Slavic pet peeve: Ivan is ee-`vahn, not `eye-vun.
Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
291–300 of 474 posts
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My family has been pronouncing it incorrectly Well, the French usage for names generally is just to use either a straight French pronunciation based on how the name is written, or an approximation of the foreign pronunciation using sounds that exist in French. Only a handful of well-known names get to have a special pronunciation. If your family has been in France for 100 years, I wouldn't say they pronounce the na…
This reminds me of the story of the town of Versailles, Indiana. 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…
And also of "Socrates", an American Quake 3 player who insisted on the "soh-crates" pronunciation :-)
I also love the double mind-fuck of "karaoke":
EN: pronounced "owe-kee"
JP: "oh-keh"!
EN: but "oke" comes from the English "orchestra" (kara-oke = empty orchestra)… so really should be pronounced "or-keh"? Are we mispronouncing a Japanese mispronounciation of OUR OWN WORD??
(and then of course the Greeks chime in, OG)
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Same boat here. Vicente in Spanish so I go by Vincent most of the time (either the english or the French pronounciations, I don't care). Most people see my name in Spanish and pronounce it like it was Italian ("Vinchente", they always add an N). I've never been bothered by it one bit, at least they tried. For the curious, the correct pronounciation is either "Vee-sen-teh" or with the spanish voiceless-dental-fricativ…
43 years speaking Spanish, not in Spain, but certainly aware of different accents from Spain (both from speaking to other people and watching Spanish movies), and TIL that the name for that sound is “ voiceless-dental-fricative”.
¡Gracias!
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#294My 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 wonder if you can use a rhyme to help people. Sander, rhymes with wander (for Americans). Björk inspired me with her own brilliant rhyming word. I'll leave it up to you to discover what she uses: https://youtu.be/AGtMv-EQp20 For my own name, Ambroos (Dutch as well), I've yet to find a good English rhyming word. I've just settled with telling people to pronounce it as Ambrose. It's better than people turning it into…
Hm, Ambroos is a tricky one. The best I could think of would be "arm" (assuming they're not with a rhotic-r accent, though I could imagine people then making it sound like aam) + "close" (as in dichtbij, not sluiten.)
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compare the t in 'stellar' vs the t in 'tell'.
What's the difference between the t in 'stellar' vs the t in 'tell'? I seem to pronounce them identically, dictionary pronunciation guides ( https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis... and https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis... ) do not make a distinction.. [edit] ah, one (!) of the two "tell" audio recordings in that dictionary seems to pronounce it in a different way tha…
Both recordings of the "tell" word exhibit aspiration. I guess it is perhaps more noticeable to me because I'm quite well-versed in phonetics.
A common way of illustrating aspiration is: hold a sheet of paper in front of your mouth (or your hand), as you say the words. "tell" will give you a noticeable puff of air as it leaves the mouth, as opposed to "stellar", which won't.
Maybe these recordings are helpful to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant#Allophonic
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm always puzzled by certain British imperial transliteration schemes that seem to do their best to set you up for failure and embarrassment. Apparently "Burma" is supposed to be pronounced in a non-rhotic fashion, but would it have killed the non-rhotic speakers to write "Bama"? Then the rhotic speakers who form the majority of English speakers would have at least had a fighting chance to get it right. Another thin…
OK, I'm Indian and I will stipulate that transliterations of Devanagari are inconsistent, but that guy you linked to is just being a crude racist asshole. (0:39 "and it's so appropriate because she's Indian." Fuck you, Paul Henry!) In the specific case, her last name would be pronounced "deekshit", with both "d" and "t" being soft like in Spanish. Both those consonant sounds do not exist in standard American/British…
> In the specific case, her last name would be pronounced "deekshit", with both "d" and "t" being soft like in Spanish. Both those consonant sounds do not exist in standard American/British English.
So he did get the fricative right after all? The sounds certainly exist, unfortunately there is no unambiguous way of denoting them without resorting to the now archaic "ð" and "þ".
Could you perhaps shed some light on what a seemingly silent "h" after a consonant really indicates? Take names like "Delhi" and "Bhopal".
> Example of #1: A friend of mine is named "Manohar". The syllable emphasis and spelling is: "Muh-NOH-huhr". But his name gets pronounced as "Man-oh-HAAR" in the US. And it's not because he's pronouncing it wrong. Imagine if he pronounced every "Michael" as "Mikhail". People would be pissed.
I agree that errors in emphasis are far more jarring than errors in sounds, but using the native cognate in the language being spoken of a foreign name in that category is actually very common and often encouraged by the bearer of the name. Perhaps because it has already been mangled so many times since its Hebrew origin through Koine to all the modern languages that use it.
On thing that has always puzzled me is despite of what a dumpster fire Devanagari transliteration to Latin is, it seems to still have a massive buy-in with native speakers online. In places like social media or the Indian channels on the company Slack, it seems more common than actual Devanagari. I see the same pattern with Malayalam being written in Latin rather than its own script. If there's no need to accommodate people who don't know the script, I fail to see the point. I've asked but people usually get very defensive about it. Are they ashamed of having different scripts from the globally dominant one, Latin? I would rather consider it a point of pride.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#297Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#298I have my phone set up in English. Google maps is hilarious and basically unusable when it tries to pronounce street names.
While my phone is in English, I have Google Maps set to Dutch so that it will pronounce street names correctly (in English it'll butcher "Spui", but however it says "Utrechtsestraat" is pretty much unrecognisable.)
However there's an annoying/funny bug. If you open maps and start navigation, it's fine. However if, while navigation is running, you switch to another app temporarily, the language voice will change to the English voice, but the direction-generation part will still be generating directions in Dutch. This then becomes the worst of all possible worlds, as not only are the street names being butchered, but the instructions are too. In particular, "sla rechtsaf" (turn right) becomes "ess ell aye rektsaaf" as it thinks it's an acronym.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#299No one could produce the sounds for my name in Thailand, so I just picked a nickname (as is the local custom) and I've rolled with that as my primary name ever since.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#300Some 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 am E/F bilingual. I taught in an educational institution which is multicultural with dozens of cultural origins. When I get names wrong, I see grimaces on their faces. When I hear other people get common but foreign names -- like Nguyen for instance -- wrong, I grimace too. I am now at an institution in a country where basically no one outside the country knows how to pronounce anything.
It takes me about 5 minutes to Google names I'm unfamiliar with before I start a new class to make sure I get it right. I don't know and I should not be expected to know Chinese, but I think I should be expected to be polite enough to try to get it right before I take a stab and butcher someone's name.
I don't think it is an enormous burden to put on myself, and I don't think I'm performatively self-flagellating by doing it. I think it's just me trying to be polite. I think everyone should try to be polite in as many contexts as possible.
On another context of names:
My own names are Hebrew and Germanic respectively, two syllables each. My given name is common in North America. Most people pronounce it wrong anyway. I would greatly prefer if they didn't. It's a little disrespectful. I politely correct people and then find most of the same people make the same mistake again and again. I find it disrespectful, the same way I find it disrespectful if someone spells my name wrong even though my email address is first@last. It's not because they're frothing at the mouth racists, it's because they're minorly inconsiderate.
My wife has a common name with two English spellings (let's say similar to Meghan/Megan). People frequently misspell it. She's not bothered by people guessing wrong. She is bothered when she corrects them and they still get it wrong. When I met her, it's not like I cosmically knew which of the two spellings was correct. I simply learned which of the two spellings was correct. It was a basic act of politeness and care. When people don't do it, it comes off like they don't care.