention to it if they are just talking, only encourage
| it. The proper 'correctness' will come much later when you
| _really_ want to learn the language but at that point you will
| ask for the correcting yourself
|
| And if you mean the names of people/places/movies/etc. how can
| you not be corrected? It's literally the name you are trying to
| say
| rendall wrote:
| > _you think is unique because you are English-language
| speaker_
|
| I am a native English-language speaker, but I speak other
| languages as well. In all languages, there is exactly zero
| expectation that speakers will pronounce English words like
| English-speakers do. Because in all languages, foreign words
| are remade into native words. As it had been in English until
| the mid 20th century.
|
| > _And if you mean the names of people /places/movies/etc.
| how can you not be corrected?_
|
| Not sure what language you speak natively, but no one
| corrects Italians for saying "Germania" instead of
| _Deutschland_ , nor Spaniards for saying "Nueva York", nor
| the French for saying "Angleterre".
| throwaway02824 wrote:
| > no one corrects Italians for saying "Germania" instead of
| Deutschland
|
| This is a strawman.
|
| Italian here. I would never dream of using the word
| "Germania" with someone that does not speak Italian
| expecting them to understand that it's the Italian way to
| pronounce Deutschland.
| rendall wrote:
| Great.
|
| > _I would never dream of using the word "Germania" with
| someone that does not speak Italian..._
|
| That's the strawman. In the example, we're talking about
| Italians, speaking Italian, not being corrected for
| speaking non-Italian words like Italians do.
|
| So, when speaking Italian, if a German insisted that you
| pronounce his homeland as _Deutschland_ not Germania you
| would think he was a nut.
|
| So, when speaking English, why would you insist that
| someone saying "brusheta" is _wrong_? Help me understand.
| throwaway02824 wrote:
| You are still strawmanning. "Germania" is the Italian
| name for Germany. It's not a butchering of "Deutschland".
|
| There is an English equivalent for the French "crepe":
| pancake, and it's OK.
|
| OTOH there isn't an English word "brusheta". It's 100%
| butchering of the Italian word.
|
| Even worse if you use it in a restaurant and demand
| native Italian speakers to understand it and refuse any
| correction.
|
| It's like I call you "rendass".
| [deleted]
| ithinkso wrote:
| You are being downvoted, as should you, but I still want to
| answer your questions.
|
| > Not sure what language you speak natively
|
| Polish
|
| >but no one corrects Italians for saying "Germania" instead
| of Deutschland, nor Spaniards for saying "Nueva York", nor
| the French for saying "Angleterre".
|
| It's literally the second thing people learn when learning
| a second language. The first is how to say your name, the
| second is where are you from. And then you pretend to be
| from somewhere else and do to the above. After the first
| lesson of any language the only thing you know is your name
| and names of other countries lol so I'm not sure what are
| you talking about
| rendall wrote:
| > _You are being downvoted_
|
| I am not being downvoted
|
| > _as should you_
|
| Downvotes are for "contravenes guidelines" not "holds
| opinions with which I disagree"
|
| > _lol so I 'm not sure what are you talking about_
|
| With sincere respect, I think you should take the time to
| understand my argument instead of assuming it is invalid.
| scaryclam wrote:
| > If you speak any non-English language, you will know that
| this obsession with getting English-language speakers to
| pronounce foreign words "correctly" is unique.
|
| It's really not.
|
| The entire point of language is to be understood by others. If
| you're unwilling to take any time to find out how to be
| understood, then you're really just failing at basic
| communication. It's not up to others to interpret your
| misunderstanding of how to correctly say something, it's up to
| you to put some effort into being understood.
|
| And if you're smirking at people instead of taking the
| opportuinity to learn, well, I wish you all the best in your
| small minded world.
| bloak wrote:
| "Just pronounce it the way it's spelled" might make sense in
| some languages, and it probably makes a lot of sense in
| Russian, say, where the person who transcribed a name from
| Latin letters has already decided how it should be
| (mis)pronounced (though the position of the stress makes a big
| difference in Russian), but it doesn't make sense in English
| because the spelling is rather inconsistent even if you're
| looking just at ordinary everyday words like "machine",
| "chemical", "bough", "cough", "put", "but", whatever.
| rendall wrote:
| Yes. This confusion of spellings is due to English having a
| long history of literacy. The _k_ in _knock_ is silent, but
| once was pronounced. The pronunciation of _knock_ changed but
| its spelling did not. Nevertheless, there are historical
| reasons for these various spellings, its not just
| "whatever". In any case, these are English words, not foreign
| words.
|
| English words follow specific conventions. This is why
| English speakers who read "bruschetta" will not pronounce the
| _ch_ with a hard _k_ , as Italians do. Unless they are told
| this pronunciation is "incorrect". If it's really important
| to bruschetta marketers that English speakers pronounce it
| the way Italians do, they should consider spelling it using
| English conventions, eg _brusketa_
|
| As you pointed out, English spelling is confusing. We don't
| need to add to the cognitive load by insisting that words
| spelled according to foreign conventions be pronounced that
| way too
| nautilius wrote:
| I don't know what conventions that would be, are you
| familiar with the poem 'The Chaos'?
| https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
|
| Just one example" " Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
| Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and
| Britain. (Mind the latter, how it's written.) Now I surely
| will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But
| be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak
| and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt,
| show, poem, and toe."
|
| It seems that any English speaker expecting a certain
| pronunciation from spelling alone would have quite a hard
| time.
| SamBam wrote:
| You have it backwards. Pronunciation in English does _not_
| follow many strict conventions -- and when it does it doesn
| 't do so consistently -- and it's precisely because it's
| taken on so many loan-words and kept something close to the
| original pronounciation.
|
| You suggest "ch" should be pronounced as in "cheese" in
| English. Well, what about chemistry, christian, school,
| alchemy, anarchy, anchor, chaos, archeology, echo, and
| literally hundreds of other words in English with a hard
| "ch"?
|
| Yes, unless a child is told that pronouncing them with a
| soft "ch" is "incorrect" they will pronounce all those
| words incorrectly if they come across them written down.
| Such is the burden of the English language, the language
| with the least consistent spelling-to-pronunciation rules
| on Earth.
|
| Yes, English spelling is not regular. It's mostly from all
| those loanwords. It's unfortunate, and is the cause of such
| weirdly quirky Anglophone things such as "spelling tests"
| in schools, and "spelling bees" where one can win a modicum
| of fame and money -- they don't have this in other
| alphabetic languages. But's it's the way it is and refusing
| to pronounce words correctly isn't taking some kind of
| principled stand.
|
| (Or should we say, for all those, "If it's really important
| to schoolteachers that English speakers pronounce it the
| way Italians do, they should consider spelling it using
| English conventions, eg skool"?)
| rendall wrote:
| > _refusing to pronounce words correctly_
|
| That's skewing the argument. The discussion is "should
| English speakers be expected to pronounce foreign words
| as they are pronounced in the original language"?
|
| Not "pronouncing words as foreigners do is the correct
| pronunciation when speaking English"
|
| Despite the stereotype, it's not Americans running around
| telling foreigners how to pronounce English words in
| their native tongue. No American tells Poles how to
| pronounce New York nor Yoruba how to pronounce jazz nor
| Italians how to pronounce pepperoni.
| SamBam wrote:
| > Despite the stereotype, it's not Americans running
| around telling foreigners how to pronounce English words
| in their native tongue.
|
| This seems to be the root of your annoyance, but it's
| also false. If an Italian said "President Bee-den" there
| would be plenty of Americans falling over themselves to
| let them know that it's pronounced "Bye-den." I've been
| there. I've experienced it.
| rendall wrote:
| Were they speaking Italian at the time, or English?
| SamBam wrote:
| It doesn't matter, they'd try to pronounce it correctly.
|
| This whole thing is a strange strawman regarding your
| belief that other cultures pronounce things however that
| spelling would be pronounced in their country, but
| there's simply no citation for that.
|
| You brought up the pronunciation of "gnocchi." I have
| heard French people pronounce it while speaking French (I
| have travelled in France a lot). They pronounce it as the
| Italians do, while speaking French.
|
| How did they learn that? If a French kid saw the word
| spelled out the first time, and hadn't been taught
| Italian, they'd have no idea what to do with that "ch."
| (The "gn" would have been less confusing.)
|
| Yet they _did_ pronounce it correctly, because, like most
| words, the word would generally have been learned orally.
| And if some French school kid started saying "gno-shi,"
| his peers would have corrected them.
| rendall wrote:
| > _It doesn 't matter_
|
| That is exactly the entire point. I dispute the idea that
| "correctly" means what you say it means.
|
| If Italians collectively decided that "be DEN" was the
| correct Italian pronunciation of the American name Biden,
| it's arrogant to tell them "No, when speaking Italian,
| you must say BYE den"
|
| If you can agree with that even a little bit, then you
| agree a little bit with my larger point.
| throwaway02824 wrote:
| > No speaker of any other language in the world even tries to
| pronounce foreign words like foreigners do
|
| [citation desperately needed]
|
| I'm a mothertongue Italian speaker. Never in my life I heard
| someone pronouncing "Bill Gates" or even "Google" with the
| Italian grammar/pronunciation rules.
|
| People would routinely ask how to pronounce foods in a Japanese
| or Chinese restaurant. Or thank the waiter/waitress for
| correcting them.
|
| > If someone gives you a hard time, smirk at them for being the
| unsophisticated provincial they are.
|
| This is incredibly arrogant.
| SamBam wrote:
| I absolutely agree, parent comment is completely incorrect.
|
| Growing up as an American in Italy, people would frequently
| try to pronounce my family's names correctly. They _wouldn
| 't_ simply say the word as if it were an Italian word.
|
| Same for any other name. They pronounce president Biden as
| Americans would, they don't say "Bee-den" as they would of
| the word were Italian.
|
| Ditto for non-English foreigners coming to Italy. Does GP
| really think that the Spanish and the French say "guh-nocci"
| for gnocchi? They don't have the "gn" digraph any more than
| English does, yet they all pronounce it correctly.
|
| The _word_ is the same world-round. Just because it 's
| uncommon enough that each language hasn't bothered to give it
| is own spelling ( _noci_ in Spanish, maybe, _nhoci_ in
| Portuguese, _nioki_ in English) doesn 't suddenly mean the
| word changes in other languages.
| rendall wrote:
| > _Never in my life I heard someone pronouncing "Bill Gates"
| or even "Google" with the Italian grammar/pronunciation
| rules._
|
| But if you native Italian speakers did happen to pronounce it
| "gah-tes" or "googleh" or whatever _while speaking Italian_ ,
| Americans would not insist that Italians are pronouncing it
| _wrong_. They would just say that 's how Italians pronounce
| it.
|
| By contrast, if a native English speaker pronounces an
| Italian word according to how it's spelled according to
| English conventions (we're using "bruschetta" as the example,
| so, as BREW-shet-uh), _while speaking English_ an Italian
| will insist that this pronunciation is _wrong_.
|
| _> > If someone gives you a hard time, smirk at them for
| being the unsophisticated provincial they are.
|
| > This is incredibly arrogant._
|
| I was making a joke. Probably didn't land well with those who
| disagree with me.
|
| It might be a cultural difference, but it strikes me as
| incredibly arrogant to tell people who are speaking their own
| native language that they are pronouncing a word wrong simply
| because it originated in your native language and they don't
| pronounce it like you do.
|
| e.g https://youtu.be/rHBFt11zz7U
| throwaway02824 wrote:
| > But if you native Italian speakers did happen to
| pronounce it "gah-tes" or "googleh" or whatever while
| speaking Italian, Americans would not insist that Italians
| are pronouncing it wrong.
|
| Of course the would. And I can ensure you other people from
| Italy would correct someone that say "gah-tes". When
| politicians are caught speaking terrible English they
| quickly turn into memes on social networks and are mocked a
| lot.
|
| You are being dishonest here.
|
| >> This is incredibly arrogant.
|
| > I was making a joke. Probably didn't land well with those
| who disagree with me.
|
| I don't believe you. You keep moving the goal posts.
| nautilius wrote:
| >If you speak any non-English language, you will know that this
| obsession with getting English-language speakers to pronounce
| foreign words "correctly" is unique. No speaker of any other
| language in the world even tries to pronounce foreign words
| like foreigners do, nor are they expected to.
|
| Oh boy, generalize much?
|
| If I had a dime every time an American explained to me how to
| properly pronounce Porsche, Adidas, Bach, etc....
| rendall wrote:
| Americans drive this too. If you read carefully I didn't say
| we don't.
| nautilius wrote:
| You wrote "Despite the stereotype, it's not Americans
| running around telling foreigners how to pronounce English
| words in their native tongue."
|
| Sure, technically 'Americans running around telling
| foreigners how to pronounce their own words in their native
| tongue.' is different, but it seems an even lower
| threshold.
| jpxw wrote:
| Agreed. Changing pronunciation mid-sentence to a language you
| don't even speak is very difficult, and in any case comes off
| as pretentious.
