Thanks for the suggestion. It was difficult for me to think of an example without resorting to IPA, since my own American accent is fully cot/caught + father/bother merged.
Note that the sounds in these various languages are not exactly the same, but the "au" in "caught" is the closest sound in the native phonological inventory of a General American speaker (given said speaker pronounces "caught" and "cot" differently).
It's worth noting that "given said speaker pronounces "caught" and "cot" differently" is a bit misleading qualifier - there are many who have some difference between "caught" and "cot" (with "caught" being similar to "cot" but longer/smoother, with a clear differentiation), but it's clearly not the sound you intended that would match Italian "casa" and IPA 'a'; so pronouncing "caught" and "cot" differently apparently does not necessarily imply pronouncing "caught" the same way you do.
Also, if I listen to the audio examples at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger then it's exactly the other way around, that the "merged" pronunciation seems like an appropriate representation of "a" in words like Italian "casa", with "non-merged" "cought" sounding very different from that?
Apparently there's a subset of American-English speakers that would pronounce "caught" as "kaat". I've always heard it like a longer/smoother "cot" though.
I'd say a good first guess is the "a" in "about" instead.
Yes, in my dialect of American English (raised in Southern California by parents from the midwest), "cot" and "caught" are pronounced almost identically.
I was also raised in Southern California, and both my sisters and I—all born in the 1950s—have had complete cot/caught merger since childhood. The local friends our age whom I surveyed informally about the distinction in 1975 or so, after I learned about it in a linguistics class in college, also had the merger.
Our parents, who were born in the 1920s, both made the cot/caught distinction. Our mother was from the midwest, but our father grew up in the same Southern California city as we did. This suggested to me that, with respect to at least this one phonemic distinction, our language acquisition was influenced more by our peers than by our parents.
I should note that my sisters and I were initially flabbergasted that anyone pronounced those words differently and had trouble hearing the difference, while our parents were upset to learn that we pronounced them the same.
That's also how it rhymes in northern Illinois (Chicago/Rockford/Quad Cities). I've never pronounced "cot" and "caught" alike. Using different pronunciations is a pretty good indicator that someone came from the Chicago area.
"The cot–caught merger or LOT–THOUGHT merger, formally known in linguistics as the low back merger, is a sound change present in some dialects of English where speakers do not distinguish the vowel phonemes in "cot" and "caught". ...An additional vowel merger, the father–bother merger, which spread through North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has resulted today in a three-way merger in which most Canadian and many American accents have no vowel difference in words like "palm" /ɑ/, "lot" /ɒ/, and "thought" /ɔ/."
> Exception/refinement: If you know the name is from an Indian language, read "a" as the "u" in "putt"
Used to be written that way; compare Calcutta -> Kolkata, suttee -> sati.
> (Examples used assume a General American accent that pronounces "cot" and "caught" differently)
In combination with the directive to read "a" as in "caught", I don't know how to take this except as a call to add lip rounding to the pronunciation of foreign "a". But that can't be right?
Also known as "pronouncing Latin alphabet vowels as in Latin" :)
I like how English managed to offset for his relatively simple grammar by totally destroying its spelling. The whole fact that things like "spelling bees" can exist was very hard to grasp to me as a kid watching stuff dubbed in Italian.
Seven years old me was always very confused by why the kids in TV shows were rewarded for knowing how to spell stuff, which is something every second grader can do in Italy for any arbitrary word. In Italian you just write things the way you hear them, and there's an almost 1:1 strong correspondence between written and spoken language. If you don't know how to write something, you also don't know how to say it.
They had a crazy vowel shift where vowels, which for example in Romanian are defined as sounds that "stand by themselves" [1] all became 2-sound things.
To make it obvious, I'll use the Romanian spelling for vowels, which is practically Latin (except for "ă" which is pronounced "uh").
A became ei.
E became i (ok, this one's the exception, but in practice it's still crazy, "Mercedes" manages to have 3 - three!!! - pronunciations for it).
I became ai.
O became ău.
U became iu.
So if you look at them, they're all 2 distinct sounds (ergo the 2 letters in the Romanian spelling, except for E, which is crazy enough anyway).
I'm not counting W, Y and such because I think they weren't used in Latin.
[1] I.e. they're need a single sound to be pronounced, don't need an additional supporting sound.
Without counting all those circumstances where A is still /a/, u is /a/ or a similar vowel, and so on. Basically, there's nothing that's still pronounced as it should :)
> 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.
> The goal of this guide is to produce a simple guide to help you pronounce a surname from a non-English speaking culture that sounds reasonably correct.
FYI, the first sentence of the article isn't proper English. It purports to teach how a non-English speaking culture can sound resonably correct.
The main value is I think for people to stop and think about where they stand on the issue.
I read through the post and agree with you that I still don't have a clear understanding of the correct sounds, but I doubt I would have gone sound by sound trying to hear the differences.
Overall my takeaway is that there are common names and sound that are worth remembering, I checked a few like Nguyen, and will probably check others when coming across some Chinese name that reminds me of the article.
I could see myself using Github for something like this because people can easily contribute by sending pull requests. Particularly a page like this I would hope people with language experience in other areas would send PRs to build a nice big reference.
Be careful though, not too long ago I watched a YouTube video in very demeaning tone of how to not offend people yadda yadda, but it turns out they pronounced it completely differently than a guy from school pronounced his own family name. (He was born there and emigrated, so not some generations-old mishmash).
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. :(
The one thing I've learned about pronouncing Nguyen is that everybody agrees English speakers pronounce it wrong. And when I say everybody agrees I mean you can't find an example of somebody saying it where there isn't further debate that example is also incorrect somehow. Typically because it's an anglicized version but also debates on dialects. At this point I'm not sure there is an always "right" way to say that name in an English context even if there is a "correct" way it should be said.
Something that always kind of bugs me is when I am traveling at an airport in the US, and there is an announcement like “Passengers X and Y, please come to gate 7” and the announcer obviously has no idea how to pronounce non-English names. This is even in airports like LAX which see a massive number of travelers from Latin America and East Asia.
I would think that after making those sorts of announcements frequently for one’s job, one would learn just a few minor adjustments to improve accuracy.
The basic ones I can think of that would increase accuracy measurably are:
1. How to pronounce “Nguyen”
2. Spanish ‘j’ is close to English ‘h’
3. Spanish ‘h’ is silent
4. Spanish 'll' is close to English 'y'
5. Chinese ‘q’ is close to English ‘ch’
6. Chinese ‘c’ is like English ‘ts’
7. Chinese ‘x’ is close to English ‘sh’
8. Most languages do not use ‘a’ as in the American English “and”. If you have to guess, better is ‘a’ as in “father”. In general if you have to guess, the vowels of Spanish are usually going to be closer than the vowels of English for most languages.
If the airport announcers were taught these basics on day 1 it would make a tangible difference in people’s lives for so little invested effort.
If you were to pick any major Vietnamese dialect and learn that pronunciation, you will be much, much closer than the oft-repeated-in-America “nuh-gooyen”.
Most Americans who learn how to pronounce it “correctly” learn something like “wen”, which while not quite right, is still a huge improvement.
I've always aimed at "ngwen" although as a native English speaker I'm still not great at starting words with "ng" despite years of trying. It's more common in Australia than most western countries as a lot of Aboriginal words use it so we have it in place names, such as "Ngunawal" an area near Canberra. On TV (since we have a few celebrities named Nguyen) they just wuss out and tend to go with "Win"
> I'm still not great at starting words with "ng" despite years of trying
The trick that worked for me is that I know how to end on "ng", and that I can hold that sound. So I froze my mouth in that position, and used that position at the start of the word. After doing that a few times, it became easy.
I'm Vietnamese, but I never figured out a good way to teach people pronouncing "ng" until a recent vocal lesson, so I'll give it a try here. When you say "Go", you'll find the back of your tongue make a quick contact with the roof of your mouth to make the "k" consonant. If you try to gradually slow that down, keeping your tongue touching the roof for longer, and tone down the edge in "k", and you'll get "ng". And hopefully you'll be saying "Ngo" after a few tries.
Yes, "g" and "ng" both involve the back of your tongue contacting the roof of your mouth. (Technically, that area of the roof of your mouth is the "velum", and they are called "velar" consonants.)
The difference is that, with "g", the flow of air is out from your mouth (and the "g" interrupts that flow, which is why a "g" sound cannot be held), whereas with "ng", the flow of air is out from your nose (which is why a "ng" sound can be held indefinitely).
Indeed. When I worked with a partner in Asia I asked how to pronounced “Ng” because I heard it said a few different ways (different from the US version of “ing”). Turns out they are all correct, just different dialects.
And English 'r' is not 'R' despite having the same latin alphabet letter, with rare exceptions in certain dialects. And plurals are easy, just add an 's' to most.
Try searching for EFEO (École française d'extrême Orient) transcriptions instead. That system was made for French sprakers and the resulting pronunciation should be somewhat understandable by a native. I wish that system would have been kept in use for education (a least in the beginning) because badly pronunced pinyin cause mistakes that stick for years in learners.
A majority of the street names around Santa Fe where I live are named in Spanish. I'm always quite impressed that (english language) gmaps manages to say "Suh-ree-os" for "Cerrillos", but every once in a while it totally goofs up some Spanish streetname, for no apparent reason.
This happens in Ireland too. Even though mostly people speak English, a lot of the place names have a spelling that's a compromise between the Irish Language original and the "Anglicised" pronunciation. Any system (including Google Maps) that doesn't specifically add phonetic pronunciation has no hope. Good examples include "Graiguenamanagh", "Dun Laoighre" and the classic "Cobh".
While my phone is in English, I have Google Maps set to Dutch so that it will pronounce street names correctly (in English it'll butcher "Spui", but however it says "Utrechtsestraat" is pretty much unrecognisable.)
However there's an annoying/funny bug. If you open maps and start navigation, it's fine. However if, while navigation is running, you switch to another app temporarily, the language voice will change to the English voice, but the direction-generation part will still be generating directions in Dutch. This then becomes the worst of all possible worlds, as not only are the street names being butchered, but the instructions are too. In particular, "sla rechtsaf" (turn right) becomes "ess ell aye rektsaaf" as it thinks it's an acronym.
You can get away from this vague stuff like 'an "ah" vowel', and learn (1) the real way the pronounce the names, including sounds that aren't in English, and (2) the precise closest English approximation, without having to go through analogies and metaphors that won't be valid across English dialects.
I was chatting to a speech pathologist the other day, apparently when they were being awarded their degrees, the entire class submitted the IPA transcription of their names to be read out at the graduation ceremony.
I lost enthusiasm for IPA once I found out that there's no unambiguous way to denote a rolled r. It sounds like IPA has already accumulated its own historical baggage and recommends users to specify what they mean by each symbol, so you're just trading one set of vague analogies and metaphors for another.
Sometimes linguists transcribing particular languages have developed conventions so they don't have to hunt around in the special characters. For example the English r sound is really ɹ but people writing about English might write it as r. But in standard IPA, rolled r is the symbol r and nothing else.
This, exactly. The rolled r is only r in IPA, but way too often people reach out for the wrong symbols when representing English pronunciation. Often I also see ◌ʰ being often left out when a consonant is usually aspirated, and so on.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. In phonetic transcription, rolled r is unambiguously [r]. In phonemic transcription… well, /r/ can be ambiguous depending on what language you’re transcribing, but that’s OK because phonemic transcription isn’t supposed to represent specific sounds anyway.
