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Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

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Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#31

Post by koyote »

> 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"

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#32

Post by _kst_ »

eliseumds wrote: post #13
yesenadam wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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?

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.

Yes, in my dialect of American English (raised in Southern California by parents from the midwest), "cot" and "caught" are pronounced almost identically.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#34

Post by yesenadam »

ericbarrett wrote: post #26
yesenadam wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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?

Gotta be careful with “caught”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot–caught_merger

"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" /ɑ/, "lot" /ɒ/, and "thought" /ɔ/."

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#36

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #19

I have my phone set up in English. Google maps is hilarious and basically unusable when it tries to pronounce street names.

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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#38

Post by bdon »

jollybean wrote: post #28

Question for someone knowledgeable - why doesn't Chinese transliteration make rational use of vowels and consonants? Why Q? Why not simply 'Ch'?

It does use almost all vowels and consonants. “Ching” ㄔㄧㄥ is a technically valid syllable in the Pinyin system but does not correspond to any word in the dictionary.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#39

Post by Clewza313 »

jollybean wrote: post #28

Question for someone knowledgeable - why doesn't Chinese transliteration make rational use of vowels and consonants? Why Q? Why not simply 'Ch'?

Chinese has both, and they're different sounds: ch [ʈʂʰ] vs q [tɕʰ]. Unfortunately the Chinese "q" doesn't exist in English, so "ch" is the closest approximation.

https://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/break-through-chine...

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#40

Post by prvc »

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?
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