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Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

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Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#421

Post by mkotowski »

notafraudster wrote: post #300
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 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…

> When I hear other people get common but foreign names […] wrong, I grimace too.

To be honest, this seems as one of the worst ways to handle such situations. Feeling distraught over an imprecise pronunciation feels like something to get rid of rather than accepting as a norm.

And I am saying this as someone with a slight speech impediment using one of the more consonant cluster-rich languages on the continent. I would have to be delusional to expect someone from an English-speaking country to pronounce names such as Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz on first or even second try.

Also, how do you decide which names are common? Not trying to be rude, but this can easily depend on from where someone is coming from and their age/generation. Names popular in the generation of my grandparents sometimes are completely absent from my own and rarely written down.

This all also comes with the prerequisite that a person in question still uses the original pronunciation and not one adapted to the dominant language in the region.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#422

Post by jagger27 »

mmarq wrote: post #399
jagger27 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people really overdo the idea that certain sounds simply cannot be replicated by non-native speakers. If there is any remote proximity to native speakers and a bare minimum effort is made to practice tricky sounds, it's totally doable. I certainly picked up French quite easily in school. Later, in university, I picked up Italian very easily (though I had some exposure from older relatives). More recently, I a…

Of course you can replicate all sounds, I can pronounce Friedrich, but an Italian speaker with no exposure to German (which is 99% of the population) will inevitably butcher it, because both the R and the “voiceless palatal fricative” do not exist in Italian phonology. This hypothetical Friedrich can either accept that he is talking to foreigners that can’t pronounce his name as native Germans, or he may spend 2 hour…

Perhaps my perspective is skewed as a Canadian consistently exposed to multiple languages in media and in casual conversation.

Italy shares borders with two German majority speaking countries (Switzerland and Austria) and is close to Germany itself. Wouldn't Northern Italians especially have good exposure to them?

As for the Italian 'gli', that was probably the hardest for me to pick up.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#423

Post by SamBam »

rendall wrote: post #407
SamBam wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It doesn't matter, they'd try to pronounce it correctly.

This whole thing is a strange strawman regarding your belief that other cultures pronounce things however that spelling would be pronounced in their country, but there's simply no citation for that.

You brought up the pronunciation of "gnocchi." I have heard French people pronounce it while speaking French (I have travelled in France a lot). They pronounce it as the Italians do, while speaking French.

How did they learn that? If a French kid saw the word spelled out the first time, and hadn't been taught Italian, they'd have no idea what to do with that "ch." (The "gn" would have been less confusing.)

Yet they did pronounce it correctly, because, like most words, the word would generally have been learned orally. And if some French school kid started saying "gno-shi," his peers would have corrected them.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#424

Post by valarauko »

LordAtlas wrote: post #364
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cit…

> "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.

To be fair to the English orthography, the English 'Delhi' doesn't come from the Hindi दिल्ली, but rather an anglicization of the Persian دهلی when the East India Company arrived, retained in modern Urdu as دہلی or 'dehli'.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#425

Post by Vinnl »

eyko wrote: post #415
Vinnl wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? (F…

Most people pronounce the spanish Vicente as "Beethenteh" in castellano but you can definitely ignore the "th" sound and pronounce it like an S, it's your name after all, you make the rules! In some spanish languages there's no "th" sound (e.g. Catalan) so it's really not an issue. It will definitely be much easier for spaniards to pronounce the english version of Vincent than the french. We probably have the worst f…

Ha, you haven't heard the Dutch pronunciation of croissant yet I take it :P

But thanks! I'll probably stick to the English Vincent then, as I'm not sure Vicente would trigger a response from me if I'm not paying attention, but maybe if I ever get to spend a longer time in a Spanish-speaking community I might give Vicente a try.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#426

Post by pierrec »

njharman wrote: post #390

Why the fuck is "zh" not transliterated into "j" if it suppose to be a Jay sound?

"j" is already used to represent another consonant that arguably sounds closer to Jay (not that it's supposed to specifically match how English uses the Latin alphabet, but in this case it doesn't matter). Both of these consonants could maybe have been represented by "j" since they're always used in different contexts (IIRC), but pinyin avoids writing multiple sounds in the same way.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#427

Post by scaryclam »

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.

It's really not.

The entire point of language is to be understood by others. If you're unwilling to take any time to find out how to be understood, then you're really just failing at basic communication. It's not up to others to interpret your misunderstanding of how to correctly say something, it's up to you to put some effort into being understood.

And if you're smirking at people instead of taking the opportuinity to learn, well, I wish you all the best in your small minded world.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#428

Post by gurkendoktor »

kragen wrote: post #400
gurkendoktor wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pinyin is predictable if you memorize every single syllable that exists, it is not logical on a letter-by-letter basis. For example, "liu" should be pronounced "liou" and "shui" should be pronounced "shuei", but the "o" and "e" are omitted in Pinyin for brevity. Similarly, the "u" in lu and mu is different from the "u" in "ju" and "qu"; the latter is actually "jü" and "qü" as in "nü" and "lü", again the diareses are…

Probably you speak more Chinese than I do, but as I understand it, you don't have to memorize the syllables, just the 22 (?) onsets and 17 (?) vowel+codas, same as in bopomofo, just more sneakily. Plus nü and lü, I guess. But that still means memorizing 41 pronunciations instead of the 374 you suggest. Is that right, or is the situation far more complicated than it appears?

I've never learned bopomofo in earnest, and for pinyin I just memorized everything that felt like an exception to me, even though it might have some internal logic. For example, I guess that the "a" in "yan" is different from "lan" because "yan" is its own coda, whereas "lan" is "l" + "an"?

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#429

Post by iflp »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #184
mc32 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pinyin is pretty close. At least it's predictable. Wade-Giles is way off -well, I guess it was based off Cantonese? In any case, my pet peeve is people expecting speakers of English to accommodate foreign sounds, but not extending the same ask to foreign speakers who often mangle English name sounds just as much. I say just let them say it however they know how and let it be. I don't mind if they can't pronounce my n…

Pinyin is predictable if you memorize every single syllable that exists, it is not logical on a letter-by-letter basis. For example, "liu" should be pronounced "liou" and "shui" should be pronounced "shuei", but the "o" and "e" are omitted in Pinyin for brevity. Similarly, the "u" in lu and mu is different from the "u" in "ju" and "qu"; the latter is actually "jü" and "qü" as in "nü" and "lü", again the diareses are…

> liu" should be pronounced "liou" and "shui" should be pronounced "shuei"

This is nuanced: in some cases it’s omission for brevity [1] and in other cases it’s how the phonemes sound 100 years ago [2]. And if you pronounce them fast enough there isn’t much difference.

The omitted diaeresis is certainly for brevity, although using v is more common to me.

[1]: https://www.zhihu.com/question/26010099 [2]: https://www.zhihu.com/question/313646560

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#430

Post by 908B64B197 »

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 much prefer hearing my name pronounced wrong by mistake, than wasting time in a useless woke-posturing session with someone using my time to teach them how to make sounds their mouth hasn't been trained to make, supposedly out of respect for my foreignness.

The French language is perceived as refined and hard to get right. And France in general is very romanticized in American culture. Maybe it's less "woke respect" and little more curiosity than you think.

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