I agree fully, and I wish, for written communication (chat, emails) people could use some latin/ascii based transliteration of IPA. There is X-SAMPA [1], though it's not much used yet. I think a simple input method, available on all keyboards and maybe some textual annotation for text sections being in IPA, might give this a much bigger audience. Many people are often in meetings where they don't know how to pronounce the names of meeting participants - would be really great to have an ASCII based IPA notation.
> Phonetic spelling is useless when you’ve got more than one dialect. For instance, consider the word ‘castle’. Is this [kæsɫ̩], or [kɑːsl̩], or [kɑːsu] (as it is for me), or something else entirely? Having an orthography which is not purely phonetic avoids this problem.
It does use almost all vowels and consonants. “Ching” ㄔㄧㄥ is a technically valid syllable in the Pinyin system but does not correspond to any word in the dictionary.
But it isn't a valid syllable in the orthography rules. Pinyin has a set of syllable onsets and a set of rimes. You determine the spelling of a syllable by choosing the onset/rime combination you want and looking it up in a table. Thus, the spelling of n-/-ü is "nü", and the spelling of ∅-/-ü is "yu". Same syllable column; zero characters in common in the spelling.
And if you look up ch-/-ing, the table will tell you "no such syllable", just like it will for "m-/-iang" or "h-/-weng".
All three of those are invalid in terms of orthography -- the standard specifically defines that there is no way to spell them. But "miang" is perfectly valid conceptually, and "ching" isn't even that.
So by your definition, are "biang", "kiang" and "duang" valid pinyin, considering those are pronounceable and understandable to millions of people, though they don't appear in your table?
Not being defined by "the Pinyin system", they cannot be valid elements of the Pinyin system.
I know that biang is the name of a particular noodle; I'm not aware of kiang; and I believe that duang is a sound Jackie Chan made once. Which leads into a tangential question -- "duang" has no meaning. What would it mean to say it is "understandable" to millions of people?
A cursory search of media published in the last month [1][2] shows those can be used to productively communicate in Chinese languages. You can argue that it is outside of what is prescribed in a table, but if not Pinyin, then what writing system is being used here?
Chinese has both, and they're different sounds: ch [ʈʂʰ] vs q [tɕʰ]. Unfortunately the Chinese "q" doesn't exist in English, so "ch" is the closest approximation.
Because the standard transliteration used for Mandarin (pinyin) already has a CH. Q sounds similar, but not identical to CH. Similar enough that "just pronounce Q as CH" is ok advice, different enough to make a huge difference when actually speaking Mandarin.
It seems this system is the Pinyin system common to mainland China, there are other transliteration systems used in Taiwan (Bopomofo) and Wade-Giles (which seems to create more phonetically obvious transliterations).
Bopomofo is not a transliteration system. It's a phonetic spelling system used to teach reading to young children in Taiwanese schools. The characters it uses are not meaningful outside of Taiwan.
There are plenty of other uses of Bopomofo:
1) as a faster electronic input method for Mandarin and other Chinese languages
2) in casual or abbreviated writing
3) in overseas education
Chinese has (at least) two different sounds that map to "Ch" in English. Pinyin has both a "Ch" and a "Q" to capture this nuance. Of course, when you translate it to native English phonemes that difference is lost.
In the older Wade-Giles system, they indeed tried to maintain some similarity with how English uses the Latin alphabet. Ch was used, for example Ssu-ma Ch'ien, which is now Sima Qian. Using Latin q for a ch sound isn't unheard of in European languages, for example, in Albanian. Mandarin pinyin is "rational" in the sense that any other language with phonemic values for the Latin alphabet widely divergent from Latin or English, like Turkish, Albanian, or Irish.
As always, “rational” is subjective. Pinyin, the transliteration scheme in use in this post (in use in the PRC since the 50s or so), is necessarily full of trade-offs.
Ch is already needed to represent a sound which is much closer to the English “Ch”, as in Chen. But then there is this other sound, which sounds superficially like Ch to a non-native speaker, but actually is quite different (and if you mix them up, you might not be understood by a native speaker). What letter do you use for that?
Originally people used Ts, as in Tsingtao the beer, named for the city on the coast (but that wasn’t perfect either, because the sound also has very little in common with T). Then in the 50s Pinyin came along and it was changed to Q, so Qingdao (the final consonant was changed too).
Btw this change in transliteration schemes is why Peking Duck is still a thing: even though the city’s name is now spelled Beijing, the old spelling of Peking lives on in the name of the dish (and a few other places).
> why doesn't Chinese transliteration make rational use of vowels and consonants
Usage is way more rational than in English where the number of graphemes and phonemes associations is mind blowing. Save for a few contextual allophones, vowels is very regular, and consonant letters has a 1:1 mapping to consonant which is very rational in pinyin.
> For example, in the US, many families that immigrated many years ago have changed the way their name was pronounced from its original heritage pronunciation
As a native German and French speaker, this is actually an issue for me.
If I see a common German or French name, I do not actually know how it would be pronounced in English and it's very difficult for me to guess or get my head to think of that pronunciation in an 'English' way.
This is especially difficult when talking about a third person who you might not know well/at all: "I think a John Dubois, based in the X Office, is tech lead for that service"
Except for obvious cases I go for the French or Alsatian pronunciation and let the person correct me. This is what English speakers are doing too after all. Conversely I don't take it personally when people mispronounce my names (given and family) the first time, especially since the family name is problematic even in France. That being said, it pisses me to no end when someone doesn't make any efforts after a given period of time (like my thesis director who still mispronounce it after 3 years, or can't align few letters properly).
I generally go with a native pronunciation unless told otherwise. So I would pronounce it John Dubwah, but I've learned that it's W.E.B. Du-boys.
But the single most important thing to do is ask how to pronounce and keep trying to get it right. My wife's first name is a Mexican name with an ll in the middle that should be pronounced as j/y (most Spanish speakers don't really hear a difference between the two English phonemes so it's perfectly fine to use either in working towards the correct sound, but j is probably the better choice for most English speakers since y between vowels tends to disappear, at least in Midwestern pronunciation). It's really not a hard name to say, but it does take paying attention for one whole second and remembering something that's not in the standard repertoire of American first names so a huge number of people get it wrong and don't care or say things like, "can I call you — instead?" (the answer, of course, is NO, what the — is wrong with you, you lazy twit).
Take the time to learn how people pronounce their names and give them the courtesy of getting it right. I doubt that most Croats, for example, will care if you don't pronounce č and ć differently, but if you insist on pretending that either makes a k or s sound, you will annoy them.
So, it is really easy and almost no one manages to do it right even after instructions?
And after failing to do it right after instructions, it is the other people who are arrogant for asking to use something they are able to pronounce, not you for insisting on making them uncomfortable?
Names are just sounds people make when they want someones attention. Respect goes two ways.
The sounds may be easy to pronounce. The people may just not be devoting the attention to remember it. They've been told it's "Isabeya," say, but they just keep forgetting it's not "Isabella."
I would treat this as similar to forgetting someone's name. Yes, plenty of people have a "terrible memory for names," but at the end of the day it's a matter of respect. If you really care -- if it's someone who's becoming a friend, if it's someone you ought to know for your job, if it's someone who's been introduced to you five times -- it's on you to remember the name, unless you have a genuine neurological condition.
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 for the aggrieved name-holders to adopt a more accurate transliteration instead? Could it be that the transliteration rules which are now standard are not optimally suited to this purpose?
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 transliterating Chinese, was designed more with English speakers in mind, but suffered from a number of problems of its own, particularly requiring apostrophes all over the place.
And in Japan you can still see two competing systems duking it out, with the Japanese-for-Japanese Kunrei system ("Huzi") officially anointed as standard but in practice the Japanese-for-Americans Hepburn ("Fuji") being far more common.
>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.
In this case, it makes even less sense to blame English speakers for incorrect pronunciations resulting from this system.
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.
I find the title misleading, as the link is only covering Chinese. But the same problem exists with other languages that are already using the "Roman alphabet". So, with that in mind, what makes you think the transliteration should be optimized for English? :)
The goal of pinyin was not to make Mandarin words pronounceable to English speakers, but to be a consistent means of representing the sounds of Mandarin to Mandarin speakers.
Maybe it's transliterated for a more Latin-like crowd where vowels have exactly one pronunciation, like in languages like Spanish, where reading the second columns as they'd naturally think to, would likely be 95% OK
There are plenty of other transliteration systems that might lead to more accurate pronunciations for English speakers in particular (as opposed to say, native Russian speakers); see Wade-Giles or Gwoyeu Romatzyh. The factors that led to the current de-facto standard are more related to 20th century history rather than optimizing for the particular use case of reading aloud by non-natives.
But the "official" (as you say) transliterations of world languages enjoy wide usage not because they're necessarily the best anyone could come up with --- rather, they just represented the right local maxima at the right time in history.
Displacing those romanization systems with better ones (assuming those exist) would be an uphill battle lasting decades, and I wager there aren't many people who would find that struggle worth the effort.
Particularly when the dominant language that uses roman letters is lacking a consistent alphabetic encoding system itself. Before you start replacing pinyin, you might want to take a long, critical look at how English is written.
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 name well.
But back to pinyin, that was intended as an alphabetic alternative for native Chinese speakers to use instead of logographs/characters. So it's audience wasn't foreign language speakers and thus will have shortcomings for them. This was back when they were tackling illiteracy and pinyin was seen as both potential replacement of characters or at least an aid in learning a simplified version of the original characters.
>But back to pinyin, that was intended as an alphabetic alternative for native Chinese speakers to use instead of pictogram/characters. So it's audience wasn't foreign language speakers and thus will have shortcomings for them.
Yes that makes sense, and is reasonable. But the expectation for all foreigners to be familiar with it is not.
But I'd say the expectation that professionals who have to pronounce Chinese names pretty frequently, like those who do announcements at an airport, or newscasters, could spend the time to familiarize themselves with it IS reasonable.
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.
> 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.
Sorry... what?
Us non native speaker live in a world where English is taught in almost any school on the planet and where you have a peer pressure to know and speak decently English. This on top of one of the most irregular languages in the world wrt pronunciation of dictionary words, let alone names.
PS good luck getting right Greenwich, for example.
As a native English speaker, for the most part I typically know what someone means when they say "gl-OW-kester square" or "Green-witch mean time", so don't worry about it.
I have a Russian friend who has specifically asked me to go out of my way to correct their mispronunciations, but for the most part if someone says an English word in a weird I don't even blink.
I'd say part of being an effective English communicator is not just about speaking English, but also about being able to understand foreign English accents (and I include different dialects of native English in that as well).
> I have a Russian friend who has specifically asked me to go out of my way to correct their mispronunciations, but for the most part if someone says an English word in a weird I don't even blink.
Yes, English has so many weird native dialects that weird foreign pronunciations shouldn’t throw you off either.
The Finns seems obtuse in their insistence on using Finnish phonology when speaking English, which is easy to make light of on the surface, but when you think about it it’s not actually a bad system. It’s consistent, easy to understand and it lets them focus on gaining fluency over memorising pointless irregular pronunciations.
English is also unusually flexible, something I noticed abroad. In English you can do ridiculous wrong things and still create something that a skilled listener can easily understand. Subject and verb all you know? Eh, I can guess from context.
Try putting the subject and verb in the wrong order in Japanese or forget your counter particle for a particular kind of counting and you just get blank stares.
