Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers | Hacker News Reader

Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

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Some people take this idea to heart a bit too much. Barely anyone can pronounce my name properly and I really don't bat an eye at it. It's not pragmatic to expect most people to do so, especially in a place like the US where so many people come from different backgrounds. And that's nothing to say about the fact that the same name, written the same way, can be pronounced very differently depending on the bearer's background. At last, it seems to me that the people who care the most about this issue are monolingual.

It's one thing to do a quick effort at it; you can ask "how do you say your name" real quick and let it go after a try. Or just try to catch how I'll introduce myself, and say it the same way.

On the other hand, some folks get hung up on pronouncing my name "properly" and get very annoying about it: "no no no I reaaally want to say your name properly, it's important _for me_". In a 30min meeting, I don't feel like spending 5 minutes giving a useless French pronunciation class for something so pointless. I much prefer hearing my name pronounced wrong by mistake, than wasting time in a useless woke-posturing session with someone using my time to teach them how to make sounds their mouth hasn't been trained to make, supposedly out of respect for my foreignness.

I find the same. My (English) name seems very challenging for French people to pronounce correctly. Probably because it has a diphthong in the middle that doesn’t occur in French. I’ve basically never heard a French person say it right (even my French ex-gf). It doesn’t matter. So long as people attempt some approximation and it doesn’t sound too outlandish, who cares. It’s just part of their accent.

I commonly refer to my last name as vowel soup (I'm french, and it's the Americanization of my family name). It's such a niche last name that I've heard all of two people get my name right and both of them were Cajun or Cajun adjacent - most native French speakers are totally lost on it. I always tell people to call me by my first name when this comes up.

I've watched as people did as you described where they spend an inordinate amount of net time (it usually occurs in fragments, such as at the beginning of a meeting) trying to get someone's name "right". When I let people do this, instead of just opting for my very American first name, it almost always felt like I was watching a parody of my last name play out in real time. I didn't put too much thought into it, but holy hell does it get old. I don't like being in the spotlight and wokeism is already very offputting to me.

If you find yourself doing this, consider this: I have a weird name and I don't remember people's names very well at all. I remember faces, experiences, and feelings much more. You'll get my name right over time as you hear people around me say it. That's just fine with me.

Heh, I think employees should be given a fully synthetic identity, mostly for privacy reasons, but it can help with this thing too. The nickname can be also selected so that names aren't reused in a team, which would reduce ambiguity in communication. Even in small teams a lot of time is spent resolving ambiguities which John was referred.

I've thought on this before. I think it's a really cool idea, and maybe a great place to use something like PGP.

Some other usecases:

- prevents hero worship in software (eg: I'm an x-Googler, believe me)

- might put a dent in bigotry based identity issues

My last name is French, but in reality the name comes from Germany. My family has been pronouncing it incorrectly for 100 years, and I … just don’t care enough to enforce the correct pronunciation. It feels snobbish to me, like you said. Might be an artifact of being an American.

> My family has been pronouncing it incorrectly

Well, the French usage for names generally is just to use either a straight French pronunciation based on how the name is written, or an approximation of the foreign pronunciation using sounds that exist in French. Only a handful of well-known names get to have a special pronunciation.

If your family has been in France for 100 years, I wouldn't say they pronounce the name "incorrectly", they just pronounce it the correct way in France.

This reminds me of the story of the town of Versailles, Indiana.

It was common knowledge nearby that anyone who came in and pronounced it "ver-sai" was from out of town. Because everyone living there called it "ver-sails".

I use this as an example of how if anyone gets to decide how something is pronounced, it's the people who live there. The city is simply called "ver-sails" and that's all there is to it.

It is not "wrong", anymore than pronouncing it as you likely say "karate" is not more wrong than "ka-ra-te" (the japanese pronunciation) or that the japanese prounciation of the english word "sweater" being "su-we-ta" is wrong. Borrowed word pronunciation is entirely up to the user.

And also of "Socrates", an American Quake 3 player who insisted on the "soh-crates" pronunciation :-)

I also love the double mind-fuck of "karaoke":

EN: pronounced "owe-kee"

JP: "oh-keh"!

EN: but "oke" comes from the English "orchestra" (kara-oke = empty orchestra)… so really should be pronounced "or-keh"? Are we mispronouncing a Japanese mispronounciation of OUR OWN WORD??

(and then of course the Greeks chime in, OG)

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

> This reminds me of the story of the town of Versailles, Indiana.

Detroit would be the same way if it wasn't such a big city. Easier to see when you add back the accent, Détroit.

Oh, DEE-troit is just the beginning. Other notables include the home of Milan Dragway, pronounced MYL-in, or Lake Orion, pronounced OR-ee-yin.