|
| Non-native speakers will be used to the English pronunciation,
| even if it's wrong. If you try and pronounce the name
| "correctly", the chances are you'll mess it up and cause even
| more confusion.
| rendall wrote:
| q.v.: The guy who over pronounces foreign words
|
| https://youtu.be/fKGoVefhtMQ
| wodenokoto wrote:
| > The way English speakers say Tokyo as 'Toh-Kee-Oh' is the
| mistake you want to avoid here. Toh-kyoh.
|
| I once came across a "how to speak English like a native" video
| on YouTube aimed at a Japanese audience. It spend a lot of time
| teaching the viewer to say Tokyo with 3 syllables instead of 2.
| wccrawford wrote:
| Which is funny, because pronouncing it correctly doesn't cause
| any confusion. I've been learning Japanese for like 10-15 years
| now and that has changed my pronunciation of Tokyo, and nobody
| is confused when I say it correctly. They never even try to
| correct their pronunciation, but I take that as further
| evidence that they don't even hear anything different.
| scanny wrote:
| A Canadian journalist and youtuber covered this same topic
| recently in a decent amount of depth, I found it a decent watch:
|
| Title: "The Impossible Challenge of Names"
|
| subtext: "Foreign names are the biggest challenge of language,
| and it doesn't seem like we've ever come up with any good way of
| dealing with them -- though some western countries have been
| trying."
|
| Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx7cIb1IRLc
| mikkelam wrote:
| As a guy with a name that's hard for everyone except my
| nationality, I don't really mind much. People are not doing it to
| be assholes, sometimes it's just hard to make certain sounds, if
| they're not part of your language.
| yoz-y wrote:
| I don't care how you pronounce my name at all. However I do care
| about how people write it - if they have a way of knowing the
| correct spelling. I find it quite baffling that some people don't
| even bother to look at the signature, much less copy paste it.
|
| Making people who dwell upon pronunciation is harder. The article
| misses half of the story by ignoring Chinese tonalities. Also in
| my experience many sounds from Eastern European languages are
| indistinguishable by some non-practitioners. (E.g. a difference
| between a "n" and "n" is seldom heard by the French)
| Symmetry wrote:
| Another aspect of pronouncing Japanese names is paying attention
| to how long you're supposed to hold a syllable. I knew a Japanese
| researcher named Yuuki (moderately common Japanese name meaning
| "courage") who was bothered by people always calling him Yuki
| (common girl's name meaning "snow") so he just went by a chosen
| English name.
| prvc wrote:
| One thing that has puzzled me about complaints about English
| speakers' pronunciation of transliterated Chinese words (the only
| topic of TFA), is why the speaker is blamed rather than the
| transliteration. If the official transliteration into the Roman
| alphabet leads to less accuracy in pronunciation than some other
| (for example see the second vs third columns in the table in
| TFA), then would it not make better sense for the aggrieved name-
| holders to adopt a more accurate transliteration instead? Could
| it be that the transliteration rules which are now standard are
| not optimally suited to this purpose?
| bdon wrote:
| There are plenty of other transliteration systems that might
| lead to more accurate pronunciations for English speakers in
| particular (as opposed to say, native Russian speakers); see
| Wade-Giles or Gwoyeu Romatzyh. The factors that led to the
| current de-facto standard are more related to 20th century
| history rather than optimizing for the particular use case of
| reading aloud by non-natives.
| caseyross wrote:
| Of course.
|
| But the "official" (as you say) transliterations of world
| languages enjoy wide usage not because they're necessarily the
| best anyone could come up with --- rather, they just
| represented the right local maxima at the right time in
| history.
|
| Displacing those romanization systems with better ones
| (assuming those exist) would be an uphill battle lasting
| decades, and I wager there aren't many people who would find
| that struggle worth the effort.
| usrusr wrote:
| Particularly when the dominant language that uses roman
| letters is lacking a consistent alphabetic encoding system
| itself. Before you start replacing pinyin, you might want to
| take a long, critical look at how English is written.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I'm always puzzled by certain British imperial transliteration
| schemes that seem to do their best to set you up for failure
| and embarrassment.
|
| Apparently "Burma" is supposed to be pronounced in a non-rhotic
| fashion, but would it have killed the non-rhotic speakers to
| write "Bama"? Then the rhotic speakers who form the majority of
| English speakers would have at least had a fighting chance to
| get it right.
|
| Another thing is their scattering of seemingly pointless "h"s
| in their transliteration of Devanagari, which together with
| "s"s leads many speakers to incorrectly assume a fricative:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l8x36fjvjk
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| > Apparently "Burma" is supposed to be pronounced in a non-
| rhotic fashion, but would it have killed the non-rhotic
| speakers to write "Bama"? Then the rhotic speakers who form
| the majority of English speakers would have at least had a
| fighting chance to get it right.
|
| To be fair, Bama wouldn't be the right pronunciation. The
| easiest way for an RP speaker to indicate what the right
| pronunciation should be is to write "Burma". An American
| might try Buhma.
|
| And your complain about "rhotic speakers" being "the majority
| of English speakers" could only have been taken into account
| of the British transliterator had access to a time machine to
| determine the future.
|
| At the time, a person in the British empire wouldn't have
| been considering the opinions of an American, because America
| and Britain had separate spheres of influence and a generally
| amicable but not integrated existence. To them, RP was the
| language of the elite and that was all that mattered.
|
| But if they were to consider the situation in America, they
| would have seen that in America as in Britain, non-rhotic
| accents were on the rise and were somewhat prestigious. If
| they were going to consider the future situation of the 21st
| century globe and how someone might pronounce the word in an
| American-centred word, it would have been entirely reasonable
| for them to have supposed it would have been one with a non-
| rhotic accent.
|
| Another matter you might consider is that a very strict
| spelling would not necessarily help matters anyway. The J in
| Beijing is pronounced more-or-less like an English j, but
| that doesn't stop people from mutilating it into the s of
| measure. Or the person who responds to you, who observes that
| "Punjab" should be pronounced roughly like the English
| spelling should indicate, but which is often pronounced with
| the u of push instead - both because of a widespread
| assumption that all words in foreign languages are pronounced
| like Italian, Spanish or French.
|
| And the final matter, which might hopefully set your blood at
| some ease, is to note that when a word is borrowed into a
| foreign language, it is subject to different pressures. You
| are not obliged to pronounce "Burma" or "Myanmar" the way any
| particular natives of Burma or Myanmar do. The English words
| are English words, intended to help English speakers identify
| a place in a generally non-offensive manner. There will
| always be variation between the source pronunciation and the
| destination pronunciation, especially once a few hundred
| years have intervened, and that's fine. The question is can
| we all agree that these are suitable words for referring to
| that country?
|
| English is one language with multiple dialects, so words that
| enter the language from a certain dialect will reflect that
| history to a greater or lesser degree. Even when there isn't
| an "r" in the spelling, Americans still manage to put an r
| into the pronunciation, as with Goethe or Godel. So to blame
| the British for unetymological r is just false. Americans do
| it because they recognise the unity of the language, and
| they're communicating rather than upholding any particular
| notion of perfection. It is unreasonable to say that the only
| reason for the British to do the same is that their life
| depends on it.
| LordAtlas wrote:
| OK, I'm Indian and I will stipulate that transliterations of
| Devanagari are inconsistent, but that guy you linked to is
| just being a crude racist asshole. (0:39 "and it's so
| appropriate because she's Indian." Fuck you, Paul Henry!)
|
| In the specific case, her last name would be pronounced
| "deekshit", with both "d" and "t" being soft like in Spanish.
| Both those consonant sounds do not exist in standard
| American/British English.
|
| What is more exasperating to me is that we are not even
| consistent in English spellings of the same names. For
| instance, "Sameer" and "Samir" are both pronounced the same
| but the first is closer to the actual pronunciation.
|
| As far as pronunciation goes, I have made peace with
| foreigners incorrectly pronouncing sounds that don't exist in
| their languages, but it bugs me when they can't be arsed to
| get the syllable emphasis right or when they use the wrong
| vowel sound even though the correct vowel sound is familiar
| to them.
|
| Example of #1: A friend of mine is named "Manohar". The
| syllable emphasis and spelling is: "Muh-NOH-huhr". But his
| name gets pronounced as "Man-oh-HAAR" in the US. And it's not
| because he's pronouncing it wrong. Imagine if he pronounced
| every "Michael" as "Mikhail". People would be pissed.
|
| Example of #2: I can understand them not pronouncing the soft
| "t" and "d" in "tandoori", but not so much having the first
| syllable rhyme with "can" instead of "run". Or "Punjab"
| becoming "Poon-jab" instead of "Puhn-jaab".
|
| Also, #PSA, Hindi does not have the "zh" sound in it, so
| please stop pronouncing "Raj" as "Razh". Thank you. :)
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm studying Hindi as a second language, and the
| inconsistency of transliterations drives me crazy, I'd
| rather nobody transliterated and just used devanagari if
| it's not going to be IAST.
|
| Worse, Google has updated the (abc -> hiNdii) keyboard on
| Android so that in many cases it actually refuses the
| standard transliterations in favour of popular ones, I
| assume. And so if you want piitaa you have to type 'peeta';
| 'piita' won't get it, even if you click the caret for more
| options.
|
| It also reinforces things like huuN - which I can
| understand if you're writing by hand, but why wouldn't a
| digital keyboard input the 'correct' / 'proper' / whatever
| huuN?
|
| (To write it there I used the direct input method rather
| than transliteration one, with which afaik it's not
| possible to write it.)
|
| In fairness to butcherers of Manohar's name though, you
| really do need to be told/have learnt how the
| transliteration (IAST or roughly) is supposed to work.
| Otherwise of course you're going to read it in the language
| you know.
|
| The trouble is, once you do know, you're left wondering if
| something is transliterated 'correctly' (in standard as
| opposed to popular fashion) or English-phonetically...
| Particularly with vowels: 'e' for example is either 'ay' as
| in 'pay' or 'e' as in 'pee' accordingly. (The latter
| 'should' be 'i' or 'ii'.)
| LordAtlas wrote:
| You have my condolences for Google's nonsense. I have not
| written anything in Hindi for the past couple of decades,
| I think, despite growing up in Delhi and speaking the
| language fluently. All my work communication and
| conversation with friends is in English. The good thing
| about Hindi is that if you know the script, it's
| pronounced exactly as it's written. There are no strange
| inconsistencies like the monstrosity that is English.
|
| > In fairness to butcherers of Manohar's name though, you
| really do need to be told/have learnt how the
| transliteration (IAST or roughly) is supposed to work.
| Otherwise of course you're going to read it in the
| language you know.
|
| I have absolutely no ill-will for people who pronounce
| any language's names solely after reading them. But if
| you work with someone and they introduce themselves to
| you, it's just common courtesy to at least make a best
| effort attempt to get the syllable emphasis and the
| vowels right. If you _hear_ it and still get it
| hopelessly wrong, I would be less charitable.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| > In the specific case, her last name would be pronounced
| "deekshit", with both "d" and "t" being soft like in
| Spanish. Both those consonant sounds do not exist in
| standard American/British English.
|
| So he did get the fricative right after all? The sounds
| certainly exist, unfortunately there is no unambiguous way
| of denoting them without resorting to the now archaic "d"
| and "th".
|
| Could you perhaps shed some light on what a seemingly
| silent "h" after a consonant really indicates? Take names
| like "Delhi" and "Bhopal".
|
| > Example of #1: A friend of mine is named "Manohar". The
| syllable emphasis and spelling is: "Muh-NOH-huhr". But his
| name gets pronounced as "Man-oh-HAAR" in the US. And it's
| not because he's pronouncing it wrong. Imagine if he
| pronounced every "Michael" as "Mikhail". People would be
| pissed.
|
| I agree that errors in emphasis are far more jarring than
| errors in sounds, but using the native cognate in the
| language being spoken of a foreign name in that category is
| actually very common and often encouraged by the bearer of
| the name. Perhaps because it has already been mangled so
| many times since its Hebrew origin through Koine to all the
| modern languages that use it.
|
| On thing that has always puzzled me is despite of what a
| dumpster fire Devanagari transliteration to Latin is, it
| seems to still have a massive buy-in with native speakers
| online. In places like social media or the Indian channels
| on the company Slack, it seems more common than actual
| Devanagari. I see the same pattern with Malayalam being
| written in Latin rather than its own script. If there's no
| need to accommodate people who don't know the script, I
| fail to see the point. I've asked but people usually get
| very defensive about it. Are they ashamed of having
| different scripts from the globally dominant one, Latin? I
| would rather consider it a point of pride.
| LordAtlas wrote:
| > So he did get the fricative right after all?
|
| Did not sound like that to me. He pronounced "d" and "t"
| as dd and tt when it should be d and t. I _think_ the
| first consonant is closer to how you might pronounce the
| article "the".
