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Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

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Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#101

Post by oconnor663 »

honie wrote: post #97

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".

"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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#102

Post by tdeck »

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…

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

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#103

Post by thaumasiotes »

bdon wrote: post #64
thaumasiotes wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Ching” ㄔㄧㄥ 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 sěng or nǖ, but "ching" is not such a syllable.

Yes, I mean that it is a valid syllable in the orthography rules but that does not imply it can be pronounced sensibly.

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-/-ü is "nü", and the spelling of ∅-/-ü 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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#104

Post by akersten »

cabalamat wrote: post #71
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…

> 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…

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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#105

Post by mastazi »

ajmurmann wrote: post #93
mastazi wrote: post #45

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 "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 le…

> 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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#106

Post by qalmakka »

canjobear wrote: post #92
lmm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ling…

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 ◌ʰ being often left out when a consonant is usually aspirated, and so on.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#107

Post by carlmr »

dirkt wrote: post #96
prvc wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I agree, it's crazy how often the news talk about China nowadays and almost nobody pronounces the names correctly.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#108

Post by tdeck »

pledess wrote: post #78

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 sudden…

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

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#109

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

jldugger wrote: post #8

"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".

That’s the one I looked for on the list.

I knew a guy that went by “Win”, is it always that?

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#110

Post by bdon »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #103
bdon wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I mean that it is a valid syllable in the orthography rules but that does not imply it can be pronounced sensibly.

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-/-ü is "nü", and the spelling of ∅-/-ü is "yu". Same syllable column; zero characters in common in the spelling. And if you look up ch-/-ing, the table will tell you…

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?
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