Versailles, France, is much more well-known than Le Détroit, France, though. (In the U.S.)

I don't know if it's the city that's well-known so much as the Treaty of Versailles.

Here in Missouri (or rather in Missourah country), we have a ver-SAILS, MAH-l'n (Milan), New MAD-rid (Madrid), BALL-ah-ver (Bolivar), and La PLATE-ah (La Plata). :)

> My family has been pronouncing it incorrectly for 100 years

Yes! This is why I’m not the least bit offended when someone mispronounces my name.

I have an strategy of two pronunciations for my name (Jaime, it's a Spanish name):

- Quick chats, like answering your name at Starbucks, talking with the electric company on the phone, etc. I use directly the English pronunciation of my name (like Jamie). It's faster, easier and who cares, frankly... Gratefully, I can now use "wrote as Lanister" and fix some writing problems

- With more meaningful relationships, like coworkers or acquaintances that I will be talking several times, etc, the only thing that I care about is an honest try. Most people tends to have problems with the ending vowel, and the initial "hard H" sound, so it sounds more like "Hi-me", but that's absolutely no problem. Different languages have different sounds, and I mispronounce things all the time. All I care about it's the other person putting a bit of effort into it, but that's about it...

Good idea. Establishing a relationship between your name and with some named thing of the real world: a TV series character, a city, etc.

I get your point but I like that you describe the name of a character in a fictional TV show as a "thing of the real world", as compared to the name of a coworker you speak with regularly. :p

Well, maybe "thing of their culture" would have been a more appropiate term.

Same boat here. Vicente in Spanish so I go by Vincent most of the time (either the english or the French pronounciations, I don't care). Most people see my name in Spanish and pronounce it like it was Italian ("Vinchente", they always add an N). I've never been bothered by it one bit, at least they tried. For the curious, the correct pronounciation is either "Vee-sen-teh" or with the spanish voiceless-dental-fricative θ[1] "Vee-θen-teh".

If you ever bought into this idea that mispronouncing someone's unfamiliar/foreign name is somehow rude or racist or an extension of white supremacy/privilege, you should see how english names and surnames are pronounced in non-english speaking countries. People give it their best shot and fail, that's all there is to it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_fricative

Yup. Take Bob; in English, especially American English it's pronounced like "Baawhb" (exaggerated, weirdly phonetic), but over here (Dutch) it would be pronounced as "Bop", with a very short / clipped O sound.

Of course there's also names that have transformed to nearly unrecognizable forms; George over here has evolved into Sjors (or the other way around?), John into Sjon, etc.

Another interesting one: James and Jacob are the same name (from the Hebrew Yaʿqob), and in spanish it's either found as "Jaime", "Jacobo" or "Santiago" which comes from "Saint Iago" (Iago being an old spanish conversion of the Latin "Iacobus" which came to other romance languages as Yago, Iaco, Jacob, Yacobo, Jacobo etc).

The "J" consonant leads to many interesting things because of how many pronounciations it has. It can be an english "J" or the softer latin "J" (identical to an I) or an in between Y which could be between an english J and SH. In current spanish, however, the J is pronounced as the "voiceless velar fricative"[1] (a very strong H?), so whilst the name started sounding like "Iacobo", it's now a very firm HHakobo.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative

I belive San Diego could also be translated back to Saint James or any of those other variants but there's some other odd step or two in between that I can't remember right now.

Ah it turns out that may not be true, though widely believed for the last couple of centuries:

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Diego#Spanish

The one that shocked me the most was the number of different names that I associated with different countries that all turned out just to be variations on John.

Ivan, Ian, Euan, Hans, Sean, Jens, Juan, Yiannis, Giovanni, Evan, Ifan, Janko, Ivanko and many more

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_(given_name)#In_other_l...

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

TIL! So many (most?) christian names have hebrew origins so it's just great to see how much hebrew pronounciation has been completely violated to create words that sometimes barely resemble the original.

> softer latin "J" (identical to an I)

That's a fun one here in the US. My employer has an office in Romania, so many of my coworkers have names that start with an I for the voiced palatal approximant sound. These names would start with a J in English, have the I in Romanian, and are pronounced (more or less) like an English "y" sound. For example, Julian -> Iulian, approximately pronounced Yoo-lee-an. For extra complication for those in the States, many default fonts show minimal differences between a capital I and a lower-case L, so some people read it as Loo-Lee-An.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palatal_approximant

And then don't get me started on us Americans trying to understand the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-comma

btw if you ever run into someone who uses the hebrew version of Jacob.... I'd go with Ya'Qov , the hard B sound at the end and the softer V sound are the same letter in hebrew but I've basically never encountered anyone who uses the hard sound

should also add Ya'Qov and Ya'a'Quov, are fairly interchangeable

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

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

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

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

That's more the New England pronunciation of "Bob". Here in the Midwest it's shorter. It was a fun part of _This Old House_ back when Bob Vila was on; he'd ask a subcontractor (this was in Boston) how things were going, and they'd say "Well, Baawhb..."