|
| > Could you perhaps shed some light on what a seemingly
| silent "h" after a consonant really indicates? Take names
| like "Delhi" and "Bhopal".
|
| Oh boy. OK, "Delhi" is the Anglicised name of the city
| name, which in Hindi is "Dilli", so it's actually
| pronounced "Del-hi", hard "D", faint "h". Though it could
| be clipped to sound just like "deli" depending on whom
| you're speaking to.
|
| But in cases where it's a transliteration, _usually_ it
| means that it's an aspirated version of the consonant in
| question. "Bhopal" is one such instance. The Devanagari
| script has, for some consonants, multiple versions: soft,
| aspirated soft, hard, aspirated hard. (I'm not a
| linguist; there may be better terms for these.) Let's
| take "d". There's the soft "d" pronounced as Spanish-
| speaking people pronounce "d". There's a hard "d"
| pronounced as in "door". Then there's "dh" and "ddh",
| which are the aspirated forms of the respective letters.
|
| (Google "pronounce Bhopal" and switch to the "Indian
| English" pronunciation option. I also checked the top 5
| or so youtube videos and ALL of them are wrong; they have
| an American pronouncing it. WTF?)
|
| But as I mentioned, our transliteration is not
| standardised and it's indeed a dumpster fire, so
| sometimes, the consonant is "ddh", but it's written as
| "dh" in a word, which does not help things at all.
|
| Want more complications? In South India, "th" is often
| used instead of "t" in names where there's a soft "t".
| But it's pronounced exactly the same. [1]
|
| Oh, and Devanagari is a simpler script. Other Indian
| languages like Malayalam have even more sounds that
| Westerners have zero hope of pronouncing correctly. Heck,
| Indians from other states struggle with it.
|
| As for names, you'll find multiple spellings for names
| that are pronounced the same. I have friends named
| "Aarti" and they are spelt "Aarti", "Arathi", "Aarthi",
| and "Arati". A royal mess.
|
| And this is before some idiotic
| astrological/numerological superstition makes them add
| unnecessary letters to their names. (Not common, but does
| happen.)
|
| > In places like social media or the Indian channels on
| the company Slack, it seems more common than actual
| Devanagari.
|
| I can only speculate that there are two reasons for this:
|
| 1) PC keyboards in India are English QWERTY and typing
| regional language text on them is a pain.
|
| 2) The medium of instruction in middle class education is
| English, so many of us grow up speaking English well. And
| in some cases like mine, think in English too. As we
| progress in our careers, communication in the workplace
| is in English, and writing fluency in native languages
| decreases. It's just easier to type it out in English. I
| consume pretty much all my Internet content in English
| (though I can speak 3 Indian languages), and it bugs the
| hell out of me too because I have to translate from the
| weird English transliteration to the native language in
| my head first. And that's before people use SMS-like
| contractions for words.
|
| [1] Speculative answers here: https://www.reddit.com/r/in
| dia/comments/5uwcwi/people_from_s...
|
| This will only make sense to you if you read Hindi:
| https://qr.ae/pG5zMP
| valarauko wrote:
| > "Delhi" is the Anglicised name of the city name, which
| in Hindi is "Dilli", so it's actually pronounced "Del-
| hi", hard "D", faint "h". Though it could be clipped to
| sound just like "deli" depending on whom you're speaking
| to.
|
| To be fair to the English orthography, the English
| 'Delhi' doesn't come from the Hindi dillii, but rather an
| anglicization of the Persian dhly when the East India
| Company arrived, retained in modern Urdu as dhly or
| 'dehli'.
| fishywang wrote:
| Do you also blame French system when you mispronounced
| Guillaume Dubois? Like, French should use a better system to
| transliterate into Roman alphabet for English pronunciation?
| [deleted]
| mc32 wrote:
| Pinyin is pretty close. At least it's predictable. Wade-Giles
| is way off -well, I guess it was based off Cantonese?
|
| In any case, my pet peeve is people expecting speakers of
| English to accommodate foreign sounds, but not extending the
| same ask to foreign speakers who often mangle English name
| sounds just as much.
|
| I say just let them say it however they know how and let it be.
| I don't mind if they can't pronounce my name well.
|
| But back to pinyin, that was intended as an alphabetic
| alternative for native Chinese speakers to use instead of
| logographs/characters. So it's audience wasn't foreign language
| speakers and thus will have shortcomings for them. This was
| back when they were tackling illiteracy and pinyin was seen as
| both potential replacement of characters or at least an aid in
| learning a simplified version of the original characters.
| Markoff wrote:
| > In any case, my pet peeve is people expecting speakers of
| English to accommodate foreign sounds, but not extending the
| same ask to foreign speakers who often mangle English name
| sounds just as much.
|
| You fail to understand most of the world use international
| English where nobody really cares about correct
| pronunciation, but about understanding each other and only
| small minority of English users are nowadays native English
| speakers, one could say it's questionable nowadays what is
| the correct pronunciation (intended original use changed), so
| it would be quite foolish to insist on correct pronunciation
| in international enviroment.
|
| I don't think same can be said about English native speakers
| who usually don't speak even second language and can't go
| their way to at least pronounce few names correctly, while
| rest of the world is learning whole other language, not just
| pronunciation of bunch of names.
|
| Agreed with your pinyin commnets.
| prvc wrote:
| >But back to pinyin, that was intended as an alphabetic
| alternative for native Chinese speakers to use instead of
| pictogram/characters. So it's audience wasn't foreign
| language speakers and thus will have shortcomings for them.
|
| Yes that makes sense, and is reasonable. But the expectation
| for all foreigners to be familiar with it is not.
| dirkt wrote:
| But I'd say the expectation that professionals who have to
| pronounce Chinese names pretty frequently, like those who
| do announcements at an airport, or newscasters, could spend
| the time to familiarize themselves with it IS reasonable.
| carlmr wrote:
| I agree, it's crazy how often the news talk about China
| nowadays and almost nobody pronounces the names
| correctly.
| mc32 wrote:
| It's not a big deal. Watch some news in Chinese and
| you'll hear similar butchering.
|
| It's so exaggerated US cities are given totally different
| names in Chinese -there is little resemblance to the
| North American name of the city.
| carlmr wrote:
| That's true, although in Chinese these are official
| transliterations as Hanzi.
|
| I think if someone says Milan in English instead of
| Milano it's fine because the city has an English name as
| well.
| mc32 wrote:
| Right, often what they do is they try to find "close"
| syllables. Close is the wrong term as some are not close
| at all. Vancouver and Philadelphia for example.
|
| It's like taking Milano and cutting it up into Mil + Ano
| and saying, hmm, in English the closest syllables are
| approximately Mill + Anus, we'll call it Millanus, oh,
| but that's got a word we should avoid so let's call it
| MillLand.
|
| The point is, it's not wrong or bad for (any) people to
| get foreign words wrong when they pronounce them.
| darkwater wrote:
| > In any case, my pet peeve is people expecting speakers of
| English to accommodate foreign sounds, but not extending the
| same ask to foreign speakers who often mangle English name
| sounds just as much.
|
| Sorry... what? Us non native speaker live in a world where
| English is taught in almost any school on the planet and
| where you have a peer pressure to know and speak decently
| English. This on top of one of the most irregular languages
| in the world wrt pronunciation of dictionary words, let alone
| names.
|
| PS good luck getting right Greenwich, for example.
| 22c wrote:
| As a native English speaker, for the most part I typically
| know what someone means when they say "gl-OW-kester square"
| or "Green-witch mean time", so don't worry about it.
|
| I have a Russian friend who has specifically asked me to go
| out of my way to correct their mispronunciations, but for
| the most part if someone says an English word in a weird I
| don't even blink.
|
| I'd say part of being an effective English communicator is
| not just about speaking English, but also about being able
| to understand foreign English accents (and I include
| different dialects of native English in that as well).
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| > I have a Russian friend who has specifically asked me
| to go out of my way to correct their mispronunciations,
| but for the most part if someone says an English word in
| a weird I don't even blink.
|
| Yes, English has so many weird native dialects that weird
| foreign pronunciations shouldn't throw you off either.
|
| The Finns seems obtuse in their insistence on using
| Finnish phonology when speaking English, which is easy to
| make light of on the surface, but when you think about it
| it's not actually a bad system. It's consistent, easy to
| understand and it lets them focus on gaining fluency over
| memorising pointless irregular pronunciations.
| neltnerb wrote:
| English is also unusually flexible, something I noticed
| abroad. In English you can do ridiculous wrong things and
| still create something that a skilled listener can easily
| understand. Subject and verb all you know? Eh, I can
| guess from context.
|
| Try putting the subject and verb in the wrong order in
| Japanese or forget your counter particle for a particular
| kind of counting and you just get blank stares.
|
| I think that English, for its many faults, is at least
| extremely error tolerant in terms of it being possible to
| say something that's comprehensible enough dozens of ways
| and often with words practically in random order. It's
| probably the most amazing thing about English to me,
| although I only know a few other languages they are much
| more strict.
| Zababa wrote:
| I think you have to understand that "international
| English" is not the same as English. We have the same
| thing in France where lots of people come to study from
| other countries where they speak French, and their French
| is a little different. I'm not going to waste anyone's
| time on correcting someone because they said "le table"
| and not "la table". Same thing with the pronunciation. I
| can understand them, they can understand me, and that's
| what matters. That's the "price" of having a huge
| influence in the world.
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| Pinyin is predictable if you memorize every single syllable
| that exists, it is not logical on a letter-by-letter basis.
|
| For example, "liu" should be pronounced "liou" and "shui"
| should be pronounced "shuei", but the "o" and "e" are omitted
| in Pinyin for brevity. Similarly, the "u" in lu and mu is
| different from the "u" in "ju" and "qu"; the latter is
| actually "ju" and "qu" as in "nu" and "lu", again the
| diareses are omitted purely for the convenience of the
| writer. The "a" in "yan" and "ya"/"yang" is completely
| different, etc.
|
| I like Pinyin as a reasonably concise input method, but it's
| not great for romanizing names.
| iflp wrote:
| > liu" should be pronounced "liou" and "shui" should be
| pronounced "shuei"
|
| This is nuanced: in some cases it's omission for brevity
| [1] and in other cases it's how the phonemes sound 100
| years ago [2]. And if you pronounce them fast enough there
| isn't much difference.
|
| The omitted diaeresis is certainly for brevity, although
| using v is more common to me.
|
| [1]: https://www.zhihu.com/question/26010099 [2]:
| https://www.zhihu.com/question/313646560
| kragen wrote:
| Probably you speak more Chinese than I do, but as I
| understand it, you don't have to memorize the syllables,
| just the 22 (?) onsets and 17 (?) vowel+codas, same as in
| bopomofo, just more sneakily. Plus nu and lu, I guess. But
| that still means memorizing 41 pronunciations instead of
| the 374 you suggest. Is that right, or is the situation far
| more complicated than it appears?
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| I've never learned bopomofo in earnest, and for pinyin I
| just memorized everything that felt like an exception to
| me, even though it might have some internal logic. For
| example, I guess that the "a" in "yan" is different from
| "lan" because "yan" is its own coda, whereas "lan" is "l"
| + "an"?
| kragen wrote:
| Hmm, I don't know.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Pinyin is not a transliteration into English, it's a way to
| write Chinese using the latin alphabet. Learning how to
| pronounce Pinyin is no difference than learning how to
| pronounce French or German text.
|
| So when you say " _why the speaker is blamed rather than the
| transliteration_ " it's like saying " _why the English speaker
| is blamed rather than the French spelling_ " about an English
| speaker having problems pronouncing a French word.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| In some place, the transliterated rules aren't up to the name
| bearer. There's official rules and when you apply for
| international documents, the government decides how your name
| looks like in romanized form.
| [deleted]
| cabalamat wrote:
| > If the official transliteration into the Roman alphabet leads
| to less accuracy in pronunciation than some other (for example
| see the second vs third columns in the table in TFA), then
| would it not make better sense to adopt a more accurate
| transliteration instead?
|
| Can't be done. The Roman alphabet is a pretty good alphabet for
| Latin, but it isn't for Chinese, which has different sounds
| than are in Latin (or English).
|
| For example, stop consonants in English have a voiced-unvoiced
| distinction: /p b t d k g/
|
| Latin is similar: /p b t d k g kw gw/
|
| Chinese is totally different. Instead of a voiced-unvoiced
| distinction, it has aspirated-unaspirated: /p ph t th k kh/
| (with the h denoting an aspirated stop).
| akersten wrote:
| Is there a resource (maybe with sound samples) that expands
| on the voiced/unvoiced vs aspirated/unaspirated distinction?
| It sounds fascinating, but I'm struggling to conceptualize it
| just with the text here.
| ylyn wrote:
| Compare the t in 'stellar' vs the t in 'tell'.
| PeterisP wrote:
| What's the difference between the t in 'stellar' vs the t
| in 'tell'? I seem to pronounce them identically,
| dictionary pronunciation guides (https://www.oxfordlearne
| rsdictionaries.com/definition/englis... and https://www.o
| xfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...) do
| not make a distinction..
