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Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

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Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#81

Post by dhosek »

sverhagen wrote: post #58

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 ple…

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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#82

Post by tasogare »

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'?

> 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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#83

Post by tasogare »

bernardv wrote: post #17

A great idea, and useful not just for English speakers. My French background doesn’t make me any better at pronouncing Chinese names!

Try searching for EFEO (École française d'extrême 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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#84

Post by mc32 »

gamegoblin wrote: post #12

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…

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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#85

Post by refurb »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #20
gamegoblin wrote: post #12

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…

> 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.

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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#86

Post by hermannj314 »

legerdemain wrote: post #70
hermannj314 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Thank you for clarifying.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#87

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Clewza313 wrote: post #44
prvc wrote: post #40

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 f…

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 tran…

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".

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#88

Post by lmm »

canjobear wrote: post #27

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 metaph…

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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#89

Post by schoen »

dhosek wrote: post #81
sverhagen wrote: post #58

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 ple…

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.

If you happen to know German, ui --> au is an amazing discovery (huis --> Haus, uitgang --> Ausgang, various others).

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#90

Post by naturalauction »

theCodeStig wrote: post #43

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.

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.
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