My first name is Jonathan, and my Indian colleagues whose mother tongue is Marathi either say "Jonatan" or avoid it altogether because they think it has five syllables due to Marathi's implicit schwa. I'm sure I've done all kinds of violence to their names myself.

43 years speaking Spanish, not in Spain, but certainly aware of different accents from Spain (both from speaking to other people and watching Spanish movies), and TIL that the name for that sound is “ voiceless-dental-fricative”.

¡Gracias!

I totally read it as "Vincente" and didn't even notice there was no n until you pointed it out. Brains are super weird.

I totally get it. The brain's autocorrect has "fixed" my last name (Harwood) for people my entire life. Hardwood, Howard, Hayward... and even stranger modifications.

Fun fact, I can't type hardwood without great effort.

In English the /v/ in the phonetic spelling [edit, was: transcription] vee usually represents a voiced labiodental fricative (as /v/ in Italian Vincente) whereas most Spanish speakers will pronounce v (just like b) as voiced bilabial fricative or approximant. That is, I'd expect Vicente to be phonetically spelled bee-sen-teh (well aware that English /b/ is not a fricative as Spanish /v/ and /b/).

You're right! Most castellano speakers don't make a distinction between /b/ and /v/. Some latin american countries do make the distinction and also some spanish regions, like catalan/valenciano speakers in certain regions have a stronger or softer, yet still distinct /v/ sound, such as in "a veure, Vicent" (let's see, Vincent).

Super off-topic, but my name is Vincent and I'm learning some basic Spanish vocabulary, and it's been at the back of my mind for a while that I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to pronounce my name in Spanish. So maybe you could help: how would you pronounce my name when speaking Spanish - would you turn it into Vicente, use the English or French pronunciation, or is there a "proper" Spanish way to pronounce it?

(Feel free to ignore of course, I just got interested.)

Most people pronounce the spanish Vicente as "Beethenteh" in castellano but you can definitely ignore the "th" sound and pronounce it like an S, it's your name after all, you make the rules! In some spanish languages there's no "th" sound (e.g. Catalan) so it's really not an issue.

It will definitely be much easier for spaniards to pronounce the english version of Vincent than the french. We probably have the worst french pronounciation in Europe despite the fact that we're neighbours! I always chuckle with how some people pronounce croissant: "curasan" (an attempt to transliterate as "cruasan", I believe).

Ha, you haven't heard the Dutch pronunciation of croissant yet I take it :P

But thanks! I'll probably stick to the English Vincent then, as I'm not sure Vicente would trigger a response from me if I'm not paying attention, but maybe if I ever get to spend a longer time in a Spanish-speaking community I might give Vicente a try.

I feel the same way. I avoid the problem by pronouncing my (Dutch) name the way an American would pronounce it when introducing myself. (If there happen to be other Dutch people present, they'll figure it out, as it's a common name)

Thanks, I have the same problem - I'm an Eastern European living in the UK, must've heard my name pronounced correctly (just from someone seeing it written down) maybe 3 times in 9 years. But I actively avoid telling people the correct pronunciation because it's not in anyone's interest (unless they're a close friend, I guess). I never understood why someone would selfishly expect a stranger to pronounce their name correctly if your name is difficult/not intuitive. There are billions of people out there whose names are so difficult to get right, isn't it more important for us to spend that mental energy being nice to each other in a practical way instead of doing this useless ritual?

Conversely, I had a friend named Γωγώ, a Greek name trasliterated as "Gogo" in the Latin alphabet. When she went to stay in France she wrote her name as Roro to help French speakers produce the correct sound (gamma, "γ", is pronounced much like the French "r").

And to avoid being called "go-go" of course.

I get what you mean and agree with the broad point, but I really, truly do both want to learn more about foreign languages and also feel it is both polite and good culture to try to pronounce the names of long-term colleagues as well as I can. I love foreign languages, I love Korean consonants, I love German Vowels, I love the French Schwa.

I wouldn't want to put that on anyone to explain when obviously I can just get more foreign language tapes, but I do actually legitimately prefer to get it right if I can, and the process of learning to say it right is super fun... but I've spent my whole life having to spell and pronounce my name for everyone so it just doesn't seem like a big deal.

But yeah, I can see it getting annoying. I definitely wouldn't insist on it over a casual "<foo> is fine" but I do want to learn to do better at things if I can!