|
| [edit] ah, one (!) of the two "tell" audio recordings in
| that dictionary seems to pronounce it in a different way
| that would illustrate the aspiration, but that seems
| different to how I've usually heard 'tell' being
| pronounced.
| bjowen wrote:
| This is so hard to explain in text, given the variation
| of English accents and that aspiration is not meaningful
| in English. For my regional speech, the strongest
| difference would be something like the difference between
| the /k/ sounds in "kale" and "scale". Nothing to do with
| my feelings for the vegetable, but it gets an extra
| scornful bit of turbulence.
| kragen wrote:
| Are you a native English speaker? It's common for native
| speakers to be pretty deaf to the differences between
| allophones. Try recording yourself in Audacity saying
| "Tell the stellar tart to start stewing a tall stall
| too," then highlight the two "tell" sounds and listen to
| them repeatedly. Also the two "tart" sounds, the two
| "too"/"tew" sounds, and the two "tall" sounds. Maybe
| you'll be able to hear the puff of white noise that's
| missing in "stellar", "start", "stew", and "stall".
| That's the aspiration.
| elros wrote:
| Both recordings of the "tell" word exhibit aspiration. I
| guess it is perhaps more noticeable to me because I'm
| quite well-versed in phonetics.
|
| A common way of illustrating aspiration is: hold a sheet
| of paper in front of your mouth (or your hand), as you
| say the words. "tell" will give you a noticeable puff of
| air as it leaves the mouth, as opposed to "stellar",
| which won't.
|
| Maybe these recordings are helpful to you: https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant#Allophonic
| PeterisP wrote:
| Thanks, that was helpful, I seem to get the difference
| now - just the "tell" example wasn't working as I
| (apparently unlike most English speakers) seem to
| pronounce that word with an unaspirated t.
| [deleted]
| retrac wrote:
| The Wikipedia articles on it might be approachable for a
| layperson with no particular background. I studied some
| linguistics in university and it's a hobby interest so I
| can't really judge that anymore. The articles have plenty
| of sound examples.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_(phonetics)
|
| English actually has all the relevant sounds in most
| dialects so I will try to explain in it reference to that.
| Most English dialects have environments where consonants
| are reliably aspirated, or not, depending on their voicing
| and surrounding environment. Unvoiced stops (p/t/k) in
| isolation "pat" or "cap" are moderately aspirated. Voiced
| stops (b/d/g) are not like "dog" or "bad". (Leaning on this
| pattern as a partial hack using a feature common in a lot
| of European languages, is why p and b are what they are in
| Pinyin, and many other Chinese romanizations.)
|
| In principle, if your dialect does not have a length
| contrast for /ae/ after a voiced consonant (many do though
| including mine, making the vowel longer in that
| environment, so you'll have to try to say them with equal
| vowel length) then "pap" and "bab" (to rhyme with cap and
| cat) when whispered (no vocal chord movement, so all
| equally unvoiced) should be differentiated only by
| aspiration similar to Mandarin's p/b difference. Though
| aspiration is Mandarin is a bit more forceful.
|
| As an aside, most people can hear the difference between
| those words when whispered, hearing a voiced or unvoiced
| consonant, based solely on the aspiration hint. Phonetic
| interpretation is a strange and subtle thing. And voicing
| in Mandarin? It plays the inferior role to aspiration's
| main starring role, a role reversal of the English
| arrangement.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > Unvoiced stops (p/t/k) in isolation "pat" or "cap" are
| moderately aspirated. Voiced stops (b/d/g) are not like
| "dog" or "bad". (Leaning on this pattern as a partial
| hack using a feature common in a lot of European
| languages, is why p and b are what they are in Pinyin,
| and many other Chinese romanizations.)
|
| Some languages, such as Hindi, have both the
| voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated distinction, so
| they have 4 consonants (/t d th dh/) where English only
| has two (/t d/).
|
| Hindi also has retroflex equivalents of those 4
| consonants, and there are minimal pairs between all 8 of
| them. A typical English speaker would struggle to tell
| the difference between them.
|
| For these sorts of reasons, a Romanisation of names in
| different languages that (1) is easy to pronounce for
| English speakers, and (2) sounds like the word in the
| original language, is going to be a tall order.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| Pinyin was not designed as a system for making it easier for
| English speakers to pronounce Chinese, but as a way for native
| Chinese speakers to write their own language. During the early
| years of the revolution in China, there were proposals of
| various levels of seriousness to ditch characters entirely in
| favor of a Latin script like pinyin, and this actually happened
| in Vietnam.
|
| Wade-Giles, an earlier system of transliterating Chinese, was
| designed more with English speakers in mind, but suffered from
| a number of problems of its own, particularly requiring
| apostrophes all over the place.
|
| And in Japan you can still see two competing systems duking it
| out, with the Japanese-for-Japanese Kunrei system ("Huzi")
| officially anointed as standard but in practice the Japanese-
| for-Americans Hepburn ("Fuji") being far more common.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Kunrei Shiki is really annoying. Nobody knows how to
| pronounce Mitutoyo correctly because someone in Japan got
| scared of the supposed ambiguity caused by "tsu".
| kragen wrote:
| I recently saw some publicity video _by Mitutoyo America_
| on YouTube that pronounced it [mitutojou]. All the
| machinists I watch on YouTube pronounce it [mItsutojou]
| though.
| prvc wrote:
| >Pinyin was not designed as a system for making it easier for
| English speakers to pronounce Chinese, but as a way for
| native Chinese speakers to write their own language.
|
| In this case, it makes even less sense to blame English
| speakers for incorrect pronunciations resulting from this
| system.
| sverhagen wrote:
| I find the title misleading, as the link is only covering
| Chinese. But the same problem exists with other languages that
| are already using the "Roman alphabet". So, with that in mind,
| what makes you think the transliteration should be optimized
| for English? :)
| tasogare wrote:
| Yeah, I was kind of blueballed by the page. Maybe the author
| expected pull requests for other languages?
| Epenthesis wrote:
| The goal of pinyin was not to make Mandarin words pronounceable
| to English speakers, but to be a consistent means of
| representing the sounds of Mandarin to Mandarin speakers.
| tdeck wrote:
| I wondered this too when learning Pinyin. I believe the reason
| is that while Pinyin's X and Q may sound like "sh" and "ch" to
| English speakers, they are actually different sounds (and
| contrast with the "sh" and "ch" sounds that also exist in
| Mandarin). That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for
| "wei", "shi" is pronounced "shr", "-ian" is pronounced "yen",
| etc...
|
| MPS-II seems much closer to intuitive pronunciation for English
| speakers, although it never caught on:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Phonetic_Symbols_II
| loycombinate wrote:
| A Chinese teacher once told me that pinyin is based off
| Russian
| bmn__ wrote:
| That's more wrong than correct. There's only one minor part
| of the design where we can see a relation: Latin _q_
| resembles Cyrillic _ch_.
| Markoff wrote:
| > That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei",
| "shi" is pronounced "shr"
|
| Shi is pronounced Shr? That sounds more like your typical
| pirate Beijing hua. Which can get quite confusing when you
| get out of Beijing to let's say to Shanghai business trip and
| you can't figure if something cost 4 or 10 kuai at street
| vendor (my personal anecdote, I think they actually do it on
| purpose since normally 4 would have very different sound).
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| > I believe the reason is that while Pinyin's X and Q may
| sound like "sh" and "ch" to English speakers, they are
| actually different sounds (and contrast with the "sh" and
| "ch" sounds that also exist in Mandarin).
|
| Neither Mandarin sh nor x exist in English. X is sharper and
| is a little more like shy-, whereas sh is darker and a little
| like shr-. In reality they both strike English speakers as
| being quite like sh, because we use the space differently.
|
| I've heard various native English speakers who are fluent in
| Mandarin saying e.g. Xi as Si. I don't know if there's a
| dialectal difference in English or in Mandarin or both that
| accounts for it.
|
| > That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei"
|
| It looks better, if you have a certain aesthetic.
|
| > "shi" is pronounced "shr"
|
| As far as I know Mandarin speakers just consider them the
| same. Pinyin is designed for native speakers.
|
| > "-ian" is pronounced "yen"
|
| The e in Pinyin isn't really the English e sound. It's more
| like the American short u in fun or the NZ short i in pin.
| It's not obvious what letter to use to represent that, but e
| is not completely unreasonable. When they do have an e-sound
| according to the internal logic of Mandarin, it's a variant
| of an a-sound.
| phreack wrote:
| Maybe it's transliterated for a more Latin-like crowd where
| vowels have exactly one pronunciation, like in languages like
| Spanish, where reading the second columns as they'd naturally
| think to, would likely be 95% OK
| pledess wrote:
| Because of categorical perception (as defined on the
| https://dictionary.apa.org/categorical-perception page), there's
| no general agreement on the "correct" way to pronounce a non-
| English name within English communication to a mostly English
| speaking audience. Some people argue that the right approach is
| to always use the closest equivalents within the English phonemic
| inventory. In this view, it's _incorrect_ to suddenly shift
| English speech into the phonemic inventory of a name 's origin.
| Listeners, on average, simply can't and won't hear the name
| consistently, and thus communication is less effective. The
| opposite view is that this is just another example of cultural
| arrogance, and it's best to shift out of the English phonemic
| inventory whenever that's reasonably possible. (For example, in
| this view, the shift should occur when a name is part of news
| coverage, and the speaker had an opportunity to learn the
| phonemes of the original language in advance.)
|
| This isn't specific to English: it's the general question of
| whether a speaker _should_ always stay within the phonemic
| inventory of the communication 's main language.
| tdeck wrote:
| I see this a lot in with Americans having Polish surnames (or
| other Slavic). People typically pronounce theirs somewhere on a
| spectrum between the original and a monolingual english-
| speaker's attempt to make sense of the letters, so you just
| have to wait for them to say it. Example: Susan Wojcicki, whose
| name is apparently pronounced "woh-jisky" but I think in Polish
| (not a speaker) would be more like "voy-chitsky". This site
| shows a whole variety of other American pronunciations:
| https://www.pronouncenames.com/pronounce/wojcicki
| pchm wrote:
| C in Polish is pronounced as ts/tz and 'ck' is an interesting
| case in Polish-American surnames: American pronunciation
| turns 'ck' into 'kk' and Polish speakers will often have a
| hard time recognizing the original spelling.
|
| Listening to audio mentioning Susan Wojcicki, I could never
| figure out the spelling of her name... BTW, Polish
| pronunciation for Wojcicki (notice the 'o') is Vooy-chits-ki
| ithinkso wrote:
| Susan Wojcicki - polish people would immediately assume it's
| written online and would correct the surname to Wojcicki
| because it makes much more sense grammatically speaking and I
| think that's what it was originally before being anglicized.
|
| Note that 'o' in not a form of 'o' but of 'u' so subsequent
| pronunciations with 'o' sounds a bit weird for us polish
| speakers
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| I can't think of any examples off-hand right now, but I
| remember reading an analysis of English where it was talking
| about using only a subset of its phonetic
| inventory/phonotactics for foreign words (a bunch being
| reserved for native words). So even in cases that the English
| has all the sounds for a word it may not always render them
| because of the 'foreign word' register.
|
| English-speakers like to struggle with issues of pronounciation
| of non-native words. Some other languages are just hardcore
| "naturalize the hell out of foreign words". I personally don't
| see much of a moral component in English approach. Though I
| understand that many people are super big on it as indicating
| respect, for me, I'd never be so arrogant as to judge people of
| random language X too harshly for only getting a rough
| approximation of my name, or mapping it to the nearest common
| name in their language.
| gryson wrote:
| The article brings up categorical perception when it says one
| shouldn't assume they are hearing sounds in another language
| correctly, since our brains will map those sounds to the
| nearest English equivalent.
|
| What the article is really addressing is how different
| orthographic romanization systems map to English sounds. It's
| not advocating (as far as I can tell) that English speakers
| attempt to produce non-English sounds, which is, as you say, a
| difficult issue and probably not realistic without phonetic
| training.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > The article brings up categorical perception when it says
| one shouldn't assume they are hearing sounds in another
| language correctly, since our brains will map those sounds to
| the nearest English equivalent.
|
| I've noticed a similar thing with Spanish (my second
| language). I can kind-of read Portuguese as a side effect,
| but if I try to listen to spoken Portuguese I find it
| completely incomprehensible. My auditory circuits just aren't
| wired for it.
| rlpb wrote:
| Even within English there are different accents. I'm British.
| If I meet an American "Annie" then do I put on a faux American
| accent while saying her name? Or do I just say "Annie" with a
| British accent? If it's allowed or even expected that I shift
| "Annie" into my accent, why not a non-English name? What about
| European names that have English equivalents but are pronounced
| differently in European languages?