I think that English, for its many faults, is at least extremely error tolerant in terms of it being possible to say something that's comprehensible enough dozens of ways and often with words practically in random order. It's probably the most amazing thing about English to me, although I only know a few other languages they are much more strict.
I think you have to understand that "international English" is not the same as English. We have the same thing in France where lots of people come to study from other countries where they speak French, and their French is a little different. I'm not going to waste anyone's time on correcting someone because they said "le table" and not "la table". Same thing with the pronunciation. I can understand them, they can understand me, and that's what matters. That's the "price" of having a huge influence in the world.
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 omitted purely for the convenience of the writer. The "a" in "yan" and "ya"/"yang" is completely different, etc.
I like Pinyin as a reasonably concise input method, but it's not great for romanizing names.
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"?
> 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.
> 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.
You fail to understand most of the world use international English where nobody really cares about correct pronunciation, but about understanding each other and only small minority of English users are nowadays native English speakers, one could say it's questionable nowadays what is the correct pronunciation (intended original use changed), so it would be quite foolish to insist on correct pronunciation in international enviroment.
I don't think same can be said about English native speakers who usually don't speak even second language and can't go their way to at least pronounce few names correctly, while rest of the world is learning whole other language, not just pronunciation of bunch of names.
> 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 to adopt a more accurate transliteration instead?
Can't be done. The Roman alphabet is a pretty good alphabet for Latin, but it isn't for Chinese, which has different sounds than are in Latin (or English).
For example, stop consonants in English have a voiced-unvoiced distinction: /p b t d k g/
Latin is similar: /p b t d k g kw gw/
Chinese is totally different. Instead of a voiced-unvoiced distinction, it has aspirated-unaspirated: /p ph t th k kh/ (with the h denoting an aspirated stop).
Is there a resource (maybe with sound samples) that expands on the voiced/unvoiced vs aspirated/unaspirated distinction? It sounds fascinating, but I'm struggling to conceptualize it just with the text here.
[edit] ah, one (!) of the two "tell" audio recordings in that dictionary seems to pronounce it in a different way that would illustrate the aspiration, but that seems different to how I've usually heard 'tell' being pronounced.
This is so hard to explain in text, given the variation of English accents and that aspiration is not meaningful in English. For my regional speech, the strongest difference would be something like the difference between the /k/ sounds in “kale” and “scale”. Nothing to do with my feelings for the vegetable, but it gets an extra scornful bit of turbulence.
Both recordings of the "tell" word exhibit aspiration. I guess it is perhaps more noticeable to me because I'm quite well-versed in phonetics.
A common way of illustrating aspiration is: hold a sheet of paper in front of your mouth (or your hand), as you say the words. "tell" will give you a noticeable puff of air as it leaves the mouth, as opposed to "stellar", which won't.
Thanks, that was helpful, I seem to get the difference now - just the "tell" example wasn't working as I (apparently unlike most English speakers) seem to pronounce that word with an unaspirated t.
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.
English actually has all the relevant sounds in most dialects so I will try to explain in it reference to that. Most English dialects have environments where consonants are reliably aspirated, or not, depending on their voicing and surrounding environment. Unvoiced stops (p/t/k) in isolation "pat" or "cap" are moderately aspirated. Voiced stops (b/d/g) are not like "dog" or "bad". (Leaning on this pattern as a partial hack using a feature common in a lot of European languages, is why p and b are what they are in Pinyin, and many other Chinese romanizations.)
In principle, if your dialect does not have a length contrast for /æ/ after a voiced consonant (many do though including mine, making the vowel longer in that environment, so you'll have to try to say them with equal vowel length) then "pap" and "bab" (to rhyme with cap and cat) when whispered (no vocal chord movement, so all equally unvoiced) should be differentiated only by aspiration similar to Mandarin's p/b difference. Though aspiration is Mandarin is a bit more forceful.
As an aside, most people can hear the difference between those words when whispered, hearing a voiced or unvoiced consonant, based solely on the aspiration hint. Phonetic interpretation is a strange and subtle thing. And voicing in Mandarin? It plays the inferior role to aspiration's main starring role, a role reversal of the English arrangement.
> Unvoiced stops (p/t/k) in isolation "pat" or "cap" are moderately aspirated. Voiced stops (b/d/g) are not like "dog" or "bad". (Leaning on this pattern as a partial hack using a feature common in a lot of European languages, is why p and b are what they are in Pinyin, and many other Chinese romanizations.)
Some languages, such as Hindi, have both the voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated distinction, so they have 4 consonants (/t d th dh/) where English only has two (/t d/).
Hindi also has retroflex equivalents of those 4 consonants, and there are minimal pairs between all 8 of them. A typical English speaker would struggle to tell the difference between them.
For these sorts of reasons, a Romanisation of names in different languages that (1) is easy to pronounce for English speakers, and (2)
sounds like the word in the original language, is going to be a tall order.
I wondered this too when learning Pinyin. I believe the reason is that while Pinyin's X and Q may sound like "sh" and "ch" to English speakers, they are actually different sounds (and contrast with the "sh" and "ch" sounds that also exist in Mandarin). That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei", "shi" is pronounced "shr", "-ian" is pronounced "yen", etc...
> That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei", "shi" is pronounced "shr"
Shi is pronounced Shr? That sounds more like your typical pirate Beijing hua. Which can get quite confusing when you get out of Beijing to let's say to Shanghai business trip and you can't figure if something cost 4 or 10 kuai at street vendor (my personal anecdote, I think they actually do it on purpose since normally 4 would have very different sound).
> I believe the reason is that while Pinyin's X and Q may sound like "sh" and "ch" to English speakers, they are actually different sounds (and contrast with the "sh" and "ch" sounds that also exist in Mandarin).
Neither Mandarin sh nor x exist in English. X is sharper and is a little more like shy-, whereas sh is darker and a little like shr-. In reality they both strike English speakers as being quite like sh, because we use the space differently.
I've heard various native English speakers who are fluent in Mandarin saying e.g. Xi as Si. I don't know if there's a dialectal difference in English or in Mandarin or both that accounts for it.
> That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei"
It looks better, if you have a certain aesthetic.
> "shi" is pronounced "shr"
As far as I know Mandarin speakers just consider them the same. Pinyin is designed for native speakers.
> "-ian" is pronounced "yen"
The e in Pinyin isn't really the English e sound. It's more like the American short u in fun or the NZ short i in pin. It's not obvious what letter to use to represent that, but e is not completely unreasonable. When they do have an e-sound according to the internal logic of Mandarin, it's a variant of an a-sound.
Do you also blame French system when you mispronounced Guillaume Dubois? Like, French should use a better system to transliterate into Roman alphabet for English pronunciation?
In some place, the transliterated rules aren't up to the name bearer. There's official rules and when you apply for international documents, the government decides how your name looks like in romanized form.
I'm always puzzled by certain British imperial transliteration schemes that seem to do their best to set you up for failure and embarrassment.
Apparently "Burma" is supposed to be pronounced in a non-rhotic fashion, but would it have killed the non-rhotic speakers to write "Bama"? Then the rhotic speakers who form the majority of English speakers would have at least had a fighting chance to get it right.
Another thing is their scattering of seemingly pointless "h"s in their transliteration of Devanagari, which together with "s"s leads many speakers to incorrectly assume a fricative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l8x36fjvjk
OK, I'm Indian and I will stipulate that transliterations of Devanagari are inconsistent, but that guy you linked to is just being a crude racist asshole. (0:39 "and it's so appropriate because she's Indian." Fuck you, Paul Henry!)
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.
What is more exasperating to me is that we are not even consistent in English spellings of the same names. For instance, "Sameer" and "Samir" are both pronounced the same but the first is closer to the actual pronunciation.
As far as pronunciation goes, I have made peace with foreigners incorrectly pronouncing sounds that don't exist in their languages, but it bugs me when they can't be arsed to get the syllable emphasis right or when they use the wrong vowel sound even though the correct vowel sound is familiar to them.
Example of #1: A friend of mine is named "Manohar". The syllable emphasis and spelling is: "Muh-NOH-huhr". But his name gets pronounced as "Man-oh-HAAR" in the US. And it's not because he's pronouncing it wrong. Imagine if he pronounced every "Michael" as "Mikhail". People would be pissed.
Example of #2: I can understand them not pronouncing the soft "t" and "d" in "tandoori", but not so much having the first syllable rhyme with "can" instead of "run". Or "Punjab" becoming "Poon-jab" instead of "Puhn-jaab".
Also, #PSA, Hindi does not have the "zh" sound in it, so please stop pronouncing "Raj" as "Razh". Thank you. :)
> 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 what a seemingly silent "h" after a consonant really indicates? Take names like "Delhi" and "Bhopal".
> Example of #1: A friend of mine is named "Manohar". The syllable emphasis and spelling is: "Muh-NOH-huhr". But his name gets pronounced as "Man-oh-HAAR" in the US. And it's not because he's pronouncing it wrong. Imagine if he pronounced every "Michael" as "Mikhail". People would be pissed.
I agree that errors in emphasis are far more jarring than errors in sounds, but using the native cognate in the language being spoken of a foreign name in that category is actually very common and often encouraged by the bearer of the name. Perhaps because it has already been mangled so many times since its Hebrew origin through Koine to all the modern languages that use it.
On thing that has always puzzled me is despite of what a dumpster fire Devanagari transliteration to Latin is, it seems to still have a massive buy-in with native speakers online. In places like social media or the Indian channels on the company Slack, it seems more common than actual Devanagari. I see the same pattern with Malayalam being written in Latin rather than its own script. If there's no need to accommodate people who don't know the script, I fail to see the point. I've asked but people usually get very defensive about it. Are they ashamed of having different scripts from the globally dominant one, Latin? I would rather consider it a point of pride.
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 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.
But in cases where it's a transliteration, _usually_ it means that it's an aspirated version of the consonant in question. "Bhopal" is one such instance. The Devanagari script has, for some consonants, multiple versions: soft, aspirated soft, hard, aspirated hard. (I'm not a linguist; there may be better terms for these.) Let's take "d". There's the soft "d" pronounced as Spanish-speaking people pronounce "d". There's a hard "d" pronounced as in "door". Then there's "dh" and "ddh", which are the aspirated forms of the respective letters.
(Google "pronounce Bhopal" and switch to the "Indian English" pronunciation option. I also checked the top 5 or so youtube videos and ALL of them are wrong; they have an American pronouncing it. WTF?)
But as I mentioned, our transliteration is not standardised and it's indeed a dumpster fire, so sometimes, the consonant is "ddh", but it's written as "dh" in a word, which does not help things at all.
Want more complications? In South India, "th" is often used instead of "t" in names where there's a soft "t". But it's pronounced exactly the same. [1]
Oh, and Devanagari is a simpler script. Other Indian languages like Malayalam have even more sounds that Westerners have zero hope of pronouncing correctly. Heck, Indians from other states struggle with it.
As for names, you'll find multiple spellings for names that are pronounced the same. I have friends named "Aarti" and they are spelt "Aarti", "Arathi", "Aarthi", and "Arati". A royal mess.
And this is before some idiotic astrological/numerological superstition makes them add unnecessary letters to their names. (Not common, but does happen.)
> In places like social media or the Indian channels on the company Slack, it seems more common than actual Devanagari.
I can only speculate that there are two reasons for this:
1) PC keyboards in India are English QWERTY and typing regional language text on them is a pain.
