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Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

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Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#381

Post by kragen »

nindalf wrote: post #282
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…

> it seems to me that the people who care the most about this issue are monolingual. Sort of. I’d speculate that those who care about it the most are people who’ve never struggled and failed to pronounce a name in another language. In my limited experience of knowing 3 languages I never had trouble with any pronunciation. So I came to the unfounded conclusion that a. I can pronounce anything and b. everyone should pr…

How's http://canonical.org/~kragen/tmp/tamiltamiltamil.ogg? I've never tried to utter a retroflex approximant before, and while I think I might have pronounced it correctly, I think I'd have a hard time reliably distinguishing it from a retroflex tap or a voiced (really) alveolar approximant.

As for learning to distinguish X from Sh, and the Ch/J/Zh/Q and C/Z distinctions in Mandarin, I think your beliefs may have swung too far from one pole to the other. It took me six or seven years to learn to pronounce American English [ɹ] correctly, and I made lots of hearing errors during that time as well. It can take time to learn to hear phonetic differences. Unsurprisingly you weren't able to learn the difference between [ɕ] and [ʂ] in a single fifteen-minute session, but if you'd done two fifteen-minute sessions a day for two years, you'd almost certainly get it. In fact, you might find that it only takes you a few weeks!

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#382

Post by SamBam »

rendall wrote: post #347
bloak wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just pronounce it the way it's spelled" might make sense in some languages, and it probably makes a lot of sense in Russian, say, where the person who transcribed a name from Latin letters has already decided how it should be (mis)pronounced (though the position of the stress makes a big difference in Russian), but it doesn't make sense in English because the spelling is rather inconsistent even if you're looking ju…

Yes. This confusion of spellings is due to English having a long history of literacy. The k in knock is silent, but once was pronounced. The pronunciation of knock changed but its spelling did not. Nevertheless, there are historical reasons for these various spellings, its not just "whatever". In any case, these are English words, not foreign words. English words follow specific conventions. This is why English speak…

You have it backwards. Pronunciation in English does not follow many strict conventions -- and when it does it doesn't do so consistently -- and it's precisely because it's taken on so many loan-words and kept something close to the original pronounciation.

You suggest "ch" should be pronounced as in "cheese" in English. Well, what about chemistry, christian, school, alchemy, anarchy, anchor, chaos, archeology, echo, and literally hundreds of other words in English with a hard "ch"?

Yes, unless a child is told that pronouncing them with a soft "ch" is "incorrect" they will pronounce all those words incorrectly if they come across them written down. Such is the burden of the English language, the language with the least consistent spelling-to-pronunciation rules on Earth.

Yes, English spelling is not regular. It's mostly from all those loanwords. It's unfortunate, and is the cause of such weirdly quirky Anglophone things such as "spelling tests" in schools, and "spelling bees" where one can win a modicum of fame and money -- they don't have this in other alphabetic languages. But's it's the way it is and refusing to pronounce words correctly isn't taking some kind of principled stand.

(Or should we say, for all those, "If it's really important to schoolteachers that English speakers pronounce it the way Italians do, they should consider spelling it using English conventions, eg skool"?)

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#383

Post by throwaway02824 »

rendall wrote: post #369
throwaway02824 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

You are still strawmanning. "Germania" is the Italian name for Germany. It's not a butchering of "Deutschland".

There is an English equivalent for the French "crêpe": pancake, and it's OK.

OTOH there isn't an English word "brusheta". It's 100% butchering of the Italian word.

Even worse if you use it in a restaurant and demand native Italian speakers to understand it and refuse any correction.

It's like I call you "rendass".

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#385

Post by Causality1 »

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…

As usual, the people with the biggest stick up their ass tend to be the least useful and most time-wasting.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#386

Post by tarsinge »

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…

French is a good example, nasal vowels are everywhere and are just impossible to pronounce correctly for English speakers without training, so not only we shouldn't take offense but it's even insensitive to expect it.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#387

Post by throwaway02824 »

rendall wrote: post #371
throwaway02824 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No speaker of any other language in the world even tries to pronounce foreign words like foreigners do [citation desperately needed] I'm a mothertongue Italian speaker. Never in my life I heard someone pronouncing "Bill Gates" or even "Google" with the Italian grammar/pronunciation rules. People would routinely ask how to pronounce foods in a Japanese or Chinese restaurant. Or thank the waiter/waitress for correcti…

> Never in my life I heard someone pronouncing "Bill Gates" or even "Google" with the Italian grammar/pronunciation rules. But if you native Italian speakers did happen to pronounce it "gah-tes" or "googleh" or whatever while speaking Italian , Americans would not insist that Italians are pronouncing it wrong . They would just say that's how Italians pronounce it. By contrast, if a native English speaker pronounces a…

> But if you native Italian speakers did happen to pronounce it "gah-tes" or "googleh" or whatever while speaking Italian, Americans would not insist that Italians are pronouncing it wrong.

Of course the would. And I can ensure you other people from Italy would correct someone that say "gah-tes". When politicians are caught speaking terrible English they quickly turn into memes on social networks and are mocked a lot.

You are being dishonest here.

>> This is incredibly arrogant.

> I was making a joke. Probably didn't land well with those who disagree with me.

I don't believe you. You keep moving the goal posts.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#388

Post by nojs »

Causality1 wrote: post #384

The sound most English speakers guess in these cases is to make them sounds like the Zh sound in the middle consonant in the English word "measure". Then why the hell do we transliterate that sound as "Zh" instead of J?

Not sure of the reason, but worth noting that a good chunk of people in the south of China pronounce it like the English “z”.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#389

Post by bradrn »

lmm wrote: post #88
canjobear wrote: post #27

If you're interested in learning to pronounce non-English things, I highly recommend learning the IPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... You can get away from this vague stuff like 'an "ah" vowel', and learn (1) the real way the pronounce the names, including sounds that aren't in English, and (2) the precise closest English approximation, without having to go through analogies and metaph…

I lost enthusiasm for IPA once I found out that there's no unambiguous way to denote a rolled r. It sounds like IPA has already accumulated its own historical baggage and recommends users to specify what they mean by each symbol, so you're just trading one set of vague analogies and metaphors for another.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. In phonetic transcription, rolled r is unambiguously [r]. In phonemic transcription… well, /r/ can be ambiguous depending on what language you’re transcribing, but that’s OK because phonemic transcription isn’t supposed to represent specific sounds anyway.
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