|
| My own name is foreign. Native English speakers cannot
| pronounce one of the vowels in it, and if they try, they end up
| using what is to me a different vowel entirely (imagine someone
| saying "Dive" instead of "Dave"). I gave up when I was about
| six, and am quite happy for people to use a common, roughly
| similar English name for me instead. In fact I prefer it, since
| then I don't have to hear it being mangled constantly.
| neltnerb wrote:
| I personally think it's entirely fine to switch between
| accents to try to match the locals, but I get the argument
| that it's offensive. I think it's unfortunate that this is
| the perception because I really really really really like
| phonetics. I'm a singer, this is our bread and butter.
|
| It's frustrating that doing my best to sing with an
| Australian accent is surely entirely unacceptable in 2021,
| even if it's an Australian composer and the rhyming scheme
| makes no sense in an American accent.
|
| At least for some reason it's perfectly fine to use a British
| accent at all times, even if it's a horrible accent. We
| almost _always_ sing with a "British accent" by default
| because of particular ways it improves the understandability
| of the words when sung. We tend to only use an "American
| accent" (and even then, which one right?) when singing Gospel
| music.
|
| The rules are a little strange and clearly asymmetric in the
| sense that adopting accents that have historically been over-
| emphasized or glorified or straight up were the accents of
| conquering empires is fine while the reverse is not. This is
| a reasonable guideline, but I admit it feels hollow as
| someone who simply wants to sing as best I can.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Good points.
|
| Yeah; it's possibly ironic that a lot of efforts/values in
| this direction have a strong indirect effect of enforcing
| the status quo and the cultural norms of the prevailing
| power. ("It's always ok to wear jeans" is my shorthand).
|
| I remember being surprised at Hugh Laurie's blues
| recordings. He's the person I can think of off-hand that
| went all-out on accent while singing with his mother
| tongue.
|
| OTOH if you go all out and sing in another language it's
| regarded as ok try to try render things more exactly (But
| most people make lots of mistakes that native speakers pick
| up on and so the audience may not enjoy the aesthetic
| outcome. It's super hard!)
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| OTOOH I just recalled the singer John Linnell settling
| for singing in Latin because of (interpolating his words
| a little) not wanting to sing badly in a living language
| ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7MJ71RPGhU ).
|
| "I'm deeply jealous of people who are fluent in a second
| language and can apply that skill to their creative work
| in a way that doesn't seem like cultural appropriation of
| the most offensive and embarrassing kind" (
| https://www.openculture.com/2021/07/they-might-be-giants-
| joh... )
| elros wrote:
| > (imagine someone saying "Dive" instead of "Dave")
|
| So, an Australian? :D
| alistairSH wrote:
| I'm Scottish-American immigrant. Pronunciation is a funny
| thing.
|
| Marry (tie the knot), Mary (the person), and Merry (happy at
| Christmas). My parents and I pronounce them differently (mah-
| ry, mai-ry, meh-ry). My younger sister, who lacks any
| Scottish accent, pronounces them the same. Same with the
| woman's name Carrie/Kerrie - same in the US, but subtly
| different in Scotland.
|
| Then there's the "wh" sound. More of a "hwh" sound vs the
| American plain-old "w". Lots of teasing from friends when I
| say white or wheels or which.
|
| This all used to cause good-natured fun for my mom and her
| peers, as she was an ESOL teacher.
|
| For the most part, I'm just happy if people get my name
| mostly correct. Alistair shouldn't be that hard, but
| apparently it is.
| jnwatson wrote:
| In parts of the American South, "wh" is still pronounced,
| though it is fading.
|
| The South had a large influx of Scottish immigration
| 200-300 years ago and it still shows.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is very reasonable. But I wonder if there is a word (in
| any language) for the pointless pleasure of saying a foreign
| word in the foreign language pronunciation.
|
| And for the pleasure of observing someone mistakenly do so. How
| many Pauls build a Les Paul?
|
| For my part, even my two syllable first name can be hard for
| Anglophones, though they are usually very eager to learn how to
| say it (people are usually very kind). I Postel principle the
| shit out of it, anyway.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Cosmopolitan aesthetics would be the root of the phenomena I
| imagine, if that word doesn't still apply.
|
| I know it was a discussion for many decades about whether a
| piece of music should be in the original language or the
| translation. Everyone settled on the original, so we all sing
| with absolutely atrocious accents in foreign languages as
| best we can.
|
| I feel like this whole area is a giant minefield for actors
| now, switching accents for roles is extremely normal. If that
| is suddenly interpreted as signaling a lack of respect for
| the real accent of the people they are portraying it makes an
| awful lot of everything harder.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > I know it was a discussion for many decades about whether
| an piece of music should be in the original language or the
| translation. Everyone settled on the original, so we all
| sing with absolutely atrocious accents in foreign languages
| as best we can.
|
| I can relate to that. Pre-pandemic, I was singing in a
| community chorus, where we routinely had to sing in
| languages we don't necessarily speak. Typically, the
| director would coach us. We had an actual German in the
| audience one time when we did some Christmas pieces in
| German, and he told us that we sang the words correctly,
| but it was still odd to hear German with a Chicago accent.
| :)
|
| I've heard of one top-level group bringing in a professor
| to coach Church Slavonic when they did Rachmaninoff's
| _Vespers_. Since I don't even speak modern Russian, I have
| no idea how well they did it, but their musicianship was
| outstanding.
| neltnerb wrote:
| If you dig into the linguistics for the singing a bit
| more, it's even more odd. Singing is traditionally done
| in "High German" so a lot of the pronunciation is as it
| is supposed to be, but it's not standard modern German.
| French is even odder, the sung version is quite different
| from spoken. I have tried simply speaking the poems that
| were set to music and people who know French have
| absolutely no idea what I am saying.
| golemiprague wrote:
| There are so many combinations of native speaker of language x
| pronouncing a name in language y, not only Americans and Chinese.
| It is a waste of time and effort trying to learn all those
| combinations. Much easier to just not be too sensitive when
| someone misspell it, most people will be polite enough to adjust
| it if someone feel the need to correct them, which is usually
| when they develop more than a one time anecdotal encounter.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Now try German :) Personally I don't have a problem with foreign
| speakers butchering my name. And what's the correct pronouncation
| anyway for a first name that's the French version of a name with
| Greek origin that seems to be most popular in Russia, and a
| family name that's an Old-German word for a profession that died
| out many centuries ago but somehow survived in some backwoods.
| theCodeStig wrote:
| There seems to be an assumption in this thread, that only
| American English speakers mispronounce non-English names. I've
| found the British and Australians, to be equally terrible at
| this.
| naturalauction wrote:
| I remember moving to the UK and being shocked at how much some
| people "butchered" their own names (mostly Indian origin ones
| in a British accent). I don't even know if that counts as
| mispronunciation at that point.
| Epenthesis wrote:
| A good addition might be to point out good first guesses for the
| vowels in non-English names (Examples used assume a General
| American accent):
|
| * "A" as in "ah" (like "ah, I see")
|
| * "E" as in "e" in "pet", or the "ai" in "pain"
|
| * "I" as in the "i" in "pit" or the "ea" in "peat"
|
| * "O" as in the "o" in "cot" or the "o" in "cone"
|
| * "U" as in the "u" in "put" or the "oo" in "doom"
|
| (Americans might notice that this approximately reflects the
| sounds those letters represent in Spanish)
|
| Exception/refinement: If you know the name is from an Indian
| language, read "a" as the "u" in "putt"
|
| (Edit: Improved the example given for "a")
| [deleted]
| thedravidian wrote:
| > If you know the name is from an Indian language, read "a" as
| the "u" in "putt"
|
| Please stop making up stuff like "an Indian language". If you
| mean Hindi-Urdu and that language family, then just call it
| that, don't subtly encourage people to think that is the
| language for all of India.
| Epenthesis wrote:
| I believe it's true for most of the sprachbund, including my
| native language Kannada (which is a Dravidian language very
| much unrelated to Hindi)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Exception/refinement: If you know the name is from an Indian
| language, read "a" as the "u" in "putt"
|
| Used to be written that way; compare Calcutta -> Kolkata,
| suttee -> sati.
|
| > (Examples used assume a General American accent that
| pronounces "cot" and "caught" differently)
|
| In combination with the directive to read "a" as in "caught", I
| don't know how to take this except as a call to add lip
| rounding to the pronunciation of foreign "a". But that can't be
| right?
| qalmakka wrote:
| Also known as "pronouncing Latin alphabet vowels as in Latin"
| :)
|
| I like how English managed to offset for his relatively simple
| grammar by totally destroying its spelling. The whole fact that
| things like "spelling bees" can exist was very hard to grasp to
| me as a kid watching stuff dubbed in Italian.
|
| Seven years old me was always very confused by why the kids in
| TV shows were rewarded for knowing how to spell stuff, which is
| something every second grader can do in Italy for any arbitrary
| word. In Italian you just write things the way you hear them,
| and there's an almost 1:1 strong correspondence between written
| and spoken language. If you don't know how to write something,
| you also don't know how to say it.
| oblio wrote:
| They had a crazy vowel shift where vowels, which for example
| in Romanian are defined as sounds that "stand by themselves"
| [1] all became 2-sound things.
|
| To make it obvious, I'll use the Romanian spelling for
| vowels, which is practically Latin (except for "a" which is
| pronounced "uh").
|
| A became _ei_.
|
| E became _i_ (ok, this one 's the exception, but in practice
| it's still crazy, "Mercedes" manages to have 3 - three!!! -
| pronunciations for it).
|
| I became _ai_.
|
| O became _au_.
|
| U became _iu_.
|
| So if you look at them, they're all 2 distinct sounds (ergo
| the 2 letters in the Romanian spelling, except for E, which
| is crazy enough anyway).
|
| I'm not counting W, Y and such because I think they weren't
| used in Latin.
|
| [1] I.e. they're need a single sound to be pronounced, don't
| need an additional supporting sound.
| qalmakka wrote:
| Without counting all those circumstances where A is still
| /a/, u is /a/ or a similar vowel, and so on. Basically,
| there's nothing that's still pronounced as it should :)
| yesenadam wrote:
| > "A" as in the "au" in "caught"
|
| Not an expert, but I can't offhand think of a language where
| this is even approximately how _a_ is pronounced--which ones
| are you thinking of?
| macdice wrote:
| Try "ah". This confusion could be caused by the caught-cot
| merger, possibly in combination with the father-bother
| merger.
| Epenthesis wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion. It was difficult for me to think
| of an example without resorting to IPA, since my own
| American accent is fully cot/caught + father/bother merged.
| Epenthesis wrote:
| * Spanish: "hacer"
|
| * French: "pas"
|
| * Italian: "casa"
|
| * Mandarin (written using pinyin): "bang"
|
| * German: "katze"
|
| * Japanes (written in romaji): "arigato"
|
| * Bahasa Indonesia: "bahasa"
|
| Note that the sounds in these various languages are not
| _exactly_ the same, but the "au" in "caught" is the closest
| sound in the native phonological inventory of a General
| American speaker (given said speaker pronounces "caught" and
| "cot" differently).
| [deleted]
| PeterisP wrote:
| It's worth noting that "given said speaker pronounces
| "caught" and "cot" differently" is a bit misleading
| qualifier - there are many who have some difference between
| "caught" and "cot" (with "caught" being similar to "cot"
| but longer/smoother, with a clear differentiation), but
| it's clearly not the sound you intended that would match
| Italian "casa" and IPA 'a'; so pronouncing "caught" and
| "cot" differently apparently does not necessarily imply
| pronouncing "caught" the same way you do.
|
| Also, if I listen to the audio examples at
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger
| then it's exactly the other way around, that the "merged"
| pronunciation seems like an appropriate representation of
| "a" in words like Italian "casa", with "non-merged"
| "cought" sounding very different from that?
| Epenthesis wrote:
| Oh wow, my mistake!
|
| I personally have the merger, and so I misunderstood
| which direction the split went.
| eliseumds wrote:
| Apparently there's a subset of American-English speakers that
| would pronounce "caught" as "kaat". I've always heard it like
| a longer/smoother "cot" though.
|
| I'd say a good first guess is the "a" in "about" instead.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| In southern English English, it rhymes with the number 0
| (nought).
| flyinghamster wrote:
| That's also how it rhymes in northern Illinois
| (Chicago/Rockford/Quad Cities). I've never pronounced
| "cot" and "caught" alike. Using different pronunciations
| is a pretty good indicator that someone came from the
| Chicago area.
| _kst_ wrote:
| Yes, in my dialect of American English (raised in Southern
| California by parents from the midwest), "cot" and "caught"
| are pronounced almost identically.
| tkgally wrote:
| I was also raised in Southern California, and both my
| sisters and I--all born in the 1950s--have had complete
| cot/caught merger since childhood. The local friends our
| age whom I surveyed informally about the distinction in
| 1975 or so, after I learned about it in a linguistics
| class in college, also had the merger.
|
| Our parents, who were born in the 1920s, both made the
| cot/caught distinction. Our mother was from the midwest,
| but our father grew up in the same Southern California
| city as we did. This suggested to me that, with respect
| to at least this one phonemic distinction, our language
| acquisition was influenced more by our peers than by our
| parents.
|
| I should note that my sisters and I were initially
| flabbergasted that anyone pronounced those words
| differently and had trouble hearing the difference, while
| our parents were upset to learn that we pronounced them
| the same.
| [deleted]
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Gotta be careful with "caught":
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot-caught_merger
| yesenadam wrote:
| "The _cot-caught merger_ or _LOT-THOUGHT merger_ , formally
| known in linguistics as the low back merger, is a sound
| change present in some dialects of English where speakers
| do not distinguish the vowel phonemes in "cot" and
| "caught". ...An additional vowel merger, the _father-bother
| merger_ , which spread through North America in the
| eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has resulted today in
| a three-way merger in which most Canadian and many American
| accents have no vowel difference in words like "palm" /a/,
| "lot" /a/, and "thought" /o/."
