Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 474 posts

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#401

Post by Y_Y »

rayiner wrote: post #344
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 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 This. My name is a whimsical permutation of a Monacan name but I’m south Asian so it confuses the heck out of people. So I just go by Ray, which frankly is kind of a sketchy name, like “Trent” or “Chad.” But it’s easy to pronounce. It’s no big dea…

Monacan like the Native Americans, or like Monégasque?

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#402

Post by nautilius »

rendall wrote: post #272

If you speak any non-English language, you will know that this obsession with getting English-language speakers to pronounce foreign words "correctly" is unique. No speaker of any other language in the world even tries to pronounce foreign words like foreigners do, nor are they expected to. Just pronounce it the way it's spelled, and if you're speaking English, that is the correct way. Join me in my militant quest to…

>If you speak any non-English language, you will know that this obsession with getting English-language speakers to pronounce foreign words "correctly" is unique. No speaker of any other language in the world even tries to pronounce foreign words like foreigners do, nor are they expected to.

Oh boy, generalize much?

If I had a dime every time an American explained to me how to properly pronounce Porsche, Adidas, Bach, etc....

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#403

Post by tremon »

enriquto wrote: post #232

The "opposite" side of this issue is people who intentionally adopt a pronounceable name of their destination country. I may have observed that, but I'm not really sure. Some of my Chinese students, who could barely speak French, were called totally french-sounding names like "Cédric" or "Pauline". I guess they invented them on the spot, to avoid people butchering their real names. But I never thought of a non-awkwar…

At uni I had a Vietnamese classmate in my group called Thanh. This was easy enough to pronounce, or so we thought. One day he introduced us to his brother, called Than. If I remember correctly, the difference between their names was in the melodic intonation, which none of us could master.

Ultimately, we ended up naming then Hans and Daan. I don't recall if they were bemused or bewildered by our inability to distinguish their names, but they accepted their new names with grace.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#404

Post by nindalf »

kragen wrote: post #381
nindalf wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

I don't think you're quite there yet. It's more like how this lady says it in the first 10 seconds - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMJNV61I9iU. She guides you through pronouncing these sounds.

You're right though. I could probably get Chinese pronunciation correct given enough time and effort. but it's not trivial, like I thought earlier.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#405

Post by kragen »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #87
Clewza313 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pinyin was not designed as a system for making it easier for English speakers to pronounce Chinese, but as a way for native Chinese speakers to write their own language. During the early years of the revolution in China, there were proposals of various levels of seriousness to ditch characters entirely in favor of a Latin script like pinyin, and this actually happened in Vietnam. Wade-Giles, an earlier system of tran…

Kunrei Shiki is really annoying. Nobody knows how to pronounce Mitutoyo correctly because someone in Japan got scared of the supposed ambiguity caused by "tsu".

I recently saw some publicity video by Mitutoyo America on YouTube that pronounced it [mitutɔjou]. All the machinists I watch on YouTube pronounce it [mɪtsutɔjou] though.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#406

Post by SamBam »

rendall wrote: post #393
SamBam wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> refusing to pronounce words correctly That's skewing the argument. The discussion is "should English speakers be expected to pronounce foreign words as they are pronounced in the original language"? Not "pronouncing words as foreigners do is the correct pronunciation when speaking English" Despite the stereotype, it's not Americans running around telling foreigners how to pronounce English words in their native ton…

> Despite the stereotype, it's not Americans running around telling foreigners how to pronounce English words in their native tongue.

This seems to be the root of your annoyance, but it's also false. If an Italian said "President Bee-den" there would be plenty of Americans falling over themselves to let them know that it's pronounced "Bye-den." I've been there. I've experienced it.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#407

Post by rendall »

SamBam wrote: post #406
rendall wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> refusing to pronounce words correctly That's skewing the argument. The discussion is "should English speakers be expected to pronounce foreign words as they are pronounced in the original language"? Not "pronouncing words as foreigners do is the correct pronunciation when speaking English" Despite the stereotype, it's not Americans running around telling foreigners how to pronounce English words in their native ton…

> Despite the stereotype, it's not Americans running around telling foreigners how to pronounce English words in their native tongue. This seems to be the root of your annoyance, but it's also false. If an Italian said "President Bee-den" there would be plenty of Americans falling over themselves to let them know that it's pronounced "Bye-den." I've been there. I've experienced it.

Were they speaking Italian at the time, or English?

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#408

Post by rendall »

nautilius wrote: post #402
rendall wrote: post #272

If you speak any non-English language, you will know that this obsession with getting English-language speakers to pronounce foreign words "correctly" is unique. No speaker of any other language in the world even tries to pronounce foreign words like foreigners do, nor are they expected to. Just pronounce it the way it's spelled, and if you're speaking English, that is the correct way. Join me in my militant quest to…

>If you speak any non-English language, you will know that this obsession with getting English-language speakers to pronounce foreign words "correctly" is unique. No speaker of any other language in the world even tries to pronounce foreign words like foreigners do, nor are they expected to. Oh boy, generalize much? If I had a dime every time an American explained to me how to properly pronounce Porsche, Adidas, Bach…

Americans drive this too. If you read carefully I didn't say we don't.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#409

Post by enlightens »

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.…

> softer latin "J" (identical to an I)

That's a fun one here in the US. My employer has an office in Romania, so many of my coworkers have names that start with an I for the voiced palatal approximant sound. These names would start with a J in English, have the I in Romanian, and are pronounced (more or less) like an English "y" sound. For example, Julian -> Iulian, approximately pronounced Yoo-lee-an. For extra complication for those in the States, many default fonts show minimal differences between a capital I and a lower-case L, so some people read it as Loo-Lee-An.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palatal_approximant

And then don't get me started on us Americans trying to understand the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-comma

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#410

Post by kragen »

PeterisP wrote: post #268
ylyn wrote: post #117

Earlier 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…

Are you a native English speaker? It's common for native speakers to be pretty deaf to the differences between allophones. Try recording yourself in Audacity saying "Tell the stellar tart to start stewing a tall stall too," then highlight the two "tell" sounds and listen to them repeatedly. Also the two "tart" sounds, the two "too"/"tew" sounds, and the two "tall" sounds. Maybe you'll be able to hear the puff of white noise that's missing in "stellar", "start", "stew", and "stall". That's the aspiration.
Post reply on HN