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Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

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Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#361

Post by Vinnl »

eyko wrote: post #245
jaimebuelta wrote: post #195

Earlier 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…

Super off-topic, but my name is Vincent and I'm learning some basic Spanish vocabulary, and it's been at the back of my mind for a while that I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to pronounce my name in Spanish. So maybe you could help: how would you pronounce my name when speaking Spanish - would you turn it into Vicente, use the English or French pronunciation, or is there a "proper" Spanish way to pronounce it?

(Feel free to ignore of course, I just got interested.)

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#362

Post by gonzus »

dhosek wrote: post #80
robocat wrote: post #74

At least English speakers often try to pronounce names correctly, for example celebrities and well known sports stars. Not that we always succeed, and many people don’t care! Bach, Cézzane, Jesus, Jahn etcetera. I notice Spanish people don’t seem to try, I think in part because there is a one-to-one correspondence between words and pronunciation in Spanish. The common Spanish pronunciation of Michael Jackson is unint…

It varies. The American practice is generally to try and get it horribly wrong. The English practice is to try to get it horribly wrong. In Byron's poem Don Juan , the title character's name is pronounced Don Jew-on. This is, of course, just one example of many. Assuming you're speaking of Spanish speakers from Spain (and not Latin America), they may be reacting to the customary mangling of Spanish by their UK counte…

This reminds me of the movie The Name of the Rose, which I love. One of the characters was named "Jorge", and he was from Spain, so it was really baffling to hear everyone calling him "Yorgeh"... I guess they didn't have anyone on board who knew any better. Still love it.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#363

Post by harwoodr »

kortex wrote: post #317
eyko wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I totally read it as "Vincente" and didn't even notice there was no n until you pointed it out . Brains are super weird.

I totally get it. The brain's autocorrect has "fixed" my last name (Harwood) for people my entire life. Hardwood, Howard, Hayward... and even stranger modifications.

Fun fact, I can't type hardwood without great effort.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#364

Post by LordAtlas »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #296
LordAtlas wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> So he did get the fricative right after all?

Did not sound like that to me. He pronounced "d" and "t" as ड and ट when it should be द and त. I think the first consonant is closer to how you might pronounce the article "the".

> Could you perhaps shed some light on what a seemingly silent "h" after a consonant really indicates? Take names like "Delhi" and "Bhopal".

Oh boy. OK, "Delhi" is the Anglicised name of the city name, which in Hindi is "Dilli", so it's actually pronounced "Del-hi", hard "D", faint "h". Though it could be clipped to sound just like "deli" depending on whom you're speaking to.

But in cases where it's a transliteration, _usually_ it means that it's an aspirated version of the consonant in question. "Bhopal" is one such instance. The Devanagari script has, for some consonants, multiple versions: soft, aspirated soft, hard, aspirated hard. (I'm not a linguist; there may be better terms for these.) Let's take "d". There's the soft "d" pronounced as Spanish-speaking people pronounce "d". There's a hard "d" pronounced as in "door". Then there's "dh" and "ddh", which are the aspirated forms of the respective letters.

(Google "pronounce Bhopal" and switch to the "Indian English" pronunciation option. I also checked the top 5 or so youtube videos and ALL of them are wrong; they have an American pronouncing it. WTF?)

But as I mentioned, our transliteration is not standardised and it's indeed a dumpster fire, so sometimes, the consonant is "ddh", but it's written as "dh" in a word, which does not help things at all.

Want more complications? In South India, "th" is often used instead of "t" in names where there's a soft "t". But it's pronounced exactly the same. [1]

Oh, and Devanagari is a simpler script. Other Indian languages like Malayalam have even more sounds that Westerners have zero hope of pronouncing correctly. Heck, Indians from other states struggle with it.

As for names, you'll find multiple spellings for names that are pronounced the same. I have friends named "Aarti" and they are spelt "Aarti", "Arathi", "Aarthi", and "Arati". A royal mess.

And this is before some idiotic astrological/numerological superstition makes them add unnecessary letters to their names. (Not common, but does happen.)

> In places like social media or the Indian channels on the company Slack, it seems more common than actual Devanagari.

I can only speculate that there are two reasons for this:

1) PC keyboards in India are English QWERTY and typing regional language text on them is a pain.

2) The medium of instruction in middle class education is English, so many of us grow up speaking English well. And in some cases like mine, think in English too. As we progress in our careers, communication in the workplace is in English, and writing fluency in native languages decreases. It's just easier to type it out in English. I consume pretty much all my Internet content in English (though I can speak 3 Indian languages), and it bugs the hell out of me too because I have to translate from the weird English transliteration to the native language in my head first. And that's before people use SMS-like contractions for words.

[1] Speculative answers here: https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/5uwcwi/people_from_s...

This will only make sense to you if you read Hindi: https://qr.ae/pG5zMP

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#365

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway02824 wrote: post #357
rendall wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you think is unique because you are English-language speaker I am a native English-language speaker, but I speak other languages as well. In all languages, there is exactly zero expectation that speakers will pronounce English words like English-speakers do. Because in all languages, foreign words are remade into native words. As it had been in English until the mid 20th century. > And if you mean the names of peop…

> no one corrects Italians for saying "Germania" instead of Deutschland This is a strawman. Italian here. I would never dream of using the word "Germania" with someone that does not speak Italian expecting them to understand that it's the Italian way to pronounce Deutschland.