> it seems to me that the people who care the most about this issue are monolingual.

Sort of. I’d speculate that those who care about it the most are people who’ve never struggled and failed to pronounce a name in another language. In my limited experience of knowing 3 languages I never had trouble with any pronunciation. So I came to the unfounded conclusion that a. I can pronounce anything and b. everyone should pronounce everything correctly and if they don’t, it’s for lack of effort.

I was wrong. I learned this while learning how to pronounce Chinese names. I thought I was saying them right. For example I’d pronounce “Xi” as “Shi”. But it wasn’t the right Shi, evidently (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Ston...). My friend sat with me patiently as I attempted it over and over. Every time she’d say “no, not Shi, it’s more like Shi”. I couldn’t hear the difference. So even if I put in more time, I wouldn’t succeed.

So now I’m more tolerant of people making mistakes. As long as they make an effort, it’s good enough.

If anyone would like a challenge, try pronouncing the word “Tamil” from the language Tamil. I haven’t heard anyone who wasn’t a native speaker pronounce it correctly.

I have no problem learning foreign languages, but when I saw how Chinese phonetics works I ran away screaming.

How's http://canonical.org/~kragen/tmp/tamiltamiltamil.ogg? I've never tried to utter a retroflex approximant before, and while I think I might have pronounced it correctly, I think I'd have a hard time reliably distinguishing it from a retroflex tap or a voiced (really) alveolar approximant.

As for learning to distinguish X from Sh, and the Ch/J/Zh/Q and C/Z distinctions in Mandarin, I think your beliefs may have swung too far from one pole to the other. It took me six or seven years to learn to pronounce American English [ɹ] correctly, and I made lots of hearing errors during that time as well. It can take time to learn to hear phonetic differences. Unsurprisingly you weren't able to learn the difference between [ɕ] and [ʂ] in a single fifteen-minute session, but if you'd done two fifteen-minute sessions a day for two years, you'd almost certainly get it. In fact, you might find that it only takes you a few weeks!

I don't think you're quite there yet. It's more like how this lady says it in the first 10 seconds - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMJNV61I9iU. She guides you through pronouncing these sounds.

You're right though. I could probably get Chinese pronunciation correct given enough time and effort. but it's not trivial, like I thought earlier.

Thanks!

> try pronouncing the word “Tamil” from the language Tamil. I haven’t heard anyone who wasn’t a native speaker pronounce it correctly.

(non-Tamil here) Off the top of my head I can think of at least two distinct ways I have heard native Tamils speakers pronounce the name, and both are convinced that they are correct. Plenty of Tamils pronounce it with a retroflex 'r', while a majority consider it archaic and pronounce it with a retroflex 'l'.

The ழ was originally kind of a retroflex 'r' sound, but many Tamils consider it archaic & pronounce it as similar to a retroflex 'l' ள் - when questioned a native Tamil speaker from Tamil Nadu told me that ள் and ழ are pronounced the same.

Consider the word வாழை பழம் (banana), with two retroflex 'r' sounds. I have heard people pronounce it with both (and how its retained in Malayalam), and many will change one of them to a retroflex 'l'. In my restricted sample of asking a handful of native speakers to say the word, at least one consistently changed both to a retroflex 'l'.

I'm from HK, the sounds in my name only really make sense in Cantonese - it is difficult to pronounce in most Chinese dialect, even I get stuck trying to say it in Mandarin myself.

So when I'm with non-Cantonese speaking people, I go by a random Anglo name I picked for myself decades ago. Honestly, I feel more attached to that name than any non-Cantonese pronunciation of my legal name.

It gets annoying when some well meaning people insist that they must learn how to pronounce my "real name", it leaves me two choices:

A) Lie and say that their attempt is good, and resign to never knowing if they're calling me for the rest of time, or

B) Repeat it dozens of time until they give up, and sometimes have them complain that they never encountered those sounds in their Chinese 101 class...

So while I think it's good to make an effort to pronounce names correctly, it's probably better to give up after a few honest attempt, if the person you are addressing don't mind.

I am E/F bilingual. I taught in an educational institution which is multicultural with dozens of cultural origins. When I get names wrong, I see grimaces on their faces. When I hear other people get common but foreign names -- like Nguyen for instance -- wrong, I grimace too. I am now at an institution in a country where basically no one outside the country knows how to pronounce anything.

It takes me about 5 minutes to Google names I'm unfamiliar with before I start a new class to make sure I get it right. I don't know and I should not be expected to know Chinese, but I think I should be expected to be polite enough to try to get it right before I take a stab and butcher someone's name.

I don't think it is an enormous burden to put on myself, and I don't think I'm performatively self-flagellating by doing it. I think it's just me trying to be polite. I think everyone should try to be polite in as many contexts as possible.

