Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

But English made good use of w, and there were two ways of writing the w sound: either as two u's (because that way you can indicate the consonantalness of it, even before consonants as in writan) or using the old rune wynn. The uu approach spread to the continent and Old High German (which still used the English sound) adopted it. Old High German also didn't have a v sound at that time, and v was considered a variant of f - which it still is in modern German (e.g. Vater = father, pronounced fah-ta). Meanwhile, uu fell out of use in England, and the runic wynn dominated. But the English spelling system was gradually replaced following the Norman invasion, which led w to dominate over wynn. And v was now considered its own sound, so the letter began to be used for a v sound. So even though English seems to be a bit of a exception, with w=/w/, it's a practice that came from England and came back to England and was a medieval norm.

But the w sound changed to v in German too. They didn't have such a radical interruption to their orthographic tradition as the English did, so the idea that V=F remained, and the letter w just come to be used for the new v sound. It spread from there.

So it's not really w instead of v to distinguish /v/ from /u/. It's more w instead of v to distinguish /w/ from v=/f/.

The crazy thing about that is it wasn't until several centuries after all that transpired that v and u became separate letters. So the Germans were using u for the sound of Buch and the sound of Uater (=Vater), and a different letter w for the sound of Wasser, when W and U=Buch were very similar and U=Buch and U=Vater were very different.

- The cardinal rule is that EVERY SINGLE LETTER MUST BE READ. We don't write unnecessary stuff, we don't eat letters like in French.

- The only exception is the letter h, which we use sparingly by itself as a Latin leftover, and is ALWAYS silent. Like "ho" and "o" sound the same.

- there are only 7 vowels (English has around 16? 17?), and no "weird" consonants.

- E and O have two allophones, but everyone in Italy has a different accent so it's quite irrelevant how you pronounce them as long as it's a "boring" E and O, like in the English "eh". The O sound is especially difficult for English speakers, because O is almost always pronounced like "ou" /oʊ/. Just try to drop the /ʊ/ part. Italian vowels are boring and plain. They don't sound fancy or complicated. They are barebones and flat.

- In general, 1 letter = 1 sound. This is quite a hard rule, and it's rarely broken.

- There's a few gotchas to this, like [gn] and [gl] which sound like the Spanish [ñ] and [ll] respectively¹.

- [gh] is always a hard g, like in English "get". [gi] and [ge] are _always_ soft Gs, like the one in the English word "justice". The same applies to [c]: [ch] is hard (read it as k), [ci]/[ce] are like in "cherry".

- [l] is never dark, while in English it often is. L in Italian always sounds the same, /l/, as in "litter".

- Syllables are not as stressed as in English. English has this tendency to "squish" one part of a word together and then slow down at the end. Italian usually has a quite "constant" tempo, with a bigger emphasis on the "accent", which is a stress put on a specific syllable.

The biggest hurdle IMHO for English speakers are geminated sounds (i.e. double letters), which do not exist _at all_ AFAIK in English, and that are often fundamental to distinguish words in Italian. It's something conceptually similar to what Japanese go through when they learn English and discover that so many words require a distinction between /r/ and /l/, like right and light.

For instance, "pollo" means chicken, while "polo" is pole. An English speaker will usually pronounce them the same.

It's also important to remember that English went through the Great Vowel Shift, so it's whole alphabet is now way more messed up compared to basically every other language that uses the Latin alphabet. Also, the Latin alphabet was designed around the phonology of Latin, so it's very good at representing Italian phonetically, while quite bad to represent Germanic languages (way too many vowels). Given that you know German, you can use the German reading of vowel letters with Italian, and it would probably work better than the English one. German also has lots of vowels, but they tend to write them closer to how Romance languages do (so A is /a/, e is /e/, ...)

¹ [gl] sounds /ʎ/ only when followed by i, like in "sceglie". Otherwise, it sounds like /gl/ like in English "glue"

Say "singer", then say it again without the "si". Congratulations - you know how to pronounce a word that starts with "ng".

It was common knowledge nearby that anyone who came in and pronounced it "ver-sai" was from out of town. Because everyone living there called it "ver-sails".

I use this as an example of how if anyone gets to decide how something is pronounced, it's the people who live there. The city is simply called "ver-sails" and that's all there is to it.

It is not "wrong", anymore than pronouncing it as you likely say "karate" is not more wrong than "ka-ra-te" (the japanese pronunciation) or that the japanese prounciation of the english word "sweater" being "su-we-ta" is wrong. Borrowed word pronunciation is entirely up to the user.