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Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

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Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#301

Post by neltnerb »

flyinghamster wrote: post #288
neltnerb wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cosmopolitan aesthetics would be the root of the phenomena I imagine, if that word doesn't still apply. I know it was a discussion for many decades about whether a piece of music should be in the original language or the translation. Everyone settled on the original, so we all sing with absolutely atrocious accents in foreign languages as best we can. I feel like this whole area is a giant minefield for actors now, s…

> I know it was a discussion for many decades about whether an piece of music should be in the original language or the translation. Everyone settled on the original, so we all sing with absolutely atrocious accents in foreign languages as best we can. I can relate to that. Pre-pandemic, I was singing in a community chorus, where we routinely had to sing in languages we don't necessarily speak. Typically, the directo…

If you dig into the linguistics for the singing a bit more, it's even more odd. Singing is traditionally done in "High German" so a lot of the pronunciation is as it is supposed to be, but it's not standard modern German. French is even odder, the sung version is quite different from spoken. I have tried simply speaking the poems that were set to music and people who know French have absolutely no idea what I am saying.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#302

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

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…

>At last, it seems to me that the people who care the most about this issue are monolingual.

I had someone asking for a way to identify 'gender from the names of overseas customers'[1] on my problem validation platform. At a glance it seems like a similar problem and there could be some who doubt the veracity of the problem. Then there were several business solutions posted for that problem.

The same people who wanted to know the gender could probably also benefit from knowing how to pronounce the name if they ever get on a call or meet the person.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/94-identifying-gender-from-a-na...

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#303

Post by flohofwoe »

Now try German :) Personally I don't have a problem with foreign speakers butchering my name. And what's the correct pronouncation anyway for a first name that's the French version of a name with Greek origin that seems to be most popular in Russia, and a family name that's an Old-German word for a profession that died out many centuries ago but somehow survived in some backwoods.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#304

Post by xdennis »

You can't solve this problem by compounding the issue: forcing people to know the spelling of every language.

The solution is to give people your IPA pronunciation. Instead of listening pronouns in Twitter you can list the pronunciation: "Ioan Răducanu /i'wan rədukanu/"

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#305

Post by qalmakka »

edanm wrote: post #275
qalmakka wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, exactly. I also saw a quite big difference between monolingual English speakers and Italian speakers. The average monolingual Italian speaker that has had a basic exposure to certain English words through TV or media in general WILL definitely mispronounce the words, but the result is never so corrupted and garbled to result incomprehensible to an English speaker. For instance, the average Italian might pronoun…

I wonder if it is indeed a difference in base language, or just a difference of exposure. I assume that, even without "trying", almost every Italian has more exposure to English than English speakers have to Italian.

My personal theory is that it's mostly due to exposure and cultural influence. The English speaking world is mostly refractory towards the non-English speaking world, i.e., books and movies published in Italian will almost always never get an English translation because there really isn't a market for translated novels. In the same way, Italian singers and bands have 0 chances of success unless they start singing in English; that's also the reason why at Eurovision only a very few countries sing in their own languages.

This causes people to hear English sounds since their very early childhood - in song, mostly. Movies are dubbed, but in general names of non translatable things are kept as-is, with a "flattened" but somewhat correct pronounciation.

English is also a mandatory subject in school. While the vast majority of students suck badly in that subject (I think among my classmates only 3 people, counting myself, had a mark above a passing grade in high school), at least you get that Millennials and some Gen X at least can grasp how stuff is supposed to get pronounced, so they can correct their parents or relatives when they say something completely out of place. I don't think there are enough people knowing a foreign language in English-speaking countries to offset this, so the "creative" pronunciations tend to stick and become the norm.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#306

Post by mc32 »

carlmr wrote: post #107
dirkt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I'd say the expectation that professionals who have to pronounce Chinese names pretty frequently, like those who do announcements at an airport, or newscasters, could spend the time to familiarize themselves with it IS reasonable.

I agree, it's crazy how often the news talk about China nowadays and almost nobody pronounces the names correctly.

It’s not a big deal. Watch some news in Chinese and you’ll hear similar butchering.