On another context of names:

My own names are Hebrew and Germanic respectively, two syllables each. My given name is common in North America. Most people pronounce it wrong anyway. I would greatly prefer if they didn't. It's a little disrespectful. I politely correct people and then find most of the same people make the same mistake again and again. I find it disrespectful, the same way I find it disrespectful if someone spells my name wrong even though my email address is first@last. It's not because they're frothing at the mouth racists, it's because they're minorly inconsiderate.

My wife has a common name with two English spellings (let's say similar to Meghan/Megan). People frequently misspell it. She's not bothered by people guessing wrong. She is bothered when she corrects them and they still get it wrong. When I met her, it's not like I cosmically knew which of the two spellings was correct. I simply learned which of the two spellings was correct. It was a basic act of politeness and care. When people don't do it, it comes off like they don't care.

The proper pronunciation of my name requires an emphasis that is not on a first syllable, rolling R, and palatalization of a consonant in the middle. Even if I tell people how to pronounce it properly, repeating it back to me would be too much to ask from people who never palatalized a consonant in their life. My point is: I don’t grimace and I don’t bother.

That seems so much work, to not ask or help someone pronounce a name.

The world is globalized, it's not expected as a norm to be able to pronounce every name properly.

My name isn't in "English" and I grew up in the USA. The people whom act like you when I introduce myself and talk are the most annoying. I don't have any onus on everyone pronouncing my name properly and if they say it with English phonetics then that's acceptable because they're trying to adapt their language to my name.

That is much more polite then having this internal monologue and judging/having bias to everyone else that they're "inconsiderate."

Just ask how to pronounce if you can't, read the room and then apologize if it needs to be said.

Loosen up.

The idea that you can Google how to pronounce a name is in itself presumptuous. My name from a European country is spelled the same but pronounced differently as a name much more commonly used in South America. If you googled how to say it you would get the wrong answer. I’d rather you just butcher it in American than make assumptions about my origin.

If you want an analogue, think of Muhammad Ali. Arabic name, non-Arabic pronunciation.

That said, I certainly wouldn’t get upset at the effort. I’d assume you mean well, so no foul. It’s just not that important.

> It's not because they're frothing at the mouth racists, it's because they're minorly inconsiderate.

There is a very good chance that your correction is coming off as inconsiderate since it is interrupting the flow of conversation and perhaps even the other person's train of thought. That interruption is also going to affect how well they remember the correction. If they were unprepared for an off-topic interjection, it is probable that they didn't hear what was being said or it did not register in their memory.

So yes, getting people's names correct is important. On the other hand, letting people get your name is important (rather than forcing the issue).

> When I hear other people get common but foreign names […] wrong, I grimace too.

To be honest, this seems as one of the worst ways to handle such situations. Feeling distraught over an imprecise pronunciation feels like something to get rid of rather than accepting as a norm.

And I am saying this as someone with a slight speech impediment using one of the more consonant cluster-rich languages on the continent. I would have to be delusional to expect someone from an English-speaking country to pronounce names such as Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz on first or even second try.

Also, how do you decide which names are common? Not trying to be rude, but this can easily depend on from where someone is coming from and their age/generation. Names popular in the generation of my grandparents sometimes are completely absent from my own and rarely written down.

This all also comes with the prerequisite that a person in question still uses the original pronunciation and not one adapted to the dominant language in the region.

>At last, it seems to me that the people who care the most about this issue are monolingual.

I had someone asking for a way to identify 'gender from the names of overseas customers'[1] on my problem validation platform. At a glance it seems like a similar problem and there could be some who doubt the veracity of the problem. Then there were several business solutions posted for that problem.

The same people who wanted to know the gender could probably also benefit from knowing how to pronounce the name if they ever get on a call or meet the person.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/94-identifying-gender-from-a-na...

I have a German last name that not even my family pronounces “correctly” and myself didn’t learn the “correct” pronunciation until I studied German at university. Most other Americans butcher it, Germans get the German pronunciation right but never the way I grew up hearing it.

My opinion is just call me what you want as long as I know to respond to it.

Even language carriers don't get my name right. Sometimes I say it myself, they realize they were mispronouncing it and say "why didn't you say about it?", but two weeks later they mispronounce it again as if nothing happened.

Are you saying these people should be more aware and considerate of your culture and experience as an immigrant with a hard to pronounce name in an English speaking country? That they should consider your feelings and change how they behave to suit you better?

Because that sounds pretty 'woke' to me, and you seem to be attacking people for trying to be woke and annoying you in the process.