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| Most of New England, as well as much of old England
|
| This too can be looked up
| Causality1 wrote:
| _The sound most English speakers guess in these cases is to make
| them sounds like the Zh sound in the middle consonant in the
| English word "measure"._
|
| Then why the hell do we transliterate that sound as "Zh" instead
| of J?
| nojs wrote:
| Not sure of the reason, but worth noting that a good chunk of
| people in the south of China pronounce it like the English "z".
| mastazi wrote:
| Four points for Italian:
|
| 1. Vowels are like in Spanish ("a" always sounds "ah" etc.)
|
| 2. The group "ch" sounds like a "k" sound, e.g. bruschetta is
| "broos-keh-tah"
|
| 3. The groups "gl" and "gn" sound like Spanish "ll" and "n"
| respectively. Those are hard to pronounce for English speakers,
| the easy shortcut is just imagine that the "g" is silent and that
| the "l" or "n" are a bit more pronounced.
|
| 4. Double consonants need to have a much more pronounced sound,
| almost as if you pause for a moment on that consonant. It should
| be easy to tell apart "nonno" ("grandpa") and "nono" ("ninth")
| ajmurmann wrote:
| "Vowels are like in Spanish ("a" always sounds "ah" etc.)"
|
| This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman
| alphabet and isn't English. The great vowel shift in English
| changed his vowels get pronounced in English when they were a
| lot more similar. This even holds for transliteration systems
| like Hepburn and painting. If you try to pronounce vowels in a
| language other than English you are likely gonna be less wrong
| pronouncing it as if it were any other language that's not
| English. English speakers literally decided to pronounce vowels
| differently at some point due to fashion. This should get
| drilled into all school children in English speaking countries!
| mastazi wrote:
| > This should get drilled into all school children in English
| speaking countries!
|
| Yes I totally agree, my daughter who grew up speaking
| English, was having trouble reading some Japanese words that
| were transliterated (Romanji) because she couldn't figure out
| how to pronounce the vowels, but for me (I'm Italian) it was
| easy to read them correctly, even though I had never seen
| those words before and I didn't know what they meant.
|
| > This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman
| alphabet
|
| Yes and surprisingly it works fairly well even with some non-
| European languages where the Latin alphabet was adopted, such
| as Malaysian and Indonesian.
|
| However there are some languages that have frequent
| exceptions, e.g. French comes to mind where there are several
| word endings like e.g. "-eau", "-aux" and "-aix" etc., other
| languages also have exceptions like "-de" endings in
| Portuguese and some diphthongs in German like "ie", "au" etc.
|
| PS. it's strange that the Great Vowel Shift is not widely
| known among English speakers - it caused the English language
| to have highly irregular phonetics which is one of the most
| evident features of the language.
| Symmetry wrote:
| My last name has an 'ough' in it and that has made me
| intensely aware of that fact.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman
| alphabet and isn't English.
|
| That is not actually the case. In Catalan, for example, "e"
| and "o" may be pronounced either open or close ( _/ e/_ vs _/
| e/_, _/ o/_ vs _/ o/_), and the difference may only be marked
| with an accent mark (e, e, o, o) if that syllable was to be
| accentuated according to the rules, or if it happens to
| distinguish two differently pronounced words that would
| otherwise be spelt the same. Also, the most prevalent dialect
| of Catalan will pronounce non-stressed "a" and "e" as schwa (
| _/ @/_) and non-stressed "o" the same as "u". I believe
| something similar to this happens in Portuguese.
|
| And don't even get me started on French...
| xdennis wrote:
| You can't solve this problem by compounding the issue: forcing
| people to know the spelling of every language.
|
| The solution is to give people your IPA pronunciation. Instead of
| listening pronouns in Twitter you can list the pronunciation:
| "Ioan Raducanu /i'wan r@dukanu/"
| keltex wrote:
| There's a Sass for that:
|
| https://cloud.name-coach.com/
| AYBABTME wrote:
| Some people take this idea to heart a bit too much. Barely anyone
| can pronounce my name properly and I really don't bat an eye at
| it. It's not pragmatic to expect most people to do so, especially
| in a place like the US where so many people come from different
| backgrounds. And that's nothing to say about the fact that the
| same name, written the same way, can be pronounced very
| differently depending on the bearer's background. At last, it
| seems to me that the people who care the most about this issue
| are monolingual.
|
| It's one thing to do a quick effort at it; you can ask "how do
| you say your name" real quick and let it go after a try. Or just
| try to catch how I'll introduce myself, and say it the same way.
|
| On the other hand, some folks get hung up on pronouncing my name
| "properly" and get very annoying about it: "no no no I reaaally
| want to say your name properly, it's important _for me_". In a
| 30min meeting, I don't feel like spending 5 minutes giving a
| useless French pronunciation class for something so pointless. I
| much prefer hearing my name pronounced wrong by mistake, than
| wasting time in a useless woke-posturing session with someone
| using my time to teach them how to make sounds their mouth hasn't
| been trained to make, supposedly out of respect for my
| foreignness.
| draw_down wrote:
| Not only this, but the reverse never seems to go remarked upon.
| Speakers of other languages have their way of pronouncing our
| names and we're fine with it.
| jaimebuelta wrote:
| I have an strategy of two pronunciations for my name (Jaime,
| it's a Spanish name):
|
| - Quick chats, like answering your name at Starbucks, talking
| with the electric company on the phone, etc. I use directly the
| English pronunciation of my name (like Jamie). It's faster,
| easier and who cares, frankly... Gratefully, I can now use
| "wrote as Lanister" and fix some writing problems
|
| - With more meaningful relationships, like coworkers or
| acquaintances that I will be talking several times, etc, the
| only thing that I care about is an honest try. Most people
| tends to have problems with the ending vowel, and the initial
| "hard H" sound, so it sounds more like "Hi-me", but that's
| absolutely no problem. Different languages have different
| sounds, and I mispronounce things all the time. All I care
| about it's the other person putting a bit of effort into it,
| but that's about it...
| eyko wrote:
| Same boat here. Vicente in Spanish so I go by Vincent most of
| the time (either the english or the French pronounciations, I
| don't care). Most people see my name in Spanish and pronounce
| it like it was Italian ("Vinchente", they always add an N).
| I've never been bothered by it one bit, at least they tried.
| For the curious, the correct pronounciation is either "Vee-
| sen-teh" or with the spanish voiceless-dental-fricative th[1]
| "Vee-then-teh".
|
| If you ever bought into this idea that mispronouncing
| someone's unfamiliar/foreign name is somehow rude or racist
| or an extension of white supremacy/privilege, you should see
| how english names and surnames are pronounced in non-english
| speaking countries. People give it their best shot and fail,
| that's all there is to it.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_fricative
| FroshKiller wrote:
| My first name is Jonathan, and my Indian colleagues whose
| mother tongue is Marathi either say "Jonatan" or avoid it
| altogether because they think it has five syllables due to
| Marathi's implicit schwa. I'm sure I've done all kinds of
| violence to their names myself.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yup. Take Bob; in English, especially American English it's
| pronounced like "Baawhb" (exaggerated, weirdly phonetic),
| but over here (Dutch) it would be pronounced as "Bop", with
| a very short / clipped O sound.
|
| Of course there's also names that have transformed to
| nearly unrecognizable forms; George over here has evolved
| into Sjors (or the other way around?), John into Sjon, etc.
| eyko wrote:
| Another interesting one: James and Jacob are the same
| name (from the Hebrew Ya'qob), and in spanish it's either
| found as "Jaime", "Jacobo" or "Santiago" which comes from
| "Saint Iago" (Iago being an old spanish conversion of the
| Latin "Iacobus" which came to other romance languages as
| Yago, Iaco, Jacob, Yacobo, Jacobo etc).
|
| The "J" consonant leads to many interesting things
| because of how many pronounciations it has. It can be an
| english "J" or the softer latin "J" (identical to an I)
| or an in between Y which could be between an english J
| and SH. In current spanish, however, the J is pronounced
| as the "voiceless velar fricative"[1] (a very strong H?),
| so whilst the name started sounding like "Iacobo", it's
| now a very firm HHakobo.
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative
| LegitShady wrote:
| The hebrew 'jacob' is pronounced with a v rather than b
| sound at the end as well. It's more like Yaqov than
| Yaqob. It uses the same letter 'bet' but with a dot in
| the middle its a b sound, without the dot in the middle
| its a v sound, and in modern use they don't add the dots
| in at all and assume everyone knows how to pronounce
| things.
| eyko wrote:
| TIL! So many (most?) christian names have hebrew origins
| so it's just great to see how much hebrew pronounciation
| has been completely violated to create words that
| sometimes barely resemble the original.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I belive San Diego could also be translated back to Saint
| James or any of those other variants but there's some
| other odd step or two in between that I can't remember
| right now.
|
| Ah it turns out that may not be true, though widely
| believed for the last couple of centuries:
|
| https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Diego#Spanish
|
| The one that shocked me the most was the number of
| different names that I associated with different
| countries that all turned out just to be variations on
| John.
|
| Ivan, Ian, Euan, Hans, Sean, Jens, Juan, Yiannis,
| Giovanni, Evan, Ifan, Janko, Ivanko and many more
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_(given_name)#In_othe
| r_l...
| enlightens wrote:
| > softer latin "J" (identical to an I)
|
| That's a fun one here in the US. My employer has an
| office in Romania, so many of my coworkers have names
| that start with an I for the voiced palatal approximant
| sound. These names would start with a J in English, have
| the I in Romanian, and are pronounced (more or less) like
| an English "y" sound. For example, Julian -> Iulian,
| approximately pronounced Yoo-lee-an. For extra
| complication for those in the States, many default fonts
| show minimal differences between a capital I and a lower-
| case L, so some people read it as Loo-Lee-An.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palatal_approximant
|
| And then don't get me started on us Americans trying to
| understand the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-comma
| jejones3141 wrote:
| That's more the New England pronunciation of "Bob". Here
| in the Midwest it's shorter. It was a fun part of _This
| Old House_ back when Bob Vila was on; he'd ask a
| subcontractor (this was in Boston) how things were going,
| and they'd say "Well, Baawhb..."
| Vinnl wrote:
| Super off-topic, but my name is Vincent and I'm learning
| some basic Spanish vocabulary, and it's been at the back of
| my mind for a while that I'm not really sure how I'm
| supposed to pronounce my name in Spanish. So maybe you
| could help: how would you pronounce my name when speaking
| Spanish - would you turn it into Vicente, use the English
| or French pronunciation, or is there a "proper" Spanish way
| to pronounce it?
|
| (Feel free to ignore of course, I just got interested.)
| eyko wrote:
| Most people pronounce the spanish Vicente as "Beethenteh"
| in castellano but you can definitely ignore the "th"
| sound and pronounce it like an S, it's your name after
| all, you make the rules! In some spanish languages
| there's no "th" sound (e.g. Catalan) so it's really not
| an issue.
|
| It will definitely be much easier for spaniards to
| pronounce the english version of Vincent than the french.
| We probably have the worst french pronounciation in
| Europe despite the fact that we're neighbours! I always
| chuckle with how some people pronounce croissant:
| "curasan" (an attempt to transliterate as "cruasan", I
| believe).
| Vinnl wrote:
| Ha, you haven't heard the Dutch pronunciation of
| croissant yet I take it :P
|
| But thanks! I'll probably stick to the English Vincent
| then, as I'm not sure Vicente would trigger a response
| from me if I'm not paying attention, but maybe if I ever
| get to spend a longer time in a Spanish-speaking
| community I might give Vicente a try.
| kortex wrote:
| I totally read it as "Vincente" and _didn 't even notice
| there was no n until you pointed it out_. Brains are super
| weird.
| harwoodr wrote:
| I totally get it. The brain's autocorrect has "fixed" my
| last name (Harwood) for people my entire life. Hardwood,
| Howard, Hayward... and even stranger modifications.
|
| Fun fact, I can't type hardwood without great effort.