2) The medium of instruction in middle class education is English, so many of us grow up speaking English well. And in some cases like mine, think in English too. As we progress in our careers, communication in the workplace is in English, and writing fluency in native languages decreases. It's just easier to type it out in English. I consume pretty much all my Internet content in English (though I can speak 3 Indian languages), and it bugs the hell out of me too because I have to translate from the weird English transliteration to the native language in my head first. And that's before people use SMS-like contractions for words.
> "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'.
I'm studying Hindi as a second language, and the inconsistency of transliterations drives me crazy, I'd rather nobody transliterated and just used devanagari if it's not going to be IAST.
Worse, Google has updated the (abc -> हिंदी) keyboard on Android so that in many cases it actually refuses the standard transliterations in favour of popular ones, I assume. And so if you want पीता you have to type 'peeta'; 'piita' won't get it, even if you click the caret for more options.
It also reinforces things like हूं - which I can understand if you're writing by hand, but why wouldn't a digital keyboard input the 'correct' / 'proper' / whatever हूँ?
(To write it there I used the direct input method rather than transliteration one, with which afaik it's not possible to write it.)
In fairness to butcherers of Manohar's name though, you really do need to be told/have learnt how the transliteration (IAST or roughly) is supposed to work. Otherwise of course you're going to read it in the language you know.
The trouble is, once you do know, you're left wondering if something is transliterated 'correctly' (in standard as opposed to popular fashion) or English-phonetically... Particularly with vowels: 'e' for example is either 'ay' as in 'pay' or 'e' as in 'pee' accordingly. (The latter 'should' be 'ī' or 'ii'.)
You have my condolences for Google's nonsense. I have not written anything in Hindi for the past couple of decades, I think, despite growing up in Delhi and speaking the language fluently. All my work communication and conversation with friends is in English. The good thing about Hindi is that if you know the script, it's pronounced exactly as it's written. There are no strange inconsistencies like the monstrosity that is English.
> In fairness to butcherers of Manohar's name though, you really do need to be told/have learnt how the transliteration (IAST or roughly) is supposed to work. Otherwise of course you're going to read it in the language you know.
I have absolutely no ill-will for people who pronounce any language's names solely after reading them. But if you work with someone and they introduce themselves to you, it's just common courtesy to at least make a best effort attempt to get the syllable emphasis and the vowels right. If you _hear_ it and still get it hopelessly wrong, I would be less charitable.
> Apparently "Burma" is supposed to be pronounced in a non-rhotic fashion, but would it have killed the non-rhotic speakers to write "Bama"? Then the rhotic speakers who form the majority of English speakers would have at least had a fighting chance to get it right.
To be fair, Bama wouldn't be the right pronunciation. The easiest way for an RP speaker to indicate what the right pronunciation should be is to write "Burma". An American might try Buhma.
And your complain about "rhotic speakers" being "the majority of English speakers" could only have been taken into account of the British transliterator had access to a time machine to determine the future.
At the time, a person in the British empire wouldn't have been considering the opinions of an American, because America and Britain had separate spheres of influence and a generally amicable but not integrated existence. To them, RP was the language of the elite and that was all that mattered.
But if they were to consider the situation in America, they would have seen that in America as in Britain, non-rhotic accents were on the rise and were somewhat prestigious. If they were going to consider the future situation of the 21st century globe and how someone might pronounce the word in an American-centred word, it would have been entirely reasonable for them to have supposed it would have been one with a non-rhotic accent.
Another matter you might consider is that a very strict spelling would not necessarily help matters anyway. The J in Beijing is pronounced more-or-less like an English j, but that doesn't stop people from mutilating it into the s of measure. Or the person who responds to you, who observes that "Punjab" should be pronounced roughly like the English spelling should indicate, but which is often pronounced with the u of push instead - both because of a widespread assumption that all words in foreign languages are pronounced like Italian, Spanish or French.
And the final matter, which might hopefully set your blood at some ease, is to note that when a word is borrowed into a foreign language, it is subject to different pressures. You are not obliged to pronounce "Burma" or "Myanmar" the way any particular natives of Burma or Myanmar do. The English words are English words, intended to help English speakers identify a place in a generally non-offensive manner. There will always be variation between the source pronunciation and the destination pronunciation, especially once a few hundred years have intervened, and that's fine. The question is can we all agree that these are suitable words for referring to that country?
English is one language with multiple dialects, so words that enter the language from a certain dialect will reflect that history to a greater or lesser degree. Even when there isn't an "r" in the spelling, Americans still manage to put an r into the pronunciation, as with Goethe or Gödel. So to blame the British for unetymological r is just false. Americans do it because they recognise the unity of the language, and they're communicating rather than upholding any particular notion of perfection. It is unreasonable to say that the only reason for the British to do the same is that their life depends on it.
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.
There seems to be an assumption in this thread, that only American English speakers mispronounce non-English names. I've found the British and Australians, to be equally terrible at this.
I remember moving to the UK and being shocked at how much some people “butchered” their own names (mostly Indian origin ones in a British accent). I don’t even know if that counts as mispronunciation at that point.
1. Vowels are like in Spanish ("a" always sounds "ah" etc.)
2. The group "ch" sounds like a "k" sound, e.g. bruschetta is "broos-keh-tah"
3. The groups "gl" and "gn" sound like Spanish "ll" and "ñ" respectively. Those are hard to pronounce for English speakers, the easy shortcut is just imagine that the "g" is silent and that the "l" or "n" are a bit more pronounced.
4. Double consonants need to have a much more pronounced sound, almost as if you pause for a moment on that consonant. It should be easy to tell apart "nonno" ("grandpa") and "nono" ("ninth")
"Vowels are like in Spanish ("a" always sounds "ah" etc.)"
This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman alphabet and isn't English. The great vowel shift in English changed his vowels get pronounced in English when they were a lot more similar. This even holds for transliteration systems like Hepburn and painting. If you try to pronounce vowels in a language other than English you are likely gonna be less wrong pronouncing it as if it were any other language that's not English. English speakers literally decided to pronounce vowels differently at some point due to fashion. This should get drilled into all school children in English speaking countries!
> This should get drilled into all school children in English speaking countries!
Yes I totally agree, my daughter who grew up speaking English, was having trouble reading some Japanese words that were transliterated (Romanji) because she couldn't figure out how to pronounce the vowels, but for me (I'm Italian) it was easy to read them correctly, even though I had never seen those words before and I didn't know what they meant.
> This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman alphabet
Yes and surprisingly it works fairly well even with some non-European languages where the Latin alphabet was adopted, such as Malaysian and Indonesian.
However there are some languages that have frequent exceptions, e.g. French comes to mind where there are several word endings like e.g. "-eau", "-aux" and "-aix" etc., other languages also have exceptions like "-de" endings in Portuguese and some diphthongs in German like "ie", "au" etc.
PS. it's strange that the Great Vowel Shift is not widely known among English speakers - it caused the English language to have highly irregular phonetics which is one of the most evident features of the language.
> This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman alphabet and isn't English.
That is not actually the case. In Catalan, for example, "e" and "o" may be pronounced either open or close (/ɛ/ vs /e/, /ɔ/ vs /o/), and the difference may only be marked with an accent mark (è, é, ò, ó) if that syllable was to be accentuated according to the rules, or if it happens to distinguish two differently pronounced words that would otherwise be spelt the same. Also, the most prevalent dialect of Catalan will pronounce non-stressed "a" and "e" as schwa (/ə/) and non-stressed "o" the same as "u". I believe something similar to this happens in Portuguese.
Not a native speaker, but at least in a Beijing accent, I wouldn't say that "Chen" rhymes with "fun." "Cheng" or "Zheng," or "Feng," sure, "fun" works as a comparison. "Chen," "Zhen," etc. would rhyme more with "pen" or "hen."
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 Zealand and, as you can imagine, again finds himself in need of a name change since everyone is pronouncing his name as "burnt"...
Haha... That was quite hilarious actually. On a similar note, a childhood friend had last name Eld, meaning "fire" in Swedish. That did not work well when it was time for conscriptive military service....
My name is "Sander". It's a common Dutch calling name, related to the (baptismal, in my case) name Alexander. I have always introduced myself in the US as "sender", which is easy and fine to me, but not how you pronounce it in Dutch, where the "a" is more like in the English "hard" (I suppose). I don't care. Until my mom visited, who started calling out everyone in my sphere for mispronouncing my name, despite my pleading to leave it alone... oh, well...
I remember when I learned how to pronounce the Dutch ui which I had been treating as if it were Spanish (wee). Once I learned it corresponded to English ow, suddenly a whole host of written Dutch opened itself up to me.
I wonder if you can use a rhyme to help people. Sander, rhymes with wander (for Americans). Björk inspired me with her own brilliant rhyming word. I'll leave it up to you to discover what she uses: https://youtu.be/AGtMv-EQp20
For my own name, Ambroos (Dutch as well), I've yet to find a good English rhyming word. I've just settled with telling people to pronounce it as Ambrose. It's better than people turning it into Am-bruce. For TTS I sometimes use Ahmbrohs.
Hm, Ambroos is a tricky one. The best I could think of would be "arm" (assuming they're not with a rhotic-r accent, though I could imagine people then making it sound like aam) + "close" (as in dichtbij, not sluiten.)
I suppose you don't like the way Americans pronounce the A in the English word "sander". I'm multilingual and it's gotten difficult for me to be sure how native speakers pronounce things, but here are some other variations that come to mind that might make sense to a native English speaking American:
Xander - a common nickname for Alexander. The x is pronounced as a z, but it still has the problem with the American a.
Sunder - Not as common, but it's a name Americans might have heard and in my opinion is closer to the Dutch Sander than "sender".
San Der - For the large percentage of Americans who are familiar with Spanish pronunciation, you might have luck with this spelling, but those Americans probably aren't the ones who mispronounce the Dutch version.
"Like Shaun Der, but with an S instead of an Sh on the front" - The way I explain the Hungarian variant Sandór to Americans is "like Shaun Door".
I'm not sure I agree that the best mapping of Pinyin "e" is to the English "u".
To my ears, Chinese "he" sounds closer to (non-American) English "her" than "huh".
Same for "chen" - "chun" captures neither the Chinese phonemes nor the English spelling. I'd argue even "Cheng" (hard e) is less likely to cause confusion/disrespect.
At least English speakers often try to pronounce names correctly, for example celebrities and well known sports stars. Not that we always succeed, and many people don’t care! Bach, Cézzane, Jesus, Jahn etcetera.
I notice Spanish people don’t seem to try, I think in part because there is a one-to-one correspondence between words and pronunciation in Spanish. The common Spanish pronunciation of Michael Jackson is unintelligible to a native English speaker for example. Pirata Drake was another I didn’t recognise, but should have.
If I had more examples of the pronunciation of pinyin names, I would naturally start to pronounce those names more correctly given pinyin.
I suspect many native English speakers grok some of the rules associated with foreign languages without specific training.
It varies. The American practice is generally to try and get it horribly wrong. The English practice is to try to get it horribly wrong. In Byron's poem Don Juan, the title character's name is pronounced Don Jew-on. This is, of course, just one example of many.
Assuming you're speaking of Spanish speakers from Spain (and not Latin America), they may be reacting to the customary mangling of Spanish by their UK counterparts. Most of the Latin Americans I've met have no problem with English names. They may say them with some odd vowels on occasion, but they're no unintelligible. It could be heavy exposure to American media.
