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Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

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Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#351

Post by throwaway02824 »

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…

> 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 correcting them.

> If someone gives you a hard time, smirk at them for being the unsophisticated provincial they are.

This is incredibly arrogant.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#352

Post by akdor1154 »

jldugger wrote: post #8

"Non-English" -> Mainland Chinese. Well, it's a start I guess. Probably worth adding Vietnamese considering how few people in the US know how to pronounce "Nguyen".

Vietnamese is great, it's another really regular latinization scheme. A few things are a little bit different from your default English interpretation of letters, but all vowels etc are completely predictable (... once you know the rules). Unfortunately all the helpful diacritics telling you exactly how to pronounce things normally get left off names in an English context. :(

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#353

Post by MereInterest »

Radim wrote: post #292
neltnerb wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the story of the town of Versailles, Indiana. It was common knowledge nearby that anyone who came in and pronounced it "ver-sai" was from out of town. Because everyone living there called it "ver-sails". I use this as an example of how if anyone gets to decide how something is pronounced, it's the people who live there. The city is simply called "ver-sails" and that's all there is to it. It is not…

And also of "Socrates", an American Quake 3 player who insisted on the "soh-crates" pronunciation :-) I also love the double mind-fuck of "karaoke": EN: pronounced "owe-kee" JP: "oh-keh"! EN: but "oke" comes from the English "orchestra" (kara-oke = empty orchestra)… so really should be pronounced "or-keh"? Are we mispronouncing a Japanese mispronounciation of OUR OWN WORD?? (and then of course the Greeks chime in, OG…

There's a apocryphal story about a translator at an anime convention being asked why he changed a name in the English dub, using an L sound, where the name in Japanese used an R sound. The translator's response was a very flat "Because 'Alucard' is 'Dracula' spelled backwards."

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#354

Post by waylandsmithers »

magicalhippo wrote: post #57

A family friend had parents from New Zealand and Norway. He was born in New Zealand, and was named Brent after his grandfather. As an adult he moved here to Norway, and immediately had an issue with his name. In Norwegian "brent" means burnt, and is pronounced almost exactly like "Brent". So, he changed his name to a fairly common Norwegian name: Bernt. Fast forward a couple of decades and he moves back to New Zealan…

That sounds a lot like Oprah. Her given name was Orpah (a biblical name)

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#355

Post by AYBABTME »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #329
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…

Are you saying these people should be more aware and considerate of your culture and experience as an immigrant with a hard to pronounce name in an English speaking country? That they should consider your feelings and change how they behave to suit you better? Because that sounds pretty 'woke' to me, and you seem to be attacking people for trying to be woke and annoying you in the process. I just worry that if someon…

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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#356

Post by LegitShady »

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.…

The hebrew ‘jacob’ is pronounced with a v rather than b sound at the end as well. It’s more like Yaqov than Yaqob. It uses the same letter ‘bet’ but with a dot in the middle its a b sound, without the dot in the middle its a v sound, and in modern use they don’t add the dots in at all and assume everyone knows how to pronounce things.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#357

Post by throwaway02824 »

rendall wrote: post #319
ithinkso wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Celebrating incorrectness, eh? Nothing wrong with being wrong, but not willing to learn... I don't know. > 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 not unique, you think is unique because you are English-language speaker. Anyone speaking X natively will correct others learning X if they ask, bu…

> you think is unique because you are English-language speaker I am a native English-language speaker, but I speak other languages as well. In all languages, there is exactly zero expectation that speakers will pronounce English words like English-speakers do. Because in all languages, foreign words are remade into native words. As it had been in English until the mid 20th century. > And if you mean the names of peop…

> 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.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#358

Post by mc32 »

carlmr wrote: post #320
mc32 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a big deal. Watch some news in Chinese and you’ll hear similar butchering. It’s so exaggerated US cities are given totally different names in Chinese -there is little resemblance to the North American name of the city.

That's true, although in Chinese these are official transliterations as Hanzi. I think if someone says Milan in English instead of Milano it's fine because the city has an English name as well.

Right, often what they do is they try to find "close" syllables. Close is the wrong term as some are not close at all. Vancouver and Philadelphia for example.

It's like taking Milano and cutting it up into Mil + Ano and saying, hmm, in English the closest syllables are approximately Mill + Anus, we'll call it Millanus, oh, but that's got a word we should avoid so let's call it MillLand.

The point is, it's not wrong or bad for (any) people to get foreign words wrong when they pronounce them.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#359

Post by mytailorisrich »

prvc wrote: post #40

One thing that has puzzled me about complaints about English speakers' pronunciation of transliterated Chinese words (the only topic of TFA), is why the speaker is blamed rather than the transliteration. If the official transliteration into the Roman alphabet leads to less accuracy in pronunciation than some other (for example see the second vs third columns in the table in TFA), then would it not make better sense f…

Pinyin is not a transliteration into English, it's a way to write Chinese using the latin alphabet. Learning how to pronounce Pinyin is no difference than learning how to pronounce French or German text.

So when you say "why the speaker is blamed rather than the transliteration" it's like saying "why the English speaker is blamed rather than the French spelling" about an English speaker having problems pronouncing a French word.

Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

#360

Post by SamBam »

throwaway02824 wrote: post #351
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…

> 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…

I absolutely agree, parent comment is completely incorrect.

Growing up as an American in Italy, people would frequently try to pronounce my family's names correctly. They wouldn't simply say the word as if it were an Italian word.

Same for any other name. They pronounce president Biden as Americans would, they don't say "Bee-den" as they would of the word were Italian.

Ditto for non-English foreigners coming to Italy. Does GP really think that the Spanish and the French say "guh-nocci" for gnocchi? They don't have the "gn" digraph any more than English does, yet they all pronounce it correctly.

The word is the same world-round. Just because it's uncommon enough that each language hasn't bothered to give it is own spelling (ñoci in Spanish, maybe, nhoci in Portuguese, nioki in English) doesn't suddenly mean the word changes in other languages.

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