I just worry that if someone attempts to make you happy by doing this, there will be an even smaller minority of people with hard to pronounce names and right-of-center political views who will be absolutely furious that the PC brigade (i.e. you) are trying to dictate what English speakers are allowed to make small talk about about in their own country, stifling free speech just in case some foreigner gets annoyed. Then they'll insist that English speakers should always do whatever their gut instinct tells them to even, no especially, if it annoys some oversensitive immigrant. Some people would much prefer to defend the noble principle of free speech than worry about something silly like wasting 5 mins in a meeting.

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

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

Oh yes, that would be a correct statement.

Feel free to be annoyed and to share whatever you think the right thing to do is whenever you encounter these people.

However, calling them "woke-posturing" in a disparaging way is a paradox if you prefer them to be aware of your opinions and experiences and change to better accommodate you as a member of an outgroup.

That's what "woke" means.

> I really don't bat an eye at it. It's not pragmatic to expect most people to do so, especially in a place like the US where so many people come from different backgrounds

This. My name is a whimsical permutation of a Monacan name but I’m south Asian so it confuses the heck out of people. So I just go by Ray, which frankly is kind of a sketchy name, like “Trent” or “Chad.” But it’s easy to pronounce.

It’s no big deal! Why would I take offense when an American who is often mispronouncing his own French, German, or Polish family name mispronounces mine? (Sorry, Mr. Koch, your name is “Cock” not “Coke.”)

Monacan like the Native Americans, or like Monégasque?

The latter (he said sheepishly). My mom named me after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainier_III,_Prince_of_Monaco. But added a vocalized "y" for whimsy. (Boomers--my kids all have biblical names.)

As usual, the people with the biggest stick up their ass tend to be the least useful and most time-wasting.

French is a good example, nasal vowels are everywhere and are just impossible to pronounce correctly for English speakers without training, so not only we shouldn't take offense but it's even insensitive to expect it.

So people can learn names like Schwarzenegger but not others?

We can learn chai and yoga and namaste but not the names of the people it belongs to.

Seems more not wanting to make people uncomfortable which is fine, I have had to navigate the same.

When I come across a name I haven’t heard before, I just go out of my way to ask people how to pronounce their name and say it’s important to me. Sometimes demonstrating how to have the conversation of asking comfortably is the most important first step.

> I much prefer hearing my name pronounced wrong by mistake, than wasting time in a useless woke-posturing session with someone using my time to teach them how to make sounds their mouth hasn't been trained to make, supposedly out of respect for my foreignness.

The French language is perceived as refined and hard to get right. And France in general is very romanticized in American culture. Maybe it's less "woke respect" and little more curiosity than you think.

Ahah Im French too with a difficult name and usually I just correct with humour if it s super far off, we laugh and done. People hung up on perfect pronunciation I tell them to just use the english equivalent (think William for Guillaume) and basta.

I gave my daughter a perfectly language neutral, 2 syllable, "a monkey can say it" name to avoid all this next generation :D

yup! two of the three phonemes in my name just plain old dont exist in English so depending on how amused I'm feeling I either say the English version, english + explanation, or if I'm bored I simply say it in hebrew and walk away and see how the name changes the next time it's spoken back to me....

Nobody should stress out too much about not getting a name right. But it's also not ok to not care at all and just go around butchering names without ever asking the proper way or even worse, ask for a nickname because they can't pronounce it (I've seen it coming from a CTO in an all-hands meeting). Both extremes are not ok.

As long as there is symmetry in expectations, I don't mind taking this stance. If some English people get miffed when non-English speakers mispronounce their names, it becomes a matter of social justice :)

People are giving pronunciation tips for other languages in the comments, here are tips for polish. Polish often seems incomprehensible for english speakers because of the sheer amount of consonants though it actually flows quite nicely if you know the rules

'sz', 'cz' - those are equivalent to 'sh' (shop,shell) and 'ch' (chop, check)

'w' - it's a hard 'v' as in 'very', 'vary'. Always, no exceptions and never anything else, it's Ko-v-alski (Kowalski) and Le-v-ando-v-ski (Lewandowski). This is, I think, the most common mistake when reading polish names because english speakers often soften the 'w' to english 'w' as in 'when'/'why'

'Ł or ł' - that's the thing you think of when you see 'w' in english. It's the same sound as in 'when'/'why'/'when'. It's not a weird accent on 'L', for some reason we don't have 'v' in our alphabet and we moved 'v' sound to 'w' and 'w' sound to 'ł'

ó - it's called 'closed u', the same as normal, open u, pronounced as in 'put'/'dude'. The only difference between open and closed 'u' is in writing, none in speaking

y - a vowel, I don't think the sound exists in english but often 'yyyyyy...' in polish is used as 'ummmmm...' in english

ą, ć, ę, ń, ś, ź, ż - good luck ;)

One thing that makes polish a bit easier is that it's pronunciation is 98% consistent, you need to learn the sound of each letter or digraph once and it will never change so every polish person will pronounce even made-up words in the same way because there's only one way (you may write it incorrectly as in the open/closed u above, or ż/rz, but you will read it back correctly so just don't show anyone how you've written it :) )

ż has the sound of soft g, as in germs

g in germs would be "dż" not "ż" in Polish. Same sound as j in English - for example in "jungle" (dżungla in Polish). As usual - English encodes it in many ways Polish always as "dż".

