Karel Čapek's play "R.U.R." premiered in January 1921
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
Moreover, Rossum from R.U.R. is a word play on "rozum", which is a Czech/Slovak word for mind/brain. Mind's Universal Robots ;-)
There's also an audiobook available from LibriVox: https://librivox.org/rur-rossums-universal-robots-by-karel-c...
(For example: Omnics in Overwatch, Synths in Fallout.)
But yeah, there's a lot to say about sci-fi/fantasy settings that give special names to well-worn setting concepts!
(The pantheists were right, and the new matter to energy conversion plants liberate "The Absolute". Hilarity ensues.)
Either way, if you're into scifi, I consider this play required reading.
Apparently, since English-speakers have no idea how to pronounce English words that they didn't memorize beforehand, they also gave up on the idea of representing foreign words phonemically. But they still keep trying to read them that way if they see vaguely-Latin alphabet.
As a counterpoint foreign names - let's say Serena Williams - can get sort of inconsistently mangled in Czech too. Sometimes it'll be left alone as "Serena Williams", sometimes localized "Serena Williamsova". And the sometimes the "W" might be pronounced correctly or mistakenly pronounced as "V".
Nobody's perfect, people make mistakes and if you are able to suggest a correction then most people are happy to learn the "correct" way.
Why did your parents didn't love you?
See how redundant and non-sequitur this psychological question is?
The "upset" question is equally irrelevant, whether they (the parent) are upset or not.
Who said they're that much upset? Who said it upsets them more than other more important things? And even if they are, who said it's not important in their line of work (e.g. a translator or proof reader) and thus it's not justifiably a pet peeve of them?
Parent didn't come in swearing, fuming, writing in all caps, etc -- they merely made a point.
“Foreign names can get inconsistently mangled in Czech”—but to my knowledge Czech doesn't attempt to preserve foreign spelling, with e.g. letters Ñ or Ø. Czech adapts spelling to native pronunciation, which is my entire point. The ‘mistake’ here is that English keeps doing things backwards, and ‘Čapek’ is just one example here.
I had to look up the usage of ‘W’ in Czech, and Wikipedia says: “The letters Q, W and X are used exclusively in foreign words, and the former two are replaced with Kv and V once the word becomes ‘naturalized’.”
There's a close example in Russian: John ‘Dr.’ Watson's surname can be pronounced either ‘Vahtson’ or ‘Oo-ohtson’, but there's no intermediate sound like English ‘W’ in Russian (and no letter for it). So the name was spelled either of the two ways in print until it became settled on ‘Vahtson’ (‘Ватсон‘), which fits more naturally in the rest of the language. I expect a similar thing to happen to ‘Williams’ in Czech, though I'm surprised that they still have trouble with it at all, as the surname is old and widespread. However, current strong influence of English can mess things up—people, including myself, use English pronunciation even in the context of a native language.
Another example, place names are often localized even if they don't contain a non-Czech letter: Venice=>Benátky, Paris=>Pařiž, London=>Londýn, and so on. And sometimes original place names are left in place when they do have a letter or letters that are not Czech (or not very Czech) - see Washington, New York, Sydney, Chicago. In fact the last one is particularly interesting, since "ch" is considered a single letter in Czech - and there's a pretty perfect mapping to the Czech alphabet that preserves the stress on the "a" in "Chicago": Šikágo.
"Venice" is interesting too since "-ice" is a common place-name suffix. It behaves quite weirdly - sometimes it's singular (e.g. Lednice) and sometimes plural (e.g. Valtice). This becomes fun when you start to decline them so "I'm going (by vehicle) to Lednice" is "Jedu do Lednice" and to Valtice it's "Jedu do Valtic" (note: no "e" at the end). And the Venice/Benátky is apparently plural (http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?slovo=Ben%C3%A1tky). Why, I do not know. This is unrelated to the original discussion of course - just an interesting aside :-)
In Czech language even names of cities have genders. So the endings of the words are based on the gender. And Lednice - "do Lednice" is singular, while Valtice - "do Valtic" is plural. There are even some cities where locals use it as singular while the rest of Czechs use it as plural and they tease each other at parties.
In Czech, adapting spelling to native pronounciation (or adapting pronounciation to native spelling) is done for common nouns, but generally not for proper nouns (esp. names of persons) from languages written in (variants of) Latin alphabet. These are either written as is, or (informally) stripped of 'foreign' parts regardless of pronounciation (e.g. Ñ->N, Ü->U, or Ø->O). One exception is feminine suffix -ová added to female last names, as that is necessary for declension.
