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Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

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Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#151

Post by darkwater »

mc32 wrote: post #69
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 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…

> 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.

Sorry... what? Us non native speaker live in a world where English is taught in almost any school on the planet and where you have a peer pressure to know and speak decently English. This on top of one of the most irregular languages in the world wrt pronunciation of dictionary words, let alone names.

PS good luck getting right Greenwich, for example.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#152

Post by smcl »

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…

> It's the same sound as in 'when'/'why'/'when'

Note: this is ONLY applicable if your "wh" is non-aspirated. If you pronounce Łukasz as "Whookash" you're going to get some funny looks :) I'd have written this as "It's the same sound as in 'wise' or 'weather'"

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#153

Post by pomian »

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".

Żak = Jacques in French. Which is easier?

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#154

Post by wodenokoto »

> The way English speakers say Tokyo as 'Toh-Kee-Oh' is the mistake you want to avoid here. Toh-kyoh.

I once came across a “how to speak English like a native” video on YouTube aimed at a Japanese audience. It spend a lot of time teaching the viewer to say Tokyo with 3 syllables instead of 2.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#155

Post by reirob »

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 agree fully, and I wish, for written communication (chat, emails) people could use some latin/ascii based transliteration of IPA. There is X-SAMPA [1], though it's not much used yet. I think a simple input method, available on all keyboards and maybe some textual annotation for text sections being in IPA, might give this a much bigger audience. Many people are often in meetings where they don't know how to pronounce the names of meeting participants - would be really great to have an ASCII based IPA notation.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#156

Post by gnicholas »

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…

> there are sounds and consonants people just cannot make past a certain age.

It's not that people can't make the sound above a certain age, it's that above a certain age it becomes difficult to learn new sounds that are not in your language.

This age varies by person, and for some people it is well before adulthood arrives (when you are likely to be exposed to a much greater diversity of names).

One of my linguistics professors, whose specialty is to learn and document 'dying languages', told me that if I wanted to learn a new language, I should do it before 30. Even for him — a trained linguist who knows the IPA forward and backwards — age makes a difference.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#157

Post by ithinkso »

Kosirich wrote: post #134
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…

For south Slavic last names: č- "ch" as in cheddar or the choose so same as "cz" in polish ć - "tj" ...this one is hard, and only some dialects pronounce it differently enough so using "č" is good enough ž - same as "J" in french names "Jeanne d'Arc" or Jean-Luc Picard dž - same as "J" in the word "John" or "Jordan" or G in "George" đ - just use dž š - "sh" as in short

Do you guys also have the open/closed u distinction?

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#158

Post by axaxs »

gnicholas wrote: post #156
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…

> there are sounds and consonants people just cannot make past a certain age. It's not that people can't make the sound above a certain age, it's that above a certain age it becomes difficult to learn new sounds that are not in your language. This age varies by person, and for some people it is well before adulthood arrives (when you are likely to be exposed to a much greater diversity of names). One of my linguistic…

Thanks for your experience. I think the age is closer to 13 than 30.

You can learn and speak 'well enough' at many ages, but past a certain age you will always sound different, and it's much younger than 30 for the majority of folks.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#159

Post by ithinkso »

smcl wrote: post #152
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…

> It's the same sound as in 'when'/'why'/'when' Note: this is ONLY applicable if your "wh" is non-aspirated. If you pronounce Łukasz as "Whookash" you're going to get some funny looks :) I'd have written this as "It's the same sound as in 'wise' or 'weather'"

That's interesting, could you elaborate on the difference in 'w' between 'wise' and 'when'? I'd say 'Wookash' as in star-wars 'Wookie' is a good way (way, hehe) to say Łukasz.

I'm not a linguist though so I'm curious

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#160

Post by bdon »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #124
bdon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not being defined by "the Pinyin system", they cannot be valid elements of the Pinyin system. I know that biang is the name of a particular noodle; I'm not aware of kiang; and I believe that duang is a sound Jackie Chan made once. Which leads into a tangential question -- "duang" has no meaning. What would it mean to say it is "understandable" to millions of people?

A cursory search of media published in the last month [1][2] shows those can be used to productively communicate in Chinese languages. You can argue that it is outside of what is prescribed in a table, but if not Pinyin, then what writing system is being used here?

[1] http://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202107151999911843.html [2] https://www.marieclaire.com.tw/lifestyle/art/58762

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