| fipar wrote:
| 43 years speaking Spanish, not in Spain, but certainly
| aware of different accents from Spain (both from speaking
| to other people and watching Spanish movies), and TIL that
| the name for that sound is " voiceless-dental-fricative".
|
| !Gracias!
| empeyot wrote:
| In English the /v/ in the phonetic spelling [edit, was:
| transcription] vee usually represents a voiced labiodental
| fricative (as /v/ in Italian Vincente) whereas most Spanish
| speakers will pronounce v (just like b) as voiced
| _bilabial_ fricative or approximant. That is, I 'd expect
| Vicente to be phonetically spelled bee-sen-teh (well aware
| that English /b/ is not a fricative as Spanish /v/ and
| /b/).
| eyko wrote:
| You're right! Most castellano speakers don't make a
| distinction between /b/ and /v/. Some latin american
| countries do make the distinction and also some spanish
| regions, like catalan/valenciano speakers in certain
| regions have a stronger or softer, yet still distinct /v/
| sound, such as in "a veure, Vicent" (let's see, Vincent).
| happy_path wrote:
| Good idea. Establishing a relationship between your name and
| with some named thing of the real world: a TV series
| character, a city, etc.
| throwaway287391 wrote:
| I get your point but I like that you describe the name of a
| character in a fictional TV show as a "thing of the real
| world", as compared to the name of a coworker you speak
| with regularly. :p
| happy_path wrote:
| Well, maybe "thing of their culture" would have been a
| more appropiate term.
| nindalf wrote:
| > it seems to me that the people who care the most about this
| issue are monolingual.
|
| Sort of. I'd speculate that those who care about it the most
| are people who've never struggled and failed to pronounce a
| name in another language. In my limited experience of knowing 3
| languages I never had trouble with any pronunciation. So I came
| to the unfounded conclusion that a. I can pronounce anything
| and b. everyone should pronounce everything correctly and if
| they don't, it's for lack of effort.
|
| I was wrong. I learned this while learning how to pronounce
| Chinese names. I thought I was saying them right. For example
| I'd pronounce "Xi" as "Shi". But it wasn't the right Shi,
| evidently (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-
| Eating_Poet_in_the_Ston...). My friend sat with me patiently as
| I attempted it over and over. Every time she'd say "no, not
| Shi, it's more like Shi". I couldn't hear the difference. So
| even if I put in more time, I wouldn't succeed.
|
| So now I'm more tolerant of people making mistakes. As long as
| they make an effort, it's good enough.
|
| If anyone would like a challenge, try pronouncing the word
| "Tamil" from the language Tamil. I haven't heard anyone who
| wasn't a native speaker pronounce it correctly.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| I have no problem learning foreign languages, but when I saw
| how Chinese phonetics works I ran away screaming.
| [deleted]
| kragen wrote:
| How's http://canonical.org/~kragen/tmp/tamiltamiltamil.ogg?
| I've never tried to utter a retroflex approximant before, and
| while I think I might have pronounced it correctly, I think
| I'd have a hard time reliably distinguishing it from a
| retroflex tap or a voiced (really) alveolar approximant.
|
| As for learning to distinguish X from Sh, and the Ch/J/Zh/Q
| and C/Z distinctions in Mandarin, I think your beliefs may
| have swung too far from one pole to the other. It took me six
| or seven years to learn to pronounce American English [r]
| correctly, and I made lots of hearing errors during that time
| as well. It can take time to learn to hear phonetic
| differences. Unsurprisingly you weren't able to learn the
| difference between [c] and [s] in a single fifteen-minute
| session, but if you'd done two fifteen-minute sessions a day
| for two years, you'd almost certainly get it. In fact, you
| might find that it only takes you a few weeks!
| nindalf wrote:
| I don't think you're quite there yet. It's more like how
| this lady says it in the first 10 seconds -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMJNV61I9iU. She guides you
| through pronouncing these sounds.
|
| You're right though. I could probably get Chinese
| pronunciation correct given enough time and effort. but
| it's not trivial, like I thought earlier.
| kragen wrote:
| Thanks!
| valarauko wrote:
| > try pronouncing the word "Tamil" from the language Tamil. I
| haven't heard anyone who wasn't a native speaker pronounce it
| correctly.
|
| (non-Tamil here) Off the top of my head I can think of at
| least two distinct ways I have heard native Tamils speakers
| pronounce the name, and both are convinced that they are
| correct. Plenty of Tamils pronounce it with a retroflex 'r',
| while a majority consider it archaic and pronounce it with a
| retroflex 'l'.
|
| The lll was originally kind of a retroflex 'r' sound, but
| many Tamils consider it archaic & pronounce it as similar to
| a retroflex 'l' ll - when questioned a native Tamil speaker
| from Tamil Nadu told me that ll and lll are pronounced the
| same.
|
| Consider the word vaalllai plllm (banana), with two retroflex
| 'r' sounds. I have heard people pronounce it with both (and
| how its retained in Malayalam), and many will change one of
| them to a retroflex 'l'. In my restricted sample of asking a
| handful of native speakers to say the word, at least one
| consistently changed both to a retroflex 'l'.
| xwolfi wrote:
| Ahah Im French too with a difficult name and usually I just
| correct with humour if it s super far off, we laugh and done.
| People hung up on perfect pronunciation I tell them to just use
| the english equivalent (think William for Guillaume) and basta.
|
| I gave my daughter a perfectly language neutral, 2 syllable, "a
| monkey can say it" name to avoid all this next generation :D
| tarsinge wrote:
| French is a good example, nasal vowels are everywhere and are
| just impossible to pronounce correctly for English speakers
| without training, so not only we shouldn't take offense but
| it's even insensitive to expect it.
| speleding wrote:
| I feel the same way. I avoid the problem by pronouncing my
| (Dutch) name the way an American would pronounce it when
| introducing myself. (If there happen to be other Dutch people
| present, they'll figure it out, as it's a common name)
| Veen wrote:
| I find the same. My (English) name seems very challenging for
| French people to pronounce correctly. Probably because it has a
| diphthong in the middle that doesn't occur in French. I've
| basically never heard a French person say it right (even my
| French ex-gf). It doesn't matter. So long as people attempt
| some approximation and it doesn't sound too outlandish, who
| cares. It's just part of their accent.
| notafraudster wrote:
| I am E/F bilingual. I taught in an educational institution
| which is multicultural with dozens of cultural origins. When I
| get names wrong, I see grimaces on their faces. When I hear
| other people get common but foreign names -- like Nguyen for
| instance -- wrong, I grimace too. I am now at an institution in
| a country where basically no one outside the country knows how
| to pronounce anything.
|
| It takes me about 5 minutes to Google names I'm unfamiliar with
| before I start a new class to make sure I get it right. I don't
| know and I should not be expected to know Chinese, but I think
| I should be expected to be polite enough to try to get it right
| before I take a stab and butcher someone's name.
|
| I don't think it is an enormous burden to put on myself, and I
| don't think I'm performatively self-flagellating by doing it. I
| think it's just me trying to be polite. I think everyone should
| try to be polite in as many contexts as possible.
|
| On another context of names:
|
| My own names are Hebrew and Germanic respectively, two
| syllables each. My given name is common in North America. Most
| people pronounce it wrong anyway. I would greatly prefer if
| they didn't. It's a little disrespectful. I politely correct
| people and then find most of the same people make the same
| mistake again and again. I find it disrespectful, the same way
| I find it disrespectful if someone spells my name wrong even
| though my email address is first@last. It's not because they're
| frothing at the mouth racists, it's because they're minorly
| inconsiderate.
|
| My wife has a common name with two English spellings (let's say
| similar to Meghan/Megan). People frequently misspell it. She's
| not bothered by people guessing wrong. She is bothered when she
| corrects them and they still get it wrong. When I met her, it's
| not like I cosmically knew which of the two spellings was
| correct. I simply learned which of the two spellings was
| correct. It was a basic act of politeness and care. When people
| don't do it, it comes off like they don't care.
| rootsudo wrote:
| That seems so much work, to not ask or help someone pronounce
| a name.
|
| The world is globalized, it's not expected as a norm to be
| able to pronounce every name properly.
|
| My name isn't in "English" and I grew up in the USA. The
| people whom act like you when I introduce myself and talk are
| the most annoying. I don't have any onus on everyone
| pronouncing my name properly and if they say it with English
| phonetics then that's acceptable because they're trying to
| adapt their language to my name.
|
| That is much more polite then having this internal monologue
| and judging/having bias to everyone else that they're
| "inconsiderate."
|
| Just ask how to pronounce if you can't, read the room and
| then apologize if it needs to be said.
|
| Loosen up.
| mynegation wrote:
| The proper pronunciation of my name requires an emphasis that
| is not on a first syllable, rolling R, and palatalization of
| a consonant in the middle. Even if I tell people how to
| pronounce it properly, repeating it back to me would be too
| much to ask from people who never palatalized a consonant in
| their life. My point is: I don't grimace and I don't bother.
| bitcurious wrote:
| The idea that you can Google how to pronounce a name is in
| itself presumptuous. My name from a European country is
| spelled the same but pronounced differently as a name much
| more commonly used in South America. If you googled how to
| say it you would get the wrong answer. I'd rather you just
| butcher it in American than make assumptions about my origin.
|
| If you want an analogue, think of Muhammad Ali. Arabic name,
| non-Arabic pronunciation.
|
| That said, I certainly wouldn't get upset at the effort. I'd
| assume you mean well, so no foul. It's just not that
| important.
| II2II wrote:
| > It's not because they're frothing at the mouth racists,
| it's because they're minorly inconsiderate.
|
| There is a very good chance that your correction is coming
| off as inconsiderate since it is interrupting the flow of
| conversation and perhaps even the other person's train of
| thought. That interruption is also going to affect how well
| they remember the correction. If they were unprepared for an
| off-topic interjection, it is probable that they didn't hear
| what was being said or it did not register in their memory.
|
| So yes, getting people's names correct is important. On the
| other hand, letting people get your name is important (rather
| than forcing the issue).
| mkotowski wrote:
| > When I hear other people get common but foreign names [...]
| wrong, I grimace too.
|
| To be honest, this seems as one of the worst ways to handle
| such situations. Feeling distraught over an imprecise
| pronunciation feels like something to get rid of rather than
| accepting as a norm.
|
| And I am saying this as someone with a slight speech
| impediment using one of the more consonant cluster-rich
| languages on the continent. I would have to be delusional to
| expect someone from an English-speaking country to pronounce
| names such as _Grzegorz Brzeczyszczykiewicz_ on first or even
| second try.
|
| Also, how do you decide which names are common? Not trying to
| be rude, but this can easily depend on from where someone is
| coming from and their age/generation. Names popular in the
| generation of my grandparents sometimes are completely absent
| from my own and rarely written down.
|
| This all also comes with the prerequisite that a person in
| question still uses the original pronunciation and not one
| adapted to the dominant language in the region.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Are you saying these people should be more aware and
| considerate of your culture and experience as an immigrant with
| a hard to pronounce name in an English speaking country? That
| they should consider your feelings and change how they behave
| to suit you better?
|
| Because that sounds pretty 'woke' to me, and you seem to be
| attacking people for trying to be woke and annoying you in the
| process.
|
| I just worry that if someone attempts to make you happy by
| doing this, there will be an even smaller minority of people
| with hard to pronounce names and right-of-center political
| views who will be absolutely furious that the PC brigade (i.e.
| you) are trying to dictate what English speakers are allowed to
| make small talk about about in their own country, stifling free
| speech just in case some foreigner gets annoyed. Then they'll
| insist that English speakers should always do whatever their
| gut instinct tells them to even, no especially, if it annoys
| some oversensitive immigrant. Some people would much prefer to
| defend the noble principle of free speech than worry about
| something silly like wasting 5 mins in a meeting.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| You got me well confused here. Take my experience of the
| phenomenon as you wish and incorporate it or not into your
| decision making process, at your leisure. I'm not the only
| one who feels this way when citizens corner us immigrants
| into pronouncing our names for a while.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I much prefer hearing my name pronounced wrong by mistake,
| than wasting time in a useless woke-posturing session with
| someone using my time to teach them how to make sounds their
| mouth hasn't been trained to make, supposedly out of respect
| for my foreignness.
|
| The French language is perceived as refined and hard to get
| right. And France in general is very romanticized in American
| culture. Maybe it's less "woke respect" and little more
| curiosity than you think.
| brezelnbitte wrote:
| I have a German last name that not even my family pronounces
| "correctly" and myself didn't learn the "correct" pronunciation
| until I studied German at university. Most other Americans
| butcher it, Germans get the German pronunciation right but
| never the way I grew up hearing it.
|
| My opinion is just call me what you want as long as I know to
| respond to it.
| xenocratus wrote:
| Thanks, I have the same problem - I'm an Eastern European
| living in the UK, must've heard my name pronounced correctly
| (just from someone seeing it written down) maybe 3 times in 9
| years. But I actively avoid telling people the correct
| pronunciation because it's not in anyone's interest (unless
| they're a close friend, I guess). I never understood why
| someone would selfishly expect a stranger to pronounce their
| name correctly if your name is difficult/not intuitive. There
| are billions of people out there whose names are so difficult
| to get right, isn't it more important for us to spend that
| mental energy being nice to each other in a practical way
| instead of doing this useless ritual?
| [deleted]
| rayiner wrote:
| > I really don't bat an eye at it. It's not pragmatic to expect
| most people to do so, especially in a place like the US where
| so many people come from different backgrounds
|
| This. My name is a whimsical permutation of a Monacan name but
| I'm south Asian so it confuses the heck out of people. So I
| just go by Ray, which frankly is kind of a sketchy name, like
| "Trent" or "Chad." But it's easy to pronounce.
|
| It's no big deal! Why would I take offense when an American who
| is often mispronouncing his own French, German, or Polish
| family name mispronounces mine? (Sorry, Mr. Koch, your name is
| "Cock" not "Coke.")
| Y_Y wrote:
| Monacan like the Native Americans, or like Monegasque?
| rayiner wrote:
| The latter (he said sheepishly). My mom named me after: htt
| ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainier_III,_Prince_of_Monaco.
| But added a vocalized "y" for whimsy. (Boomers--my kids all
| have biblical names.)