This reminds me of the movie The Name of the Rose, which I love. One of the characters was named "Jorge", and he was from Spain, so it was really baffling to hear everyone calling him "Yorgeh"... I guess they didn't have anyone on board who knew any better. Still love it.
Is this actually true for English speakers? Especially prominent Latin names have been totally butchered. For example Markus Antonius always gets butchered as Mark Anthony which clearly isn't a name anyone in Rome would have had. This also seems to go hand in hand with the general ignorance of the huge problem that's the great vowel shift that messes everything up for native English speakers pronouncing words from other languages.
Mark and Anthony are just the English translations of Marcus and Antonius. In French he's called Marc Antoine, in Spanish and Italian Marco Antonio, etc.
All Latin languages do that for names (at least historical names, but it's common enough for other names too) it's just less common for Germanic languages except English which is like always a bit in-between the two.
That is some Latin name translation thing. Christopher Columbus (EN), Cristóbal Colón (ES), Christophe Colomb (FR), and Cristoforo Colombo (IT) are all Christophorus Columbus (his original Latin name). Edit: the same things happen with Ancient Greek names - one person has different spellings and pronunciations in different languages — look up 荷马 or ソクラテス.
Spanish speakers in the Dominican Republic often leave our S sounds in words, and some do it in foreign names as well. I remember a friend excitedly asking me if I like what I heard as "Brooli". It took me a good 5 minutes to realize that he was asking if I liked Bruce Lee.
Don't know what kind of Spanish speaker you spoke to, but no Spaniard/Latin-American I know would pronounce a famouse people name lke Michael Jackson "wrong".
Not the original commenter, but I'll try to explain because something similar happens in Italy as well
It's not a "wrong" pronunciation, but it's clearly influenced by how Spanish/Italian stresses individual letters way more than English.
Let's take Hillary Clinton as another example: Italians pronounce it "Heel-lah-ree Clean-tone" (/ˈilari ˈklinton/), which is way different from the actual pronunciation.
Because of categorical perception (as defined on the https://dictionary.apa.org/categorical-perception page), there's no general agreement on the "correct" way to pronounce a non-English name within English communication to a mostly English speaking audience. Some people argue that the right approach is to always use the closest equivalents within the English phonemic inventory. In this view, it's incorrect to suddenly shift English speech into the phonemic inventory of a name's origin. Listeners, on average, simply can't and won't hear the name consistently, and thus communication is less effective. The opposite view is that this is just another example of cultural arrogance, and it's best to shift out of the English phonemic inventory whenever that's reasonably possible. (For example, in this view, the shift should occur when a name is part of news coverage, and the speaker had an opportunity to learn the phonemes of the original language in advance.)
This isn't specific to English: it's the general question of whether a speaker should always stay within the phonemic inventory of the communication's main language.
I can't think of any examples off-hand right now, but I remember reading an analysis of English where it was talking about using only a subset of its phonetic inventory/phonotactics for foreign words (a bunch being reserved for native words). So even in cases that the English has all the sounds for a word it may not always render them because of the 'foreign word' register.
English-speakers like to struggle with issues of pronounciation of non-native words. Some other languages are just hardcore "naturalize the hell out of foreign words". I personally don't see much of a moral component in English approach. Though I understand that many people are super big on it as indicating respect, for me, I'd never be so arrogant as to judge people of random language X too harshly for only getting a rough approximation of my name, or mapping it to the nearest common name in their language.
I see this a lot in with Americans having Polish surnames (or other Slavic). People typically pronounce theirs somewhere on a spectrum between the original and a monolingual english-speaker's attempt to make sense of the letters, so you just have to wait for them to say it. Example: Susan Wojcicki, whose name is apparently pronounced "woh-jisky" but I think in Polish (not a speaker) would be more like "voy-chitsky". This site shows a whole variety of other American pronunciations: https://www.pronouncenames.com/pronounce/wojcicki
C in Polish is pronounced as ts/tz and 'ck' is an interesting case in Polish-American surnames: American pronunciation turns 'ck' into 'kk' and Polish speakers will often have a hard time recognizing the original spelling.
Listening to audio mentioning Susan Wojcicki, I could never figure out the spelling of her name... BTW, Polish pronunciation for Wójcicki (notice the 'ó') is Vooy-chits-ki
Susan Wojcicki - polish people would immediately assume it's written online and would correct the surname to Wójcicki because it makes much more sense grammatically speaking and I think that's what it was originally before being anglicized.
Note that 'ó' in not a form of 'o' but of 'u' so subsequent pronunciations with 'o' sounds a bit weird for us polish speakers
This is very reasonable. But I wonder if there is a word (in any language) for the pointless pleasure of saying a foreign word in the foreign language pronunciation.
And for the pleasure of observing someone mistakenly do so. How many Pauls build a Les Paul?
For my part, even my two syllable first name can be hard for Anglophones, though they are usually very eager to learn how to say it (people are usually very kind). I Postel principle the shit out of it, anyway.
Cosmopolitan aesthetics would be the root of the phenomena I imagine, if that word doesn't still apply.
I know it was a discussion for many decades about whether a piece of music should be in the original language or the translation. Everyone settled on the original, so we all sing with absolutely atrocious accents in foreign languages as best we can.
I feel like this whole area is a giant minefield for actors now, switching accents for roles is extremely normal. If that is suddenly interpreted as signaling a lack of respect for the real accent of the people they are portraying it makes an awful lot of everything harder.
> I know it was a discussion for many decades about whether an piece of music should be in the original language or the translation. Everyone settled on the original, so we all sing with absolutely atrocious accents in foreign languages as best we can.
I can relate to that. Pre-pandemic, I was singing in a community chorus, where we routinely had to sing in languages we don't necessarily speak. Typically, the director would coach us. We had an actual German in the audience one time when we did some Christmas pieces in German, and he told us that we sang the words correctly, but it was still odd to hear German with a Chicago accent. :)
I've heard of one top-level group bringing in a professor to coach Church Slavonic when they did Rachmaninoff's _Vespers_. Since I don't even speak modern Russian, I have no idea how well they did it, but their musicianship was outstanding.
If you dig into the linguistics for the singing a bit more, it's even more odd. Singing is traditionally done in "High German" so a lot of the pronunciation is as it is supposed to be, but it's not standard modern German. French is even odder, the sung version is quite different from spoken. I have tried simply speaking the poems that were set to music and people who know French have absolutely no idea what I am saying.
The article brings up categorical perception when it says one shouldn't assume they are hearing sounds in another language correctly, since our brains will map those sounds to the nearest English equivalent.
What the article is really addressing is how different orthographic romanization systems map to English sounds. It's not advocating (as far as I can tell) that English speakers attempt to produce non-English sounds, which is, as you say, a difficult issue and probably not realistic without phonetic training.
> The article brings up categorical perception when it says one shouldn't assume they are hearing sounds in another language correctly, since our brains will map those sounds to the nearest English equivalent.
I've noticed a similar thing with Spanish (my second language). I can kind-of read Portuguese as a side effect, but if I try to listen to spoken Portuguese I find it completely incomprehensible. My auditory circuits just aren't wired for it.
Even within English there are different accents. I'm British. If I meet an American "Annie" then do I put on a faux American accent while saying her name? Or do I just say "Annie" with a British accent? If it's allowed or even expected that I shift "Annie" into my accent, why not a non-English name? What about European names that have English equivalents but are pronounced differently in European languages?
My own name is foreign. Native English speakers cannot pronounce one of the vowels in it, and if they try, they end up using what is to me a different vowel entirely (imagine someone saying "Dive" instead of "Dave"). I gave up when I was about six, and am quite happy for people to use a common, roughly similar English name for me instead. In fact I prefer it, since then I don't have to hear it being mangled constantly.
I personally think it's entirely fine to switch between accents to try to match the locals, but I get the argument that it's offensive. I think it's unfortunate that this is the perception because I really really really really like phonetics. I'm a singer, this is our bread and butter.
It's frustrating that doing my best to sing with an Australian accent is surely entirely unacceptable in 2021, even if it's an Australian composer and the rhyming scheme makes no sense in an American accent.
At least for some reason it's perfectly fine to use a British accent at all times, even if it's a horrible accent. We almost always sing with a "British accent" by default because of particular ways it improves the understandability of the words when sung. We tend to only use an "American accent" (and even then, which one right?) when singing Gospel music.
The rules are a little strange and clearly asymmetric in the sense that adopting accents that have historically been over-emphasized or glorified or straight up were the accents of conquering empires is fine while the reverse is not. This is a reasonable guideline, but I admit it feels hollow as someone who simply wants to sing as best I can.
Yeah; it's possibly ironic that a lot of efforts/values in this direction have a strong indirect effect of enforcing the status quo and the cultural norms of the prevailing power. ("It's always ok to wear jeans" is my shorthand).
I remember being surprised at Hugh Laurie's blues recordings. He's the person I can think of off-hand that went all-out on accent while singing with his mother tongue.
OTOH if you go all out and sing in another language it's regarded as ok try to try render things more exactly (But most people make lots of mistakes that native speakers pick up on and so the audience may not enjoy the aesthetic outcome. It's super hard!)
OTOOH I just recalled the singer John Linnell settling for singing in Latin because of (interpolating his words a little) not wanting to sing badly in a living language ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7MJ71RPGhU ).
"I’m deeply jealous of people who are fluent in a second language and can apply that skill to their creative work in a way that doesn’t seem like cultural appropriation of the most offensive and embarrassing kind" ( https://www.openculture.com/2021/07/they-might-be-giants-joh... )
I'm Scottish-American immigrant. Pronunciation is a funny thing.
Marry (tie the knot), Mary (the person), and Merry (happy at Christmas). My parents and I pronounce them differently (mah-ry, mai-ry, meh-ry). My younger sister, who lacks any Scottish accent, pronounces them the same. Same with the woman's name Carrie/Kerrie - same in the US, but subtly different in Scotland.
Then there's the "wh" sound. More of a "hwh" sound vs the American plain-old "w". Lots of teasing from friends when I say white or wheels or which.
This all used to cause good-natured fun for my mom and her peers, as she was an ESOL teacher.
For the most part, I'm just happy if people get my name mostly correct. Alistair shouldn't be that hard, but apparently it is.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] thread* "A" as in "ah" (like "ah, I see")
* "E" as in "e" in "pet", or the "ai" in "pain"
* "I" as in the "i" in "pit" or the "ea" in "peat"
* "O" as in the "o" in "cot" or the "o" in "cone"
* "U" as in the "u" in "put" or the "oo" in "doom"
(Americans might notice that this approximately reflects the sounds those letters represent in Spanish)
Exception/refinement: If you know the name is from an Indian language, read "a" as the "u" in "putt"
(Edit: Improved the example given for "a")
Not an expert, but I can't offhand think of a language where this is even approximately how a is pronounced—which ones are you thinking of?
* French: "pas"
* Italian: "casa"
* Mandarin (written using pinyin): "bàng"
* German: "katze"
* Japanes (written in romaji): "arigato"
* Bahasa Indonesia: "bahasa"
Note that the sounds in these various languages are not exactly the same, but the "au" in "caught" is the closest sound in the native phonological inventory of a General American speaker (given said speaker pronounces "caught" and "cot" differently).
Also, if I listen to the audio examples at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger then it's exactly the other way around, that the "merged" pronunciation seems like an appropriate representation of "a" in words like Italian "casa", with "non-merged" "cought" sounding very different from that?
I personally have the merger, and so I misunderstood which direction the split went.
