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Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

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Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#201

Post by Markoff »

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.

You fail to understand most of the world use international English where nobody really cares about correct pronunciation, but about understanding each other and only small minority of English users are nowadays native English speakers, one could say it's questionable nowadays what is the correct pronunciation (intended original use changed), so it would be quite foolish to insist on correct pronunciation in international enviroment.

I don't think same can be said about English native speakers who usually don't speak even second language and can't go their way to at least pronounce few names correctly, while rest of the world is learning whole other language, not just pronunciation of bunch of names.

Agreed with your pinyin commnets.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#202

Post by smcl »

mkotowski wrote: post #172
smcl wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'"

Also, if we are talking about aspiration, word-initial p and t are also left un-aspirated in Polish, contrary to many (most?) English dialects.

That is interesting, I can’t think how else to pronounce the word-initial “t”s in something like “Tu jest carrefour, a tu jest kurwa jeż” (a phrase that has entered the canon of my friend group) any other way, I wonder if I’m already saying it unaspirated.

:D

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#203

Post by Markoff »

tdeck wrote: post #102
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 pronunciati…

> That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei", "shi" is pronounced "shr"

Shi is pronounced Shr? That sounds more like your typical pirate Beijing hua. Which can get quite confusing when you get out of Beijing to let's say to Shanghai business trip and you can't figure if something cost 4 or 10 kuai at street vendor (my personal anecdote, I think they actually do it on purpose since normally 4 would have very different sound).

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#204

Post by d1sxeyes »

narag wrote: post #174
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…

'w' - it's a hard 'v' as in 'very', 'vary'. Always, no exceptions and never anything else I've been interacting with a Polish web and got very confused because what happens with stand-alone w , that seems to mean in . Indeed Google Translate pronounces it as a v. First time I see a word in any language that consists only of consonants :-m

English has a couple of pure examples: 'Mrs' and 'Nth' I can think of.

You can extend this with exclamations/onomatopoeia (eg: 'hmm', 'shh', 'brr'), but can see that these are not 'normal words'.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#205

Post by paradite »

dorkwood wrote: post #199

> First, if you can remember only 3 things: > Zh is like a J sound (as in "Jam") > X is like a Sh sound (as in "Shot") > Q is like a Ch sound (as in "China") This is very useful to know, but I have a question. When converting the original characters into English, why didn't the creators of this system choose letters which more closely match the native pronunciation? For example, why "Qi" instead of "Chi"?

Native Chinese speaker (though not linguist) here.

For "q" and "ch", both are valid pinyin. "ch" in pinyin is actually the same as "ch" in English in terms of pronunciation. "q" in pinyin doesn't have a equivalent in English so it is just "q", which is similar to "q" but not really.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#206

Post by ajuc »

narag wrote: post #178
mkotowski wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To elaborate on ⟨ł⟩ – there is quite a good reason for the way it is spelled. Originally, its pronunciation was /ɫ/ (“dark l” in English) so it was very close to /l/ in sound quality. It evolved to /w/ over time. During the first part of 20th century, it was already used only in dialects and by professionals such as actors and singers (because of it, it is also called “scenic ł” — „sceniczne ł”). Ironically, if I rem…

the original sound quality of ⟨v⟩ in Latin was also /w/ IIRC, there wasn't a U letter in Latin, so the vowel was written as V. I guess it tended to souns like W when starting a syllabe, as in versus.

> there wasn't a U letter in Latin

Yup they used V for both. This is probably why German (and then Polish) uses W instead of V - to distinguish it from U.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#207

Post by tsimionescu »

ajuc wrote: post #185
narag wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'w' - it's a hard 'v' as in 'very', 'vary'. Always, no exceptions and never anything else I've been interacting with a Polish web and got very confused because what happens with stand-alone w , that seems to mean in . Indeed Google Translate pronounces it as a v. First time I see a word in any language that consists only of consonants :-m

> First time I see a word in any language that consists only of consonants Polish is quite tame with these as far as Slavic languages go. "Strč prst skrz krk" is a proper sentence in Czech and Slovak :)

Romanian has the opposite oddity: we have whole words made up of vowels, with a proper sentence like that: "Aia e o oaie" ("that is a sheep", pronounced roughly 'ah-ya ye awe wa-ye').

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#208

Post by yosito »

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 suppose you don't like the way Americans pronounce the A in the English word "sander". I'm multilingual and it's gotten difficult for me to be sure how native speakers pronounce things, but here are some other variations that come to mind that might make sense to a native English speaking American:

Xander - a common nickname for Alexander. The x is pronounced as a z, but it still has the problem with the American a.

Sunder - Not as common, but it's a name Americans might have heard and in my opinion is closer to the Dutch Sander than "sender".

San Der - For the large percentage of Americans who are familiar with Spanish pronunciation, you might have luck with this spelling, but those Americans probably aren't the ones who mispronounce the Dutch version.

"Like Shaun Der, but with an S instead of an Sh on the front" - The way I explain the Hungarian variant Sandór to Americans is "like Shaun Door".

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#209

Post by ajuc »

Markoff wrote: post #196
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 about rz, is it same as ř in Czech? Good luck with this letter to any native English speaker. :-))

No, it's either the same as "ż" (in most cases) or the same as "sz" (after devoiced consonants). And there's like 3 words where it's pronounced as separate r and z letters (tarzan, marznąć, I don't remember the 3rd :) ).

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#210

Post by happy_path »

jaimebuelta wrote: post #195
AYBABTME wrote: post #161

Some people take this idea to heart a bit too much. Barely anyone can pronounce my name properly and I really don't bat an eye at it. It's not pragmatic to expect most people to do so, especially in a place like the US where so many people come from different backgrounds. And that's nothing to say about the fact that the same name, written the same way, can be pronounced very differently depending on the bearer's bac…

I have an strategy of two pronunciations for my name (Jaime, it's a Spanish name): - Quick chats, like answering your name at Starbucks, talking with the electric company on the phone, etc. I use directly the English pronunciation of my name (like Jamie). It's faster, easier and who cares, frankly... Gratefully, I can now use "wrote as Lanister" and fix some writing problems - With more meaningful relationships, like…

Good idea. Establishing a relationship between your name and with some named thing of the real world: a TV series character, a city, etc.
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