Can you really say the Czech pronunciation is correct because I am Czech? Or the German one, because it is a last name of German origin? If so, are all the people in my native country mispronouncing my last name? :-)
A Ukrainian speaker would easily use two pronunciations and spellings for ‘Gödel’, since Ukrainian doesn't have a ‘yo’ letter but Russian does and Russian is widespread in Ukraine. But the person would use each pronunciation and spelling in the corresponding language, not in the other one.
English doesn't do that—instead, it goes with the foreign spelling first, and then people pronounce the word whatever which way since they can't be bothered to look in an encyclopedia, or don't have one on them.
I feel this is rapidly turning into an impromptu session of "Falsehoods Programmers Believe" about names.
It only does that with accented letters that are otherwise shared in a common alphabet and then only sometimes.
In your desire for a rule that you like, you are insisting that English is following another rule that you do not like, when in reality it is actually much less simple. English has conventions within contexts, but is more or less allergic to to hard and fast rules.
My favourite quote on this is by the writer James Nicoll.
>“English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.”
> English doesn't do that—instead, it goes with the foreign spelling first, and then people pronounce the word whatever which way since they can't be bothered to look in an encyclopedia, or don't have one on them.
Personally, i much prefer people botching pronounciation of my name while keeping proper spelling, than botching spelling while keeping proper pronounciation.
Not sure how much linguistic knowledge you're putting behind the claim that written forms influence pronunciation, but as far as I gathered from my feeble noob learnings, spoken language utterly dominated word development even with widespread print—contrary to folk etymological intuition. This might be changing only recently, with written communication becoming much more prevalent and especially with English-language web going ubiquitously global. E.g. computer terms may be borrowed into other languages through print first.
You'll notice, however, that even with the web and text messaging around, people keep making mistakes that depend on them grokking language by hearing and speaking instead of writing and reading—e.g. “their/they're/there,” which is baffling for second-language-speakers who had to memorize each word and drill them by reading.
Curiously, your argument unabashedly presumes independence, if not primacy, of written language from oral. That wasn't ever the case at least in continental European languages—afaik spelling did matter in development of only a few words, contrary to some of modern folk etymological intuition. But this may change now that writing is much more prevalent in people's lives, with the English web getting ubiquitous, and English finally becoming completely logographic. If Mandarin doesn't wipe it all out sooner, anyway.
As an aside, I would love that more scientific papers use original names in their original scripts in the references section in addition to transcription, the way Knuth does it in tAoCP.
Being a scientist, I believe most of my colleagues prefer to cite names exactly as the authors typeset them -- therefore, if there is a work by Karel Čapek, I would cite him as [Čapek, 1921] but I would not re-type a name like Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi back into the "original" spelling if the author himself writes it this way in a paper (e.g. [1]). And on top of that, sometimes (with say Japanese-Americans) you could re-type a name only to end up with an incorrect result!
This is not incompatible with the transcription+native (if any) approach: these researchers will most likely have papers or website with their name in their native language, while descendants of immigrants don’t.
Following your example, Kawarabayashi’s original name can be found in few seconds of googling. It is 河原林 健一. (https://www.jst.go.jp/pr/info/info915/shiryo2.html)
The annoying habits are people who preserve the basic acute, grave, diaeresis, and circumflex accents on vowels but not those in other contexts (such as the Turkish ǧ, which really changes how the word is pronounced)--The Economist is a.bad offender here.
We shouldn't be afraid of asking too much of people in regards to other cultures and languages. We humans are more intelligent than you're giving us credit for.
I know exactly how I pronounce it, but it wasn't until your comment that I realized that I have no idea whether I'm doing so correctly or not.
rj could be mispronounced as unrecognizable ar-jay combo, resulting in something resembling dwor-yak or dwor-jak instead of rd3. (Sorry about lack of proper IPA.)
At least even with ‘ř’ it's not as bad as ‘Čapek’, since ‘ř’ is likely just replaced with more-or-less-hard ‘r’ when speaking, and not an unrelated sound.
You write can write Čapek in any way you want. But, personally, I'm proud that it's spelled that way. People know his great works, they (across all languages) commonly use a word he coined, and they literally make people learn a tiny bit more about the Czech language when they say, "Ah! So in Czech the Č is a CH!"
For example: víkend (weekend), hemendex (ham and eggs), anketa (enquête: questionnaire, poll, ...).
Proper names are not treated this way: Charlie Chaplin, New York, ...
Japanese words and names receive their own Czech and Slovak style romanization, e.g. džómon džidai (縄文時代: joumon jidai: joumon period , 14000-300 BCE). Curiously, the letter "w" (a letter not used in these languages) is used, e.g. Kanagawa.