I'd say a good first guess is the "a" in "about" instead.
Our parents, who were born in the 1920s, both made the cot/caught distinction. Our mother was from the midwest, but our father grew up in the same Southern California city as we did. This suggested to me that, with respect to at least this one phonemic distinction, our language acquisition was influenced more by our peers than by our parents.
I should note that my sisters and I were initially flabbergasted that anyone pronounced those words differently and had trouble hearing the difference, while our parents were upset to learn that we pronounced them the same.
This too can be looked up
Used to be written that way; compare Calcutta -> Kolkata, suttee -> sati.
> (Examples used assume a General American accent that pronounces "cot" and "caught" differently)
In combination with the directive to read "a" as in "caught", I don't know how to take this except as a call to add lip rounding to the pronunciation of foreign "a". But that can't be right?
I like how English managed to offset for his relatively simple grammar by totally destroying its spelling. The whole fact that things like "spelling bees" can exist was very hard to grasp to me as a kid watching stuff dubbed in Italian.
Seven years old me was always very confused by why the kids in TV shows were rewarded for knowing how to spell stuff, which is something every second grader can do in Italy for any arbitrary word. In Italian you just write things the way you hear them, and there's an almost 1:1 strong correspondence between written and spoken language. If you don't know how to write something, you also don't know how to say it.
To make it obvious, I'll use the Romanian spelling for vowels, which is practically Latin (except for "ă" which is pronounced "uh").
A became ei.
E became i (ok, this one's the exception, but in practice it's still crazy, "Mercedes" manages to have 3 - three!!! - pronunciations for it).
I became ai.
O became ău.
U became iu.
So if you look at them, they're all 2 distinct sounds (ergo the 2 letters in the Romanian spelling, except for E, which is crazy enough anyway).
I'm not counting W, Y and such because I think they weren't used in Latin.
[1] I.e. they're need a single sound to be pronounced, don't need an additional supporting sound.
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.
https://cloud.name-coach.com/
FYI, the first sentence of the article isn't proper English. It purports to teach how a non-English speaking culture can sound resonably correct.
What do you think, are elaborate markdown tables the best way to show how to pronounce something, or… a wav file?
I read through the post and agree with you that I still don't have a clear understanding of the correct sounds, but I doubt I would have gone sound by sound trying to hear the differences.
Overall my takeaway is that there are common names and sound that are worth remembering, I checked a few like Nguyen, and will probably check others when coming across some Chinese name that reminds me of the article.
Well, it's a start I guess. Probably worth adding Vietnamese considering how few people in the US know how to pronounce "Nguyen".
I knew a guy that went by “Win”, is it always that?
I just say 'wen' now, which is a step up from my initial 'engooyin'.
Say "singer", then say it again without the "si". Congratulations - you know how to pronounce a word that starts with "ng".
I would think that after making those sorts of announcements frequently for one’s job, one would learn just a few minor adjustments to improve accuracy.
The basic ones I can think of that would increase accuracy measurably are:
1. How to pronounce “Nguyen”
2. Spanish ‘j’ is close to English ‘h’
3. Spanish ‘h’ is silent
4. Spanish 'll' is close to English 'y'
5. Chinese ‘q’ is close to English ‘ch’
6. Chinese ‘c’ is like English ‘ts’
7. Chinese ‘x’ is close to English ‘sh’
8. Most languages do not use ‘a’ as in the American English “and”. If you have to guess, better is ‘a’ as in “father”. In general if you have to guess, the vowels of Spanish are usually going to be closer than the vowels of English for most languages.
If the airport announcers were taught these basics on day 1 it would make a tangible difference in people’s lives for so little invested effort.
> 1. How to pronounce “Nguyen”
You say that like there's only one way to do it.
Most Americans who learn how to pronounce it “correctly” learn something like “wen”, which while not quite right, is still a huge improvement.
The trick that worked for me is that I know how to end on "ng", and that I can hold that sound. So I froze my mouth in that position, and used that position at the start of the word. After doing that a few times, it became easy.
The difference is that, with "g", the flow of air is out from your mouth (and the "g" interrupts that flow, which is why a "g" sound cannot be held), whereas with "ng", the flow of air is out from your nose (which is why a "ng" sound can be held indefinitely).
It would have, back when the sound currently written "r" was written "j" instead.
However there's an annoying/funny bug. If you open maps and start navigation, it's fine. However if, while navigation is running, you switch to another app temporarily, the language voice will change to the English voice, but the direction-generation part will still be generating directions in Dutch. This then becomes the worst of all possible worlds, as not only are the street names being butchered, but the instructions are too. In particular, "sla rechtsaf" (turn right) becomes "ess ell aye rektsaaf" as it thinks it's an acronym.
You can get away from this vague stuff like 'an "ah" vowel', and learn (1) the real way the pronounce the names, including sounds that aren't in English, and (2) the precise closest English approximation, without having to go through analogies and metaphors that won't be valid across English dialects.
Some of the other things that look like nonstandard IPA are actually Americanist notation, which a lot of older linguists were trained in rather than IPA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation
Still it's a lot less ambiguous than "sounds like 'ah'" which could be just about anything.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA
> Phonetic spelling is useless when you’ve got more than one dialect. For instance, consider the word ‘castle’. Is this [kæsɫ̩], or [kɑːsl̩], or [kɑːsu] (as it is for me), or something else entirely? Having an orthography which is not purely phonetic avoids this problem.
Why Q? Why not simply 'Ch'?
No, it isn't; "ch" cannot be followed by a front vowel.
There are plenty of theoretically-valid but nonexistent syllables such as sěng or nǖ, but "ching" is not such a syllable.
And if you look up ch-/-ing, the table will tell you "no such syllable", just like it will for "m-/-iang" or "h-/-weng".
All three of those are invalid in terms of orthography -- the standard specifically defines that there is no way to spell them. But "miang" is perfectly valid conceptually, and "ching" isn't even that.
I know that biang is the name of a particular noodle; I'm not aware of kiang; and I believe that duang is a sound Jackie Chan made once. Which leads into a tangential question -- "duang" has no meaning. What would it mean to say it is "understandable" to millions of people?
[1] http://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202107151999911843.html [2] https://www.marieclaire.com.tw/lifestyle/art/58762
https://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/break-through-chine...
It seems this system is the Pinyin system common to mainland China, there are other transliteration systems used in Taiwan (Bopomofo) and Wade-Giles (which seems to create more phonetically obvious transliterations).
This link has a nice table in the symbology section. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
You can listen here:
https://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/transla...
https://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/transla...
Ch is already needed to represent a sound which is much closer to the English “Ch”, as in Chen. But then there is this other sound, which sounds superficially like Ch to a non-native speaker, but actually is quite different (and if you mix them up, you might not be understood by a native speaker). What letter do you use for that?
Originally people used Ts, as in Tsingtao the beer, named for the city on the coast (but that wasn’t perfect either, because the sound also has very little in common with T). Then in the 50s Pinyin came along and it was changed to Q, so Qingdao (the final consonant was changed too).
Btw this change in transliteration schemes is why Peking Duck is still a thing: even though the city’s name is now spelled Beijing, the old spelling of Peking lives on in the name of the dish (and a few other places).
Usage is way more rational than in English where the number of graphemes and phonemes associations is mind blowing. Save for a few contextual allophones, vowels is very regular, and consonant letters has a 1:1 mapping to consonant which is very rational in pinyin.
As a native German and French speaker, this is actually an issue for me.
If I see a common German or French name, I do not actually know how it would be pronounced in English and it's very difficult for me to guess or get my head to think of that pronunciation in an 'English' way.
This is especially difficult when talking about a third person who you might not know well/at all: "I think a John Dubois, based in the X Office, is tech lead for that service"
But the single most important thing to do is ask how to pronounce and keep trying to get it right. My wife's first name is a Mexican name with an ll in the middle that should be pronounced as j/y (most Spanish speakers don't really hear a difference between the two English phonemes so it's perfectly fine to use either in working towards the correct sound, but j is probably the better choice for most English speakers since y between vowels tends to disappear, at least in Midwestern pronunciation). It's really not a hard name to say, but it does take paying attention for one whole second and remembering something that's not in the standard repertoire of American first names so a huge number of people get it wrong and don't care or say things like, "can I call you — instead?" (the answer, of course, is NO, what the — is wrong with you, you lazy twit).
Take the time to learn how people pronounce their names and give them the courtesy of getting it right. I doubt that most Croats, for example, will care if you don't pronounce č and ć differently, but if you insist on pretending that either makes a k or s sound, you will annoy them.
And after failing to do it right after instructions, it is the other people who are arrogant for asking to use something they are able to pronounce, not you for insisting on making them uncomfortable?
Names are just sounds people make when they want someones attention. Respect goes two ways.
I would treat this as similar to forgetting someone's name. Yes, plenty of people have a "terrible memory for names," but at the end of the day it's a matter of respect. If you really care -- if it's someone who's becoming a friend, if it's someone you ought to know for your job, if it's someone who's been introduced to you five times -- it's on you to remember the name, unless you have a genuine neurological condition.
Wade-Giles, an earlier system of transliterating Chinese, was designed more with English speakers in mind, but suffered from a number of problems of its own, particularly requiring apostrophes all over the place.
And in Japan you can still see two competing systems duking it out, with the Japanese-for-Japanese Kunrei system ("Huzi") officially anointed as standard but in practice the Japanese-for-Americans Hepburn ("Fuji") being far more common.
In this case, it makes even less sense to blame English speakers for incorrect pronunciations resulting from this system.
But the "official" (as you say) transliterations of world languages enjoy wide usage not because they're necessarily the best anyone could come up with --- rather, they just represented the right local maxima at the right time in history.
Displacing those romanization systems with better ones (assuming those exist) would be an uphill battle lasting decades, and I wager there aren't many people who would find that struggle worth the effort.
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 name well.
But back to pinyin, that was intended as an alphabetic alternative for native Chinese speakers to use instead of logographs/characters. So it's audience wasn't foreign language speakers and thus will have shortcomings for them. This was back when they were tackling illiteracy and pinyin was seen as both potential replacement of characters or at least an aid in learning a simplified version of the original characters.
Yes that makes sense, and is reasonable. But the expectation for all foreigners to be familiar with it is not.
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.
I think if someone says Milan in English instead of Milano it's fine because the city has an English name as well.
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.
Sorry... what? Us non native speaker live in a world where English is taught in almost any school on the planet and where you have a peer pressure to know and speak decently English. This on top of one of the most irregular languages in the world wrt pronunciation of dictionary words, let alone names.
PS good luck getting right Greenwich, for example.
I have a Russian friend who has specifically asked me to go out of my way to correct their mispronunciations, but for the most part if someone says an English word in a weird I don't even blink.
I'd say part of being an effective English communicator is not just about speaking English, but also about being able to understand foreign English accents (and I include different dialects of native English in that as well).
Yes, English has so many weird native dialects that weird foreign pronunciations shouldn’t throw you off either.
The Finns seems obtuse in their insistence on using Finnish phonology when speaking English, which is easy to make light of on the surface, but when you think about it it’s not actually a bad system. It’s consistent, easy to understand and it lets them focus on gaining fluency over memorising pointless irregular pronunciations.
Try putting the subject and verb in the wrong order in Japanese or forget your counter particle for a particular kind of counting and you just get blank stares.