It’s so exaggerated US cities are given totally different names in Chinese -there is little resemblance to the North American name of the city.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#307

Post by OJFord »

LordAtlas wrote: post #263
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #214

Earlier 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…

I'm studying Hindi as a second language, and the inconsistency of transliterations drives me crazy, I'd rather nobody transliterated and just used devanagari if it's not going to be IAST.

Worse, Google has updated the (abc -> हिंदी) keyboard on Android so that in many cases it actually refuses the standard transliterations in favour of popular ones, I assume. And so if you want पीता you have to type 'peeta'; 'piita' won't get it, even if you click the caret for more options.

It also reinforces things like हूं - which I can understand if you're writing by hand, but why wouldn't a digital keyboard input the 'correct' / 'proper' / whatever हूँ?

(To write it there I used the direct input method rather than transliteration one, with which afaik it's not possible to write it.)

In fairness to butcherers of Manohar's name though, you really do need to be told/have learnt how the transliteration (IAST or roughly) is supposed to work. Otherwise of course you're going to read it in the language you know.

The trouble is, once you do know, you're left wondering if something is transliterated 'correctly' (in standard as opposed to popular fashion) or English-phonetically... Particularly with vowels: 'e' for example is either 'ay' as in 'pay' or 'e' as in 'pee' accordingly. (The latter 'should' be 'ī' or 'ii'.)

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#308

Post by citrin_ru »

Useless fact about Russian names surnames - if you'll try to read how it is written in an ID (e. g. a password) you'll likely mispronounce it, but if you'll read how people write their name in less formal situations e. g. in email, you have more chances to get it right.

There are multiple common ways to transliterate Russian to Latin alphabet [1]. For some reason for passports Russian authorities chose the scheme which is more confusing to English speakers than other popular schemes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#309

Post by ZeroGravitas »

eyko wrote: post #283
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Take Bob; in English, especially American English it's pronounced like "Baawhb" (exaggerated, weirdly phonetic), but over here (Dutch) it would be pronounced as "Bop", with a very short / clipped O sound. Of course there's also names that have transformed to nearly unrecognizable forms; George over here has evolved into Sjors (or the other way around?), John into Sjon, etc.

Another interesting one: James and Jacob are the same name (from the Hebrew Yaʿqob), and in spanish it's either found as "Jaime", "Jacobo" or "Santiago" which comes from "Saint Iago" (Iago being an old spanish conversion of the Latin "Iacobus" which came to other romance languages as Yago, Iaco, Jacob, Yacobo, Jacobo etc). The "J" consonant leads to many interesting things because of how many pronounciations it has.…

I belive San Diego could also be translated back to Saint James or any of those other variants but there's some other odd step or two in between that I can't remember right now.

Ah it turns out that may not be true, though widely believed for the last couple of centuries:

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Diego#Spanish

The one that shocked me the most was the number of different names that I associated with different countries that all turned out just to be variations on John.

Ivan, Ian, Euan, Hans, Sean, Jens, Juan, Yiannis, Giovanni, Evan, Ifan, Janko, Ivanko and many more

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_(given_name)#In_other_l...

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#310

Post by qalmakka »

mmarq wrote: post #267
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…

I find it very annoying when Italian speakers pronounce foreign names using sounds that do not exist in Italian. Pronouncing “Merkel” as a German would, makes it impossible to write and unrecognisable to 99% of Italian speakers. It is not reasonable to expect people to be able to pronounce and process sounds from all languages. It doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t even try, but if your name is “ Friedrich” you should a…

> if your name is “ Friedrich” you should accept that it’s unpronounceable for an Italian and that “fredrik”

I think that the only unpronounceable things in "Freidrich" for an Italian speaker are the guttural Rs and the /ç/ sound at the end. Most Italians are acquainted to the fact that 'ei' is /ai/ in German thank to South Tyrol and names such as "Einstein" being common knowledge - nobody would ever pronounce it /'einstein/. Thus an Italian would probably not mind pronouncing it as /fraidrik/, with a rolled R (which isn't technically incorrect in German, AFAIK) and a /k/ sound in place of /ç/.

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