Polish "ż" without "d" before it is more like French j for example in "je taim".

Sorry but it's « je t'aime »

Żak = Jacques in French. Which is easier?

Yup Polish is actually quite regular in pronunciation, there are very few exceptions and only about a dozen rules to remember to be able to pronounce any word.

The reputation comes from different conventions. In English letter+h is the escape code (gh, th, sh, ch) in Polish it's letter+z (rz,sz,cz,dz,dż,dź,dzi).

Especially vowels are much easier than in English. Each vowel in Polish maps to exactly one sound and vice versa.

> y - a vowel, I don't think the sound exists in english

it's the English short i like in bIt. As is the rule- Polish has a special letter for that sound and English has 2 sounds encoded the same way and you have to remember which is which :)

Another difference is that Polish j is English y. And English j is Polish dż (dżungla = jungle).

ń is the same sound as the funny n in Spanish word for Spain: España

> w is v [..] Always, no exceptions and never anything else

There actually are exceptions, but they are regular as well - w before last syllable is often devoiced to f. Levandofski. But even most Polish speakers don't know that it's the rule, they just speak that way without thinking :) And if you ignore it you are fine, it sounds unnatural but it's still correct. Like saying "I am" instead of "I'm" in English.

BTW I think all that additional complexity in English writing system is the reason you have to teach kids to read for so long. In Polish kids are usually taught reading in preschool or first class at school and they are expected to be able to correctly read any text after 6 months to 1 year.

There are some gotchas the other way around (hear something and write it) because that way the mapping isn't unique (there are sounds that have 2 ways to write them), but reading is easy.

>There actually are exceptions, but they are regular as well - w before last syllable is often devoiced to f. Levandofski. But even most Polish speakers doesn't know that it's the rule, they just speak that way without thinking :)

Well, true, but I don't think devoicing w in 'Levandofski' is correct, sounds a bit sloppy but hard to hear the distinction to be honest so maybe

There is though a clear devoicing not only before the last syllable but before 'sz' as in 'wszystko'(all), 'wszędzie'(everywhere). Not sure if there's a surname that that applies to.

Wszystko and Lewandowski both are subjected to the same principle, namely: in Polish consonant clusters, including across a word boundary, the obstruents are all voiced or all voiceless.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_phonology#Voicing_and_d...

Yup, thanks, that's the rule.

I think I should change the 99.99% in my original post to 98%

I wouldn't be so strict with it to be honest — it is still a rule that is internally consistent, and as far as I know it lacks any significant exceptions.

I wonder if there is a rule that lets people get away with "Lewandoski" :)

Rule of thumb of consonant clusters in mos languages: break the cluster. Don't try to pronounce "VSK" directly. Instead, split it and add different parts to syllables before and after: Le-van-dov-ski. Adding "ski" after the word is much easier than dealing with three consonants in a row

There is, it’s called „dialekt małopolski” ;)

Ej, co kurwa? Jeszcze mi powiesz że wychodzi się na dwór a nie na pole ;)

For south Slavic last names: č- "ch" as in cheddar or the choose so same as "cz" in polish ć - "tj" ...this one is hard, and only some dialects pronounce it differently enough so using "č" is good enough ž - same as "J" in french names "Jeanne d'Arc" or Jean-Luc Picard dž - same as "J" in the word "John" or "Jordan" or G in "George" đ - just use dž š - "sh" as in short

Do you guys also have the open/closed u distinction?

Nope. That is why people struggle with Danish o,ø,å,y,u and a,æ.

But in reality, at least for Croatia, the differences in dialects mean that in some dialects some words with "o" are pronounced as "ø", or "a" as "æ"...

Anyway, reading Slavic compared to English/Danish is a piece of cake. Grammar on the other hand...

What kinda gets me is the name Łukasz, because in German and English it is indeed an L and all the ones I know actually use the L (maybe unless talking to other native speakers).