I think that English, for its many faults, is at least extremely error tolerant in terms of it being possible to say something that's comprehensible enough dozens of ways and often with words practically in random order. It's probably the most amazing thing about English to me, although I only know a few other languages they are much more strict.
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 omitted purely for the convenience of the writer. The "a" in "yan" and "ya"/"yang" is completely different, etc.
I like Pinyin as a reasonably concise input method, but it's not great for romanizing names.
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
You fail to understand most of the world use international English where nobody really cares about correct pronunciation, but about understanding each other and only small minority of English users are nowadays native English speakers, one could say it's questionable nowadays what is the correct pronunciation (intended original use changed), so it would be quite foolish to insist on correct pronunciation in international enviroment.
I don't think same can be said about English native speakers who usually don't speak even second language and can't go their way to at least pronounce few names correctly, while rest of the world is learning whole other language, not just pronunciation of bunch of names.
Agreed with your pinyin commnets.
Can't be done. The Roman alphabet is a pretty good alphabet for Latin, but it isn't for Chinese, which has different sounds than are in Latin (or English).
For example, stop consonants in English have a voiced-unvoiced distinction: /p b t d k g/
Latin is similar: /p b t d k g kw gw/
Chinese is totally different. Instead of a voiced-unvoiced distinction, it has aspirated-unaspirated: /p ph t th k kh/ (with the h denoting an aspirated stop).
[edit] ah, one (!) of the two "tell" audio recordings in that dictionary seems to pronounce it in a different way that would illustrate the aspiration, but that seems different to how I've usually heard 'tell' being pronounced.
A common way of illustrating aspiration is: hold a sheet of paper in front of your mouth (or your hand), as you say the words. "tell" will give you a noticeable puff of air as it leaves the mouth, as opposed to "stellar", which won't.
Maybe these recordings are helpful to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant#Allophonic
English actually has all the relevant sounds in most dialects so I will try to explain in it reference to that. Most English dialects have environments where consonants are reliably aspirated, or not, depending on their voicing and surrounding environment. Unvoiced stops (p/t/k) in isolation "pat" or "cap" are moderately aspirated. Voiced stops (b/d/g) are not like "dog" or "bad". (Leaning on this pattern as a partial hack using a feature common in a lot of European languages, is why p and b are what they are in Pinyin, and many other Chinese romanizations.)
In principle, if your dialect does not have a length contrast for /æ/ after a voiced consonant (many do though including mine, making the vowel longer in that environment, so you'll have to try to say them with equal vowel length) then "pap" and "bab" (to rhyme with cap and cat) when whispered (no vocal chord movement, so all equally unvoiced) should be differentiated only by aspiration similar to Mandarin's p/b difference. Though aspiration is Mandarin is a bit more forceful.
As an aside, most people can hear the difference between those words when whispered, hearing a voiced or unvoiced consonant, based solely on the aspiration hint. Phonetic interpretation is a strange and subtle thing. And voicing in Mandarin? It plays the inferior role to aspiration's main starring role, a role reversal of the English arrangement.
Some languages, such as Hindi, have both the voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated distinction, so they have 4 consonants (/t d th dh/) where English only has two (/t d/).
Hindi also has retroflex equivalents of those 4 consonants, and there are minimal pairs between all 8 of them. A typical English speaker would struggle to tell the difference between them.
For these sorts of reasons, a Romanisation of names in different languages that (1) is easy to pronounce for English speakers, and (2) sounds like the word in the original language, is going to be a tall order.
MPS-II seems much closer to intuitive pronunciation for English speakers, although it never caught on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Phonetic_Symbols_II
Shi is pronounced Shr? That sounds more like your typical pirate Beijing hua. Which can get quite confusing when you get out of Beijing to let's say to Shanghai business trip and you can't figure if something cost 4 or 10 kuai at street vendor (my personal anecdote, I think they actually do it on purpose since normally 4 would have very different sound).
Neither Mandarin sh nor x exist in English. X is sharper and is a little more like shy-, whereas sh is darker and a little like shr-. In reality they both strike English speakers as being quite like sh, because we use the space differently.
I've heard various native English speakers who are fluent in Mandarin saying e.g. Xi as Si. I don't know if there's a dialectal difference in English or in Mandarin or both that accounts for it.
> That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei"
It looks better, if you have a certain aesthetic.
> "shi" is pronounced "shr"
As far as I know Mandarin speakers just consider them the same. Pinyin is designed for native speakers.
> "-ian" is pronounced "yen"
The e in Pinyin isn't really the English e sound. It's more like the American short u in fun or the NZ short i in pin. It's not obvious what letter to use to represent that, but e is not completely unreasonable. When they do have an e-sound according to the internal logic of Mandarin, it's a variant of an a-sound.
Apparently "Burma" is supposed to be pronounced in a non-rhotic fashion, but would it have killed the non-rhotic speakers to write "Bama"? Then the rhotic speakers who form the majority of English speakers would have at least had a fighting chance to get it right.
Another thing is their scattering of seemingly pointless "h"s in their transliteration of Devanagari, which together with "s"s leads many speakers to incorrectly assume a fricative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l8x36fjvjk
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.
What is more exasperating to me is that we are not even consistent in English spellings of the same names. For instance, "Sameer" and "Samir" are both pronounced the same but the first is closer to the actual pronunciation.
As far as pronunciation goes, I have made peace with foreigners incorrectly pronouncing sounds that don't exist in their languages, but it bugs me when they can't be arsed to get the syllable emphasis right or when they use the wrong vowel sound even though the correct vowel sound is familiar to them.
Example of #1: A friend of mine is named "Manohar". The syllable emphasis and spelling is: "Muh-NOH-huhr". But his name gets pronounced as "Man-oh-HAAR" in the US. And it's not because he's pronouncing it wrong. Imagine if he pronounced every "Michael" as "Mikhail". People would be pissed.
Example of #2: I can understand them not pronouncing the soft "t" and "d" in "tandoori", but not so much having the first syllable rhyme with "can" instead of "run". Or "Punjab" becoming "Poon-jab" instead of "Puhn-jaab".
Also, #PSA, Hindi does not have the "zh" sound in it, so please stop pronouncing "Raj" as "Razh". Thank you. :)
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 what a seemingly silent "h" after a consonant really indicates? Take names like "Delhi" and "Bhopal".
> Example of #1: A friend of mine is named "Manohar". The syllable emphasis and spelling is: "Muh-NOH-huhr". But his name gets pronounced as "Man-oh-HAAR" in the US. And it's not because he's pronouncing it wrong. Imagine if he pronounced every "Michael" as "Mikhail". People would be pissed.
I agree that errors in emphasis are far more jarring than errors in sounds, but using the native cognate in the language being spoken of a foreign name in that category is actually very common and often encouraged by the bearer of the name. Perhaps because it has already been mangled so many times since its Hebrew origin through Koine to all the modern languages that use it.
On thing that has always puzzled me is despite of what a dumpster fire Devanagari transliteration to Latin is, it seems to still have a massive buy-in with native speakers online. In places like social media or the Indian channels on the company Slack, it seems more common than actual Devanagari. I see the same pattern with Malayalam being written in Latin rather than its own script. If there's no need to accommodate people who don't know the script, I fail to see the point. I've asked but people usually get very defensive about it. Are they ashamed of having different scripts from the globally dominant one, Latin? I would rather consider it a point of pride.
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 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.
But in cases where it's a transliteration, _usually_ it means that it's an aspirated version of the consonant in question. "Bhopal" is one such instance. The Devanagari script has, for some consonants, multiple versions: soft, aspirated soft, hard, aspirated hard. (I'm not a linguist; there may be better terms for these.) Let's take "d". There's the soft "d" pronounced as Spanish-speaking people pronounce "d". There's a hard "d" pronounced as in "door". Then there's "dh" and "ddh", which are the aspirated forms of the respective letters.
(Google "pronounce Bhopal" and switch to the "Indian English" pronunciation option. I also checked the top 5 or so youtube videos and ALL of them are wrong; they have an American pronouncing it. WTF?)
But as I mentioned, our transliteration is not standardised and it's indeed a dumpster fire, so sometimes, the consonant is "ddh", but it's written as "dh" in a word, which does not help things at all.
Want more complications? In South India, "th" is often used instead of "t" in names where there's a soft "t". But it's pronounced exactly the same. [1]
Oh, and Devanagari is a simpler script. Other Indian languages like Malayalam have even more sounds that Westerners have zero hope of pronouncing correctly. Heck, Indians from other states struggle with it.
As for names, you'll find multiple spellings for names that are pronounced the same. I have friends named "Aarti" and they are spelt "Aarti", "Arathi", "Aarthi", and "Arati". A royal mess.
And this is before some idiotic astrological/numerological superstition makes them add unnecessary letters to their names. (Not common, but does happen.)
> In places like social media or the Indian channels on the company Slack, it seems more common than actual Devanagari.
I can only speculate that there are two reasons for this:
1) PC keyboards in India are English QWERTY and typing regional language text on them is a pain.
2) The medium of instruction in middle class education is English, so many of us grow up speaking English well. And in some cases like mine, think in English too. As we progress in our careers, communication in the workplace is in English, and writing fluency in native languages decreases. It's just easier to type it out in English. I consume pretty much all my Internet content in English (though I can speak 3 Indian languages), and it bugs the hell out of me too because I have to translate from the weird English transliteration to the native language in my head first. And that's before people use SMS-like contractions for words.
[1] Speculative answers here: https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/5uwcwi/people_from_s...
This will only make sense to you if you read Hindi: https://qr.ae/pG5zMP
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'.
Worse, Google has updated the (abc -> हिंदी) keyboard on Android so that in many cases it actually refuses the standard transliterations in favour of popular ones, I assume. And so if you want पीता you have to type 'peeta'; 'piita' won't get it, even if you click the caret for more options.
It also reinforces things like हूं - which I can understand if you're writing by hand, but why wouldn't a digital keyboard input the 'correct' / 'proper' / whatever हूँ?
(To write it there I used the direct input method rather than transliteration one, with which afaik it's not possible to write it.)
In fairness to butcherers of Manohar's name though, you really do need to be told/have learnt how the transliteration (IAST or roughly) is supposed to work. Otherwise of course you're going to read it in the language you know.
The trouble is, once you do know, you're left wondering if something is transliterated 'correctly' (in standard as opposed to popular fashion) or English-phonetically... Particularly with vowels: 'e' for example is either 'ay' as in 'pay' or 'e' as in 'pee' accordingly. (The latter 'should' be 'ī' or 'ii'.)
> In fairness to butcherers of Manohar's name though, you really do need to be told/have learnt how the transliteration (IAST or roughly) is supposed to work. Otherwise of course you're going to read it in the language you know.
I have absolutely no ill-will for people who pronounce any language's names solely after reading them. But if you work with someone and they introduce themselves to you, it's just common courtesy to at least make a best effort attempt to get the syllable emphasis and the vowels right. If you _hear_ it and still get it hopelessly wrong, I would be less charitable.
To be fair, Bama wouldn't be the right pronunciation. The easiest way for an RP speaker to indicate what the right pronunciation should be is to write "Burma". An American might try Buhma.
And your complain about "rhotic speakers" being "the majority of English speakers" could only have been taken into account of the British transliterator had access to a time machine to determine the future.
At the time, a person in the British empire wouldn't have been considering the opinions of an American, because America and Britain had separate spheres of influence and a generally amicable but not integrated existence. To them, RP was the language of the elite and that was all that mattered.
