Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers • Hacker News Board

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#141

Post by wink » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 6:22 AM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #138

silisili wrote: post #129

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 ca…

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…

Had a native English speaker as a coworker who struggled with U vs Ü in German. No matter how we tried to convey the difference in sound, "you're saying the same thing".

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#142

Post by axaxs » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 6:23 AM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #138

silisili wrote: post #129

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 ca…

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…

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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#143

Post by kingofpandora » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 6:24 AM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #95

robocat wrote: post #74

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, 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 ot…

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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#144

Post by wink » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 6:24 AM UTC

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".

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).

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#145

Post by gryson » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 6:24 AM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#146

Post by nielsole » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 6:25 AM UTC

silisili wrote: post #129

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 ca…

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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#147

Post by mongol » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 6:28 AM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #57

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 Zealan…

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....

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#148

Post by wink » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 6:32 AM UTC

edanm wrote: post #128

qalmakka wrote: post #111

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…

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 language…

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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#149

Post by ithinkso » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 6:35 AM UTC

wink wrote: post #139

ithinkso wrote: post #115

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 anythin…

What kinda gets me is the name Łukasz, 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).

Yeah, Łukasz 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)

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#150

Post by jgtrosh » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 6:36 AM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #133

felipelemos wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ż has the sound of soft g, as in germs

g in germs would be "dż" not "ż" in Polish. Same sound as j in English - for example in "jungle" (dżungla in Polish). As usual - English encodes it in many ways Polish always as "dż". Polish "ż" without "d" before it is more like French j for example in "je taim".

Sorry but it's « je t'aime »