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.
Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
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Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#92If 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.
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 ɹ 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.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#93Four 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 "ñ" 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…
"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!
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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"
> 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.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#95At 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, Cézzane, 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 unint…
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.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 n…
>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.
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.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#97I 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".
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#98Because 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 sudden…
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.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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"
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.