But if they were to consider the situation in America, they would have seen that in America as in Britain, non-rhotic accents were on the rise and were somewhat prestigious. If they were going to consider the future situation of the 21st century globe and how someone might pronounce the word in an American-centred word, it would have been entirely reasonable for them to have supposed it would have been one with a non-rhotic accent.
Another matter you might consider is that a very strict spelling would not necessarily help matters anyway. The J in Beijing is pronounced more-or-less like an English j, but that doesn't stop people from mutilating it into the s of measure. Or the person who responds to you, who observes that "Punjab" should be pronounced roughly like the English spelling should indicate, but which is often pronounced with the u of push instead - both because of a widespread assumption that all words in foreign languages are pronounced like Italian, Spanish or French.
And the final matter, which might hopefully set your blood at some ease, is to note that when a word is borrowed into a foreign language, it is subject to different pressures. You are not obliged to pronounce "Burma" or "Myanmar" the way any particular natives of Burma or Myanmar do. The English words are English words, intended to help English speakers identify a place in a generally non-offensive manner. There will always be variation between the source pronunciation and the destination pronunciation, especially once a few hundred years have intervened, and that's fine. The question is can we all agree that these are suitable words for referring to that country?
English is one language with multiple dialects, so words that enter the language from a certain dialect will reflect that history to a greater or lesser degree. Even when there isn't an "r" in the spelling, Americans still manage to put an r into the pronunciation, as with Goethe or Gödel. So to blame the British for unetymological r is just false. Americans do it because they recognise the unity of the language, and they're communicating rather than upholding any particular notion of perfection. It is unreasonable to say that the only reason for the British to do the same is that their life depends on it.
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.
1. Vowels are like in Spanish ("a" always sounds "ah" etc.)
2. The group "ch" sounds like a "k" sound, e.g. bruschetta is "broos-keh-tah"
3. The groups "gl" and "gn" sound like Spanish "ll" and "ñ" respectively. Those are hard to pronounce for English speakers, the easy shortcut is just imagine that the "g" is silent and that the "l" or "n" are a bit more pronounced.
4. Double consonants need to have a much more pronounced sound, almost as if you pause for a moment on that consonant. It should be easy to tell apart "nonno" ("grandpa") and "nono" ("ninth")
This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman alphabet and isn't English. The great vowel shift in English changed his vowels get pronounced in English when they were a lot more similar. This even holds for transliteration systems like Hepburn and painting. If you try to pronounce vowels in a language other than English you are likely gonna be less wrong pronouncing it as if it were any other language that's not English. English speakers literally decided to pronounce vowels differently at some point due to fashion. This should get drilled into all school children in English speaking countries!
Yes I totally agree, my daughter who grew up speaking English, was having trouble reading some Japanese words that were transliterated (Romanji) because she couldn't figure out how to pronounce the vowels, but for me (I'm Italian) it was easy to read them correctly, even though I had never seen those words before and I didn't know what they meant.
> This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman alphabet
Yes and surprisingly it works fairly well even with some non-European languages where the Latin alphabet was adopted, such as Malaysian and Indonesian.
However there are some languages that have frequent exceptions, e.g. French comes to mind where there are several word endings like e.g. "-eau", "-aux" and "-aix" etc., other languages also have exceptions like "-de" endings in Portuguese and some diphthongs in German like "ie", "au" etc.
PS. it's strange that the Great Vowel Shift is not widely known among English speakers - it caused the English language to have highly irregular phonetics which is one of the most evident features of the language.
That is not actually the case. In Catalan, for example, "e" and "o" may be pronounced either open or close (/ɛ/ vs /e/, /ɔ/ vs /o/), and the difference may only be marked with an accent mark (è, é, ò, ó) if that syllable was to be accentuated according to the rules, or if it happens to distinguish two differently pronounced words that would otherwise be spelt the same. Also, the most prevalent dialect of Catalan will pronounce non-stressed "a" and "e" as schwa (/ə/) and non-stressed "o" the same as "u". I believe something similar to this happens in Portuguese.
And don't even get me started on French...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)
It might be easier just to use one of the many dictionaries with embedded audio.
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 Zealand and, as you can imagine, again finds himself in need of a name change since everyone is pronouncing his name as "burnt"...
For my own name, Ambroos (Dutch as well), I've yet to find a good English rhyming word. I've just settled with telling people to pronounce it as Ambrose. It's better than people turning it into Am-bruce. For TTS I sometimes use Ahmbrohs.
Xander - a common nickname for Alexander. The x is pronounced as a z, but it still has the problem with the American a.
Sunder - Not as common, but it's a name Americans might have heard and in my opinion is closer to the Dutch Sander than "sender".
San Der - For the large percentage of Americans who are familiar with Spanish pronunciation, you might have luck with this spelling, but those Americans probably aren't the ones who mispronounce the Dutch version.
"Like Shaun Der, but with an S instead of an Sh on the front" - The way I explain the Hungarian variant Sandór to Americans is "like Shaun Door".
To my ears, Chinese "he" sounds closer to (non-American) English "her" than "huh".
Same for "chen" - "chun" captures neither the Chinese phonemes nor the English spelling. I'd argue even "Cheng" (hard e) is less likely to cause confusion/disrespect.
https://youtu.be/p1RKkRCiU90 Title: "having a non-white name" by ProZD
I notice Spanish people don’t seem to try, I think in part because there is a one-to-one correspondence between words and pronunciation in Spanish. The common Spanish pronunciation of Michael Jackson is unintelligible to a native English speaker for example. Pirata Drake was another I didn’t recognise, but should have.
If I had more examples of the pronunciation of pinyin names, I would naturally start to pronounce those names more correctly given pinyin.
I suspect many native English speakers grok some of the rules associated with foreign languages without specific training.
Assuming you're speaking of Spanish speakers from Spain (and not Latin America), they may be reacting to the customary mangling of Spanish by their UK counterparts. Most of the Latin Americans I've met have no problem with English names. They may say them with some odd vowels on occasion, but they're no unintelligible. It could be heavy exposure to American media.
Mark and Anthony are just the English translations of Marcus and Antonius. In French he's called Marc Antoine, in Spanish and Italian Marco Antonio, etc.
All Latin languages do that for names (at least historical names, but it's common enough for other names too) it's just less common for Germanic languages except English which is like always a bit in-between the two.
A few historical figures have Anglicized names for whatever reasons, so we use those.
It's not a "wrong" pronunciation, but it's clearly influenced by how Spanish/Italian stresses individual letters way more than English.
Let's take Hillary Clinton as another example: Italians pronounce it "Heel-lah-ree Clean-tone" (/ˈilari ˈklinton/), which is way different from the actual pronunciation.
This isn't specific to English: it's the general question of whether a speaker should always stay within the phonemic inventory of the communication's main language.
English-speakers like to struggle with issues of pronounciation of non-native words. Some other languages are just hardcore "naturalize the hell out of foreign words". I personally don't see much of a moral component in English approach. Though I understand that many people are super big on it as indicating respect, for me, I'd never be so arrogant as to judge people of random language X too harshly for only getting a rough approximation of my name, or mapping it to the nearest common name in their language.
Listening to audio mentioning Susan Wojcicki, I could never figure out the spelling of her name... BTW, Polish pronunciation for Wójcicki (notice the 'ó') is Vooy-chits-ki
Note that 'ó' in not a form of 'o' but of 'u' so subsequent pronunciations with 'o' sounds a bit weird for us polish speakers
And for the pleasure of observing someone mistakenly do so. How many Pauls build a Les Paul?
For my part, even my two syllable first name can be hard for Anglophones, though they are usually very eager to learn how to say it (people are usually very kind). I Postel principle the shit out of it, anyway.
I know it was a discussion for many decades about whether a piece of music should be in the original language or the translation. Everyone settled on the original, so we all sing with absolutely atrocious accents in foreign languages as best we can.
I feel like this whole area is a giant minefield for actors now, switching accents for roles is extremely normal. If that is suddenly interpreted as signaling a lack of respect for the real accent of the people they are portraying it makes an awful lot of everything harder.
I can relate to that. Pre-pandemic, I was singing in a community chorus, where we routinely had to sing in languages we don't necessarily speak. Typically, the director would coach us. We had an actual German in the audience one time when we did some Christmas pieces in German, and he told us that we sang the words correctly, but it was still odd to hear German with a Chicago accent. :)
I've heard of one top-level group bringing in a professor to coach Church Slavonic when they did Rachmaninoff's _Vespers_. Since I don't even speak modern Russian, I have no idea how well they did it, but their musicianship was outstanding.
What the article is really addressing is how different orthographic romanization systems map to English sounds. It's not advocating (as far as I can tell) that English speakers attempt to produce non-English sounds, which is, as you say, a difficult issue and probably not realistic without phonetic training.
I've noticed a similar thing with Spanish (my second language). I can kind-of read Portuguese as a side effect, but if I try to listen to spoken Portuguese I find it completely incomprehensible. My auditory circuits just aren't wired for it.
My own name is foreign. Native English speakers cannot pronounce one of the vowels in it, and if they try, they end up using what is to me a different vowel entirely (imagine someone saying "Dive" instead of "Dave"). I gave up when I was about six, and am quite happy for people to use a common, roughly similar English name for me instead. In fact I prefer it, since then I don't have to hear it being mangled constantly.
It's frustrating that doing my best to sing with an Australian accent is surely entirely unacceptable in 2021, even if it's an Australian composer and the rhyming scheme makes no sense in an American accent.
At least for some reason it's perfectly fine to use a British accent at all times, even if it's a horrible accent. We almost always sing with a "British accent" by default because of particular ways it improves the understandability of the words when sung. We tend to only use an "American accent" (and even then, which one right?) when singing Gospel music.
The rules are a little strange and clearly asymmetric in the sense that adopting accents that have historically been over-emphasized or glorified or straight up were the accents of conquering empires is fine while the reverse is not. This is a reasonable guideline, but I admit it feels hollow as someone who simply wants to sing as best I can.
Yeah; it's possibly ironic that a lot of efforts/values in this direction have a strong indirect effect of enforcing the status quo and the cultural norms of the prevailing power. ("It's always ok to wear jeans" is my shorthand).
I remember being surprised at Hugh Laurie's blues recordings. He's the person I can think of off-hand that went all-out on accent while singing with his mother tongue.
OTOH if you go all out and sing in another language it's regarded as ok try to try render things more exactly (But most people make lots of mistakes that native speakers pick up on and so the audience may not enjoy the aesthetic outcome. It's super hard!)
"I’m deeply jealous of people who are fluent in a second language and can apply that skill to their creative work in a way that doesn’t seem like cultural appropriation of the most offensive and embarrassing kind" ( https://www.openculture.com/2021/07/they-might-be-giants-joh... )
So, an Australian? :D
Marry (tie the knot), Mary (the person), and Merry (happy at Christmas). My parents and I pronounce them differently (mah-ry, mai-ry, meh-ry). My younger sister, who lacks any Scottish accent, pronounces them the same. Same with the woman's name Carrie/Kerrie - same in the US, but subtly different in Scotland.
Then there's the "wh" sound. More of a "hwh" sound vs the American plain-old "w". Lots of teasing from friends when I say white or wheels or which.
This all used to cause good-natured fun for my mom and her peers, as she was an ESOL teacher.
For the most part, I'm just happy if people get my name mostly correct. Alistair shouldn't be that hard, but apparently it is.
The South had a large influx of Scottish immigration 200-300 years ago and it still shows.