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Conversely, I had a friend named Gogo, a Greek name
| trasliterated as "Gogo" in the Latin alphabet. When she went to
| stay in France she wrote her name as Roro to help French
| speakers produce the correct sound (gamma, "g", is pronounced
| much like the French "r").
|
| And to avoid being called "go-go" of course.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| >At last, it seems to me that the people who care the most
| about this issue are monolingual.
|
| I had someone asking for a way to identify 'gender from the
| names of overseas customers'[1] on my problem validation
| platform. At a glance it seems like a similar problem and there
| could be some who doubt the veracity of the problem. Then there
| were several business solutions posted for that problem.
|
| The same people who wanted to know the gender could probably
| also benefit from knowing how to pronounce the name if they
| ever get on a call or meet the person.
|
| [1] https://needgap.com/problems/94-identifying-gender-from-a-
| na...
| kodah wrote:
| I commonly refer to my last name as vowel soup (I'm french, and
| it's the Americanization of my family name). It's such a niche
| last name that I've heard all of two people get my name right
| and both of them were Cajun or Cajun adjacent - most native
| French speakers are totally lost on it. I always tell people to
| call me by my first name when this comes up.
|
| I've watched as people did as you described where they spend an
| inordinate amount of net time (it usually occurs in fragments,
| such as at the beginning of a meeting) trying to get someone's
| name "right". When I let people do this, instead of just opting
| for my very American first name, it almost always felt like I
| was watching a parody of my last name play out in real time. I
| didn't put too much thought into it, but holy hell does it get
| old. I don't like being in the spotlight and wokeism is already
| very offputting to me.
|
| If you find yourself doing this, consider this: I have a weird
| name and I don't remember people's names very well at all. I
| remember faces, experiences, and feelings much more. You'll get
| my name right over time as you hear people around me say it.
| That's just fine with me.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Heh, I think employees should be given a fully synthetic
| identity, mostly for privacy reasons, but it can help with
| this thing too. The nickname can be also selected so that
| names aren't reused in a team, which would reduce ambiguity
| in communication. Even in small teams a lot of time is spent
| resolving ambiguities which John was referred.
| kodah wrote:
| I've thought on this before. I think it's a really cool
| idea, and maybe a great place to use something like PGP.
|
| Some other usecases:
|
| - prevents hero worship in software (eg: I'm an x-Googler,
| believe me)
|
| - might put a dent in bigotry based identity issues
| neltnerb wrote:
| I get what you mean and agree with the broad point, but I
| really, truly do both want to learn more about foreign
| languages and also feel it is both polite and good culture to
| try to pronounce the names of long-term colleagues as well as I
| can. I love foreign languages, I love Korean consonants, I love
| German Vowels, I love the French Schwa.
|
| I wouldn't want to put that on anyone to explain when obviously
| I can just get more foreign language tapes, but I do actually
| legitimately prefer to get it right if I can, and the process
| of learning to say it right is super fun... but I've spent my
| whole life having to spell and pronounce my name for everyone
| so it just doesn't seem like a big deal.
|
| But yeah, I can see it getting annoying. I definitely wouldn't
| insist on it over a casual "<foo> is fine" but I do _want_ to
| learn to do better at things if I can!
| remarkEon wrote:
| My last name is French, but in reality the name comes from
| Germany. My family has been pronouncing it incorrectly for 100
| years, and I ... just don't care enough to enforce the correct
| pronunciation. It feels snobbish to me, like you said. Might be
| an artifact of being an American.
| seszett wrote:
| > _My family has been pronouncing it incorrectly_
|
| Well, the French usage for names generally is just to use
| either a straight French pronunciation based on how the name
| is written, or an approximation of the foreign pronunciation
| using sounds that exist in French. Only a handful of well-
| known names get to have a special pronunciation.
|
| If your family has been in France for 100 years, I wouldn't
| say they pronounce the name "incorrectly", they just
| pronounce it the correct way in France.
| neltnerb wrote:
| This reminds me of the story of the town of Versailles,
| Indiana.
|
| It was common knowledge nearby that anyone who came in and
| pronounced it "ver-sai" was from out of town. Because
| everyone living there called it "ver-sails".
|
| I use this as an example of how if anyone gets to decide
| how something is pronounced, it's the people who live
| there. The city is simply called "ver-sails" and that's all
| there is to it.
|
| It is not "wrong", anymore than pronouncing it as you
| likely say "karate" is not more wrong than "ka-ra-te" (the
| japanese pronunciation) or that the japanese prounciation
| of the english word "sweater" being "su-we-ta" is wrong.
| Borrowed word pronunciation is entirely up to the user.
| Radim wrote:
| And also of "Socrates", an American Quake 3 player who
| insisted on the "soh-crates" pronunciation :-)
|
| I also love the double mind-fuck of "karaoke":
|
| EN: _pronounced "owe-kee"_
|
| JP: _" oh-keh"!_
|
| EN: _but "oke" comes from the English "orchestra" (kara-
| oke = empty orchestra)... so really should be pronounced
| "or-keh"? Are we mispronouncing a Japanese
| mispronounciation of OUR OWN WORD??_
|
| (and then of course the Greeks chime in, OG)
| MereInterest wrote:
| There's a apocryphal story about a translator at an anime
| convention being asked why he changed a name in the
| English dub, using an L sound, where the name in Japanese
| used an R sound. The translator's response was a very
| flat "Because 'Alucard' is 'Dracula' spelled backwards."
| soperj wrote:
| > This reminds me of the story of the town of Versailles,
| Indiana.
|
| Detroit would be the same way if it wasn't such a big
| city. Easier to see when you add back the accent,
| Detroit.
| myself248 wrote:
| Oh, DEE-troit is just the beginning. Other notables
| include the home of Milan Dragway, pronounced MYL-in, or
| Lake Orion, pronounced OR-ee-yin.
| b3morales wrote:
| Versailles, France, is much more well-known than Le
| Detroit, France, though. (In the U.S.)
| s3cur3 wrote:
| Here in Missouri (or rather in _Missourah_ country), we
| have a ver-SAILS, MAH-l 'n (Milan), New MAD-rid (Madrid),
| BALL-ah-ver (Bolivar), and La PLATE-ah (La Plata). :)
| rayiner wrote:
| > My family has been pronouncing it incorrectly for 100 years
|
| Yes! This is why I'm not the least bit offended when someone
| mispronounces my name.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Even language carriers don't get my name right. Sometimes I say
| it myself, they realize they were mispronouncing it and say
| "why didn't you say about it?", but two weeks later they
| mispronounce it again as if nothing happened.
| j45 wrote:
| So people can learn names like Schwarzenegger but not others?
|
| We can learn chai and yoga and namaste but not the names of the
| people it belongs to.
|
| Seems more not wanting to make people uncomfortable which is
| fine, I have had to navigate the same.
|
| When I come across a name I haven't heard before, I just go out
| of my way to ask people how to pronounce their name and say
| it's important to me. Sometimes demonstrating how to have the
| conversation of asking comfortably is the most important first
| step.
| Causality1 wrote:
| As usual, the people with the biggest stick up their ass tend
| to be the least useful and most time-wasting.
| axaxs wrote:
| I appreciate the effort, but I don't like this attitude of
| blaming the speaker. My company once even had a video saying that
| mispronouncing a name was a 'microaggression.' That insanity
| aside, there are sounds and consonants people just cannot make
| past a certain age. As long as we aren't being demeaning, why go
| for perfection? Nearly every foreigner pronounces the short 'i'
| in my name as 'ee', and I've never once cared enough to be upset
| or attempt to correct them.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Not even age... English-only speakers generally (let's say it
| never happened and my business is with British and Aus people
| mainly) cannot correctly pronounce either or both my first or
| last name. Some of them, especially the closer partners, want
| to try but we literally had sessions where we recorded me
| saying it and them saying it and listening to it to show them
| it was still different even though in their head it sounds
| exactly the same... and I really really don't care: I have a
| client calling me 'tiktok' (long before the tiktok app) because
| he got fed up struggling with my name. Fine with me.
| wink wrote:
| Had a native English speaker as a coworker who struggled with
| U vs U in German. No matter how we tried to convey the
| difference in sound, "you're saying the same thing".
| axaxs wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. The worst for me personally is 'ng'. My
| wife has tried a hundred times to teach me. To me it just
| sounds like a nasally 'n'. I tried that and get laughed at.
| She tries our short 'i' and gets laughed at. All in fun of
| course.
| nielsole wrote:
| When I (German) was ~15 I was blaming esp. US folks for not
| managing to pronounce my handle correctly. That changed when I
| completely failed to pronounce Baltic and Arabic names to the
| name-holders satisfaction. I can't even hear where I am going
| wrong.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| > I can't even hear where I am going wrong.
|
| Same effect for me, once on a flight between Florida and New
| York I asked for water (I'm French), I did my best to
| pronounce it correctly but the flight attendant couldn't
| understand me. Another passenger told him "I think he wants
| water". For me, he used the exact same pronunciation as me.
|
| I never understood what was wrong.
| FroshKiller wrote:
| No kidding, try asking for "agua" (Spanish) next time.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I heard from a linguist that the best way to learn foreign
| pronunciation as an adult is to learn to imitate the accent of
| a native speaker of that language. Which of course is also a
| microagression, so you just can't win no matter what you do.
|
| It makes sense, though. Trying to learn the grammar, vocabulary
| and phonology all at once makes you task saturated, learning
| them separately is easier.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _there are sounds and consonants people just cannot make past
| a certain age._
|
| It's not that people can't make the sound above a certain age,
| it's that above a certain age it becomes difficult to learn new
| sounds that are not in your language.
|
| This age varies by person, and for some people it is well
| before adulthood arrives (when you are likely to be exposed to
| a much greater diversity of names).
|
| One of my linguistics professors, whose specialty is to learn
| and document 'dying languages', told me that if I wanted to
| learn a new language, I should do it before 30. Even for him --
| a trained linguist who knows the IPA forward and backwards --
| age makes a difference.
| axaxs wrote:
| Thanks for your experience. I think the age is closer to 13
| than 30.
|
| You can learn and speak 'well enough' at many ages, but past
| a certain age you will always sound different, and it's much
| younger than 30 for the majority of folks.
| bmn__ wrote:
| > there are sounds and consonants people just cannot make past
| a certain age
|
| That's false.
|
| > why go for perfection?
|
| It's politeness, nay, more than that: respect. Trying hard to
| produce a name as accurately as one can shows one's dialogue
| partner or audience that one is making an effort. A name is a
| very personal thing. People like it when they notice that they
| are paid attention to, and will approve of and in their mind
| raise the social status of the speaker.
|
| Positive examples are:
|
| * Max Miller of "tasting history" who quite obviously spends
| some time to learn a word or name correctly from an experienced
| speaker.
|
| * Louis Rossmann who does not prepare, but is apologetic
| ("pardon me for butchering the pronunciation") or would
| altogether skip reading a name out loud rather than mangling
| it. This is okay because the text of the news article is also
| on the screen.
|
| Negative examples are:
|
| * Most other people who in general just hope for the best and
| simply blindly apply the rules from the embedding language
| (here: English), or if confronted with something out of their
| experience, just make shit up.
|
| * Adam Ragusea whose argument boils down to "I am American,
| therefore exceptional and I get a free pass to knowingly and
| willingly mispronounce".
| thom wrote:
| > rhymes with "fun" in US, in UK rhymes with the second syllable
| of London
|
| Are there USians who pronounce fun like this ("I'm having fn")?
| Struggling to hear it.
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(page generated 2021-07-26 23:03 UTC)