[deleted]

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#366

Post by SamBam »

apurtbapurt wrote: post #140
dhosek wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally go with a native pronunciation unless told otherwise. So I would pronounce it John Dubwah, but I've learned that it's W.E.B. Du-boys. But the single most important thing to do is ask how to pronounce and keep trying to get it right. My wife's first name is a Mexican name with an ll in the middle that should be pronounced as j/y (most Spanish speakers don't really hear a difference between the two English…

So, it is really easy and almost no one manages to do it right even after instructions? And after failing to do it right after instructions, it is the other people who are arrogant for asking to use something they are able to pronounce, not you for insisting on making them uncomfortable? Names are just sounds people make when they want someones attention. Respect goes two ways.

The sounds may be easy to pronounce. The people may just not be devoting the attention to remember it. They've been told it's "Isabeya," say, but they just keep forgetting it's not "Isabella."

I would treat this as similar to forgetting someone's name. Yes, plenty of people have a "terrible memory for names," but at the end of the day it's a matter of respect. If you really care -- if it's someone who's becoming a friend, if it's someone you ought to know for your job, if it's someone who's been introduced to you five times -- it's on you to remember the name, unless you have a genuine neurological condition.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#367

Post by kragen »

Maybe I should submit a pull request for Spanish names. It'd be nice to get Arabic, Hindi, and Russian in there too.

Common errors I've heard for Spanish:

- Juan being pronounced as [wan] rather than [huan] or [xuan]

- Jesus, of course

- Javier mysteriously gets mispronounced (only by British English speakers!) with the akSENT on the wrong syLOBBle, as ['hav jɛ] HAVyer instead of [hav 'jɛ] hav YAIR (the closest approximation fitting English phonotactics to the correct [xaβ i 'eɾ]).

Other people in the thread mention Jaime, for which [hajmej] is much more reasonable than the commonly heard [dʒejmi], and Vicente for which [bisɛntej] is a lot better than [vɪnsənt] or [vintʃɛntej]. (I'd be careful about [biθɛntej] though; Vicente might be from Latin America.) I bet Julián gets [dʒuliən] rather than [huli'an] pretty often, too.

The only one I've noticed from Hindi is people pronouncing "Rohit" as "Roheat" instead of the straightforward "Rohit". Like, "row hit". Couldn't be easier, but for some reason English-speakers screw it up all the time. But then, I don't speak Hindi or any other Indian language (yet!) so there may be a lot of others I'm overlooking.

Also in 02021 there is no excuse for not having some reasonable idea about how to pronounce "Nguyen", even if [wɪn] is the best you can do. Don't go around saying [nəgajən].

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#368

Post by GoblinSlayer »

kodah wrote: post #187
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 commonly refer to my last name as vowel soup (I'm french, and it's the Americanization of my family name). It's such a niche last name that I've heard all of two people get my name right and both of them were Cajun or Cajun adjacent - most native French speakers are totally lost on it. I always tell people to call me by my first name when this comes up. I've watched as people did as you described where they spend a…

Heh, I think employees should be given a fully synthetic identity, mostly for privacy reasons, but it can help with this thing too. The nickname can be also selected so that names aren't reused in a team, which would reduce ambiguity in communication. Even in small teams a lot of time is spent resolving ambiguities which John was referred.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#369

Post by rendall »

throwaway02824 wrote: post #357
rendall wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you think is unique because you are English-language speaker I am a native English-language speaker, but I speak other languages as well. In all languages, there is exactly zero expectation that speakers will pronounce English words like English-speakers do. Because in all languages, foreign words are remade into native words. As it had been in English until the mid 20th century. > And if you mean the names of peop…

> no one corrects Italians for saying "Germania" instead of Deutschland This is a strawman. Italian here. I would never dream of using the word "Germania" with someone that does not speak Italian expecting them to understand that it's the Italian way to pronounce Deutschland.

Great.

> I would never dream of using the word "Germania" with someone that does not speak Italian...

That's the strawman. In the example, we're talking about Italians, speaking Italian, not being corrected for speaking non-Italian words like Italians do.

So, when speaking Italian, if a German insisted that you pronounce his homeland as Deutschland not Germania you would think he was a nut.

So, when speaking English, why would you insist that someone saying "brusheta" is wrong? Help me understand.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#370

Post by SamBam »

kragen wrote: post #367

Maybe I should submit a pull request for Spanish names. It'd be nice to get Arabic, Hindi, and Russian in there too. Common errors I've heard for Spanish: - Juan being pronounced as [wan] rather than [huan] or [xuan] - Jesus, of course - Javier mysteriously gets mispronounced (only by British English speakers!) with the akSENT on the wrong syLOBBle, as ['hav jɛ] HAVyer instead of [hav 'jɛ] hav YAIR (the closest appro…

I would submit a small rule for almost all foreign names and words, or at the very least European and Middle Eastern ones: The letter "e" is almost never pronounced like "bee."

Though I shouldn't be, I am continually surprised by this Anglophone quirk. Just yesterday I was at a book club after we had all read the book "Piranesi," and without failure every American pronounced it "Piranisi." There are two different vowels there, i and e. Most languages besides English have the expectation that different letters are pronounced differently. I know English is weird in this regard.

My rule of thumb: if it's a foreign word and it has the letter "e," default to "eh" and you'll be close 90% of the time.

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