181–190 of 210 posts
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Wow! That was a heavy burden for those parents. Imagine knowing that a misstep in the naming of your child would cause the death of many people.
Are you familiar with the Indonesian genocide? It was pretty awful but it seems like the world at large is unaware of what happened.
Late to the party, but Pakistani names do not always follow the GIVEN FAMILY format. Plenty of Pakistanis have "prefix"-names arising from tribe/caste, eg. Syed, Chaudary. The prime minister in 2012-2013 Raja Pervaiz Ashraf has the prefix name Raja. The prime minister from 2002-2004 Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, has Mir as a prefix name. Moreover, both Khan and Jamali are tribe names. Plenty follow the FAMILY GIVEN. My…
First name, last name OR given name, family name on forms never make sense to me.
This seems like the perfect place to ask. I was recently watching an international sporting event. I watched games from South Korea and Japan, and with both countries I couldn't figure out if the Latin script name on their backs was their family name or given name. With South Korea I guessed it was their given name, someone had either Park or Moon as a name but a different name on their back. But with Japan I couldn'…
As a really rough rule of thumb, in both Japanese and South Korean cultures, it would be fairly improper to address or refer to a "stranger" or any non-close-friend [1] by their given name. A jersey nameplate would absolutely constitute a stranger/formal context, so family name would be expected here. Even if you did not know that pretty universally, jersey nameplates/tags (and nameplates writ large) with only one na…
The Park/Moon thing really threw me. Are either ever a given name? As it made no sense that the name wasn't on the jersey. Maybe I was just mistaken and the player was on the bench.
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> Hindi is spelled phonetically in English, so it’s not very hard. In my experience it's extremely hard to get right. At one of my jobs pronunciation of Indian words (mostly food and names) was a fairly common topic of conversation and it was impossible for the non-Indians to get correct. To my American ear it usually sounded exactly the same (even if it wasn't me saying it) but they would always say it wasn't quite…
I think certain sounds are hard for Western speakers to pronounce, while others are easy. Specifically, Hindi (and many other Sanskrit-derived languages) distinguish between some sounds (which have correspondingly different characters in the written script) that are often indistinguishable to Western ears. And if you can't hear the difference, you are unlikely to be able to say it right. These sounds typically come i…
First thing I did in my company, which is mostly German, was to abbreviate my name, instead of having multiple people trying their hardest to call me singing I don’t care for, I chose his I’m called in that context.
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> For example, there are 4 "T" sounds in Hindi: त थ ट ठ. Out of curiosity, are these distinguished as alveolar vs retroflex and aspirated vs non-aspirated?
Tldr yes. Not a Hindustani speaker but general linguistics nerd. No idea if HN can handle the IPA modifiers - त - /t̪ə/ - voiceless dental plosive - थ - /t̪ʰə/ - aspirated voiceless dental plosive - ट - /ʈə/ - Voiceless retroflex plosive - ठ - /ʈʰə/ - aspirated Voiceless retroflex plosive t̪ - t with square bracket below is the dental plosive ʰ - superscript h is the aspirations indicator So there are three issues fo…
The converse is also true. For example, the way native Swedish speakers pronounce seven (sju - example pronunciations at https://forvo.com/word/sju/ ) is 1) Hard for me to say and 2) No matter how I say it, the response from Swedes is, "You said ; it's actually " where both and sound exactly the same to me, so I don't hear the distinction they are trying to point out. I assumed the same happens to Western folks when Indians/Hindi speakers try to explain the difference between the various T sounds.
> The bigger issue is English lacks a retroflex plosive (tongue curls), and aspiration is non-phonemic (does not carry a meaningful distinction)
But English words do seem to distinguish meaningfully between what you term 'voiceless' and 'aspirated voiceless' isn't it? For example, there is a difference between 'time' and 'thyme'. Ignoring the difference between 'y' and 'i' for a moment, wouldn't both words be the "same" to English speakers if what you are saying is true? Isn't 'th' just the aspirated version of 't'? (Not contesting what you are saying, just curious to understand.)
