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Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

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Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#471
post #283

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.…

Some people translate their names accordingly when entering the English speaking world.

E.g. people from the Czech Republic or Slovakia named Ján, Juraj, Michal might become John, George, Michael.

Slovak and Czech sometimes use back-translated exonyms for place names. E.g. Lawrence is Vavrinec. Thus "St. Lawrence River" is called "Rieka svätého Vavrinca".

https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rieka_sv%C3%A4t%C3%A9ho_Vavrin...

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#472

My first name is Dutch. It includes a vowel combination with no equivalent in English, although both long A as in Tanis or U as in "Tunis" (or Tuesday, which is far closer in origin) are close enough. And not (also valid) "Ee". I suppose the closest might be the French "eau" for my "Teunis". (the way I'm used to saying it almost has an almost silent "r" in it too ...) I usually don't bother. People mess it up regardl…

Other than the 'r' sound, it seems to overlap with Eunice. (based on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDCDCFVuIls )

More or less.

I've only ever heard "Eunice" pronounced in ways nothing like I'm used to hearing my name, but I can see that.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got me well confused here. Take my experience of the phenomenon as you wish and incorporate it or not into your decision making process, at your leisure. I'm not the only one who feels this way when citizens corner us immigrants into pronouncing our names for a while.

I think some of us feel that you sounded a bit peevish about the whole thing.

Oh yes, that would be a correct statement.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you know the name is from an Indian language, read "a" as the "u" in "putt" Please stop making up stuff like "an Indian language". If you mean Hindi-Urdu and that language family, then just call it that, don't subtly encourage people to think that is the language for all of India.

I believe it's true for most of the sprachbund, including my native language Kannada (which is a Dravidian language very much unrelated to Hindi)

Example?
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