As a Japanese native I'm torn on this. On one hand, respecting the local ordering & notation seems to be good manners. On the other hand, this creates an ambiguity where some people are writing Asian names in local notation and some others writing in western notation. (This is even true for Japanese people themselves, as mentioned in the other comments.) At least things were consistent when everyone wrote them in wes…
I have a western name and have been learning Japanese. I also want to be respectful and considerate of the customs, legal documents, and software used in other countries. I thought my family name with an honorific should be first when in Japan, but last night I saw some advice saying that people with western style names should use the given name first when speaking there. (That didn't quite sound "fair" for all the J…
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Tldr yes. Not a Hindustani speaker but general linguistics nerd. No idea if HN can handle the IPA modifiers - त - /t̪ə/ - voiceless dental plosive - थ - /t̪ʰə/ - aspirated voiceless dental plosive - ट - /ʈə/ - Voiceless retroflex plosive - ठ - /ʈʰə/ - aspirated Voiceless retroflex plosive t̪ - t with square bracket below is the dental plosive ʰ - superscript h is the aspirations indicator So there are three issues fo…
This is fascinating. Thank you for commenting. As an Indian living in the West, I have always wondered why/how certain differences that are stark to my ears are subtle or barely perceptible to others. The converse is also true. For example, the way native Swedish speakers pronounce seven (sju - example pronunciations at https://forvo.com/word/sju/ ) is 1) Hard for me to say and 2) No matter how I say it, the response…
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Tldr yes. Not a Hindustani speaker but general linguistics nerd. No idea if HN can handle the IPA modifiers - त - /t̪ə/ - voiceless dental plosive - थ - /t̪ʰə/ - aspirated voiceless dental plosive - ट - /ʈə/ - Voiceless retroflex plosive - ठ - /ʈʰə/ - aspirated Voiceless retroflex plosive t̪ - t with square bracket below is the dental plosive ʰ - superscript h is the aspirations indicator So there are three issues fo…
This is fascinating. Thank you for commenting. As an Indian living in the West, I have always wondered why/how certain differences that are stark to my ears are subtle or barely perceptible to others. The converse is also true. For example, the way native Swedish speakers pronounce seven (sju - example pronunciations at https://forvo.com/word/sju/ ) is 1) Hard for me to say and 2) No matter how I say it, the response…
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Tldr yes. Not a Hindustani speaker but general linguistics nerd. No idea if HN can handle the IPA modifiers - त - /t̪ə/ - voiceless dental plosive - थ - /t̪ʰə/ - aspirated voiceless dental plosive - ट - /ʈə/ - Voiceless retroflex plosive - ठ - /ʈʰə/ - aspirated Voiceless retroflex plosive t̪ - t with square bracket below is the dental plosive ʰ - superscript h is the aspirations indicator So there are three issues fo…
This is fascinating. Thank you for commenting. As an Indian living in the West, I have always wondered why/how certain differences that are stark to my ears are subtle or barely perceptible to others. The converse is also true. For example, the way native Swedish speakers pronounce seven (sju - example pronunciations at https://forvo.com/word/sju/ ) is 1) Hard for me to say and 2) No matter how I say it, the response…
Aspiration is not contrastive in English - it's impossible to find two words that differ only by aspiration. Aspirated consonants (in general American English) mainly feature in the onset of a stressed syllable (pin ['pʰɪn], potato [pə̥ˈtʰeɪɾoʊ]) as long as they're not preceded by /s/ (spin ['spɪn]). The important part is that you can determine whether or not a consonant is aspirated only by its position in the word, which is why it's an allophone - a variation of a phoneme which isn't distinctive, but still sounds different. English is my L2 so "thyme" still messes me up, I always try to pronounce it with /θ/ like the first consonant in "thigh".
How people differentiate sounds is actually very interesting. The leading theory is that infants can differentiate all human phonemes (see Jusczyk's Head turn Experiment) but starts categorizing sounds into categories based on what languages are spoken to them by 9-12 months. An interesting language is the (sadly extinct) Ubykh, which had 84 (!) phonemic consonants but only 2 or 3 distinct vowels. For example, speakers percieved /qʲ q qʷ qˤ qˤʷ/ as five different sounds, even though an English-only speaker would probably categorize all of them as just "kinda guttural".
On "sju" (/ɧʉː/) - /ɧ/ is a very odd sound in general. It doesn't really feature in any other languages, and what exactly it should be categorized as is still debated by phoneticians. It also varies a lot by region - Finland Swedes generally don't differentiate the consonants in "sju" and "köpa". So bottom line, we don't know how to pronounce it either :D