Yeah, Łukasz is the same name as Lucas and because ASCII and internet it's very common to just write it as Lukasz because no matter if you're talking to the native or not, they will know what you mean (it is very common for polish people to omit polish letter altogether when texting/writing informally online because the correct letters can be inferred from the context so why bother pressing that alt key). If you were to pronounce it correctly though it would be something like 'Wookash' (which looks ridiculous in written form but hey)

> it is very common for polish people to omit polish letter

Is it still common? It was popular when there were many encodings that always broke and when people wrote SMS by pressing number keys 5 times for 1 letter, now I don't see it that often. I'd say it's about as common as writting l8r in English :)

I think I rarely use polish letters when I write on whatsapp/signal etc. and I don't think I often see them written. I don't pay that much attention though so it may be that I'm the only one

Less common than it used to be, but still happens. Mostly when writing in a hurry (of course without auto-correction turned on) or interacting with older systems and applications. Also, it is so rare to use Polish letters in a URL, that if you were to dictate one based on a Polish word(s) most people would simply spell it without them (ł → l, ą → a, etc.).

By the way, never try to use Polish letters in a Windows username. It works, but every once in a while something third-party or rarely used breaks unexpectedly.

> It's the same sound as in 'when'/'why'/'when'

Note: this is ONLY applicable if your "wh" is non-aspirated. If you pronounce Łukasz as "Whookash" you're going to get some funny looks :) I'd have written this as "It's the same sound as in 'wise' or 'weather'"

That's interesting, could you elaborate on the difference in 'w' between 'wise' and 'when'? I'd say 'Wookash' as in star-wars 'Wookie' is a good way (way, hehe) to say Łukasz.

I'm not a linguist though so I'm curious

Some English speakers pronounce "w" differently than "wh". They will say sth that sounds like "hwhen" instead of "when" for example. I think it's a dialect thing I only met like 5 people online who spoke like that but they were all native English speakers so it must be correct?

It’s “correct” but quite rare. The wh was originally a digraph pronounced with a voiceless labial–velar, but but most variants of English have undergone what linguists call the whine-wine merger so those words sound the same. Exceptions are Scots, Irish, and some Southern US varieties.

The guys I met are from Canada.

Obligatory Family Guy link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMopBpOfv_E

I'm not sure I've ever met anyone in real life who says "hwen", "hwere", etc., although you can hear it in some Johnny Cash songs. I'm not sure exactly where in America you can hear it - is it a southern thing? You'll never hear anyone say "hwen" in the UK.

IIRC the ‘History of English’ podcast mentions that pronunciation like ‘hwat’ was the norm either in Old English or before that. Then it changed, and the spelling was changed accordingly.

That's a much better example! I'm not sure how to accurately describe the w/wh difference in text. A comment in this thread suggested that it's like prepending a "h", like "hwhen" which is actually incorrect - this exists but it's what you'd do as part of an over-the-top impression of an old fashioned upper class accent :) In reality the pronunciation is just like blowing a tiny little bit of air when your mouth makes the shape for the "w". I didn't know it was largely just a Scottish/Irish thing nowadays, though.

Also while we're all gathered in our shared appreciation of pronunciation weirdness I have one more "wh" example. Where I'm from (Northeast Scotland) English words following a "wh-" pattern are transformed in the local dialect to be spelled and pronounced differently as "f-". So "fit" instead of "what" ("fit like?" = "how's it going"), "far" instead of "where" ("far dae ye bide" = "where do you live") etc. Dialects are weird :)

Also, if we are talking about aspiration, word-initial p and t are also left un-aspirated in Polish, contrary to many (most?) English dialects.

That is interesting, I can’t think how else to pronounce the word-initial “t”s in something like “Tu jest carrefour, a tu jest kurwa jeż” (a phrase that has entered the canon of my friend group) any other way, I wonder if I’m already saying it unaspirated.

I'll be honest, I'm very interested in knowing how that polish phrase entered a Scotsman's, living in Czech Republic, canon and what it means

It's all down to this video where a Polish guy was amazed at a hedgehog he saw in some city centre somewhere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwR6KS6vJWg

Edit: oh and it means “Here’s the carrefour (supermarket chain), and here’s the fucking hedgehog”

Lol, first time I'm seeing this. But the very top recommendation from yt was 'Jeż kurwa - czeska parodia!'. I love how memes travel. I think the last very popular Czech meme in Poland was Jožin z bažin

To elaborate on ⟨ł⟩ – there is quite a good reason for the way it is spelled. Originally, its pronunciation was /ɫ/ (“dark l” in English) so it was very close to /l/ in sound quality.

It evolved to /w/ over time. During the first part of 20th century, it was already used only in dialects and by professionals such as actors and singers (because of it, it is also called “scenic ł” — „sceniczne ł”).

Ironically, if I remember correctly the original sound quality of ⟨v⟩ in Latin was also /w/, so in some roundabout way you could say that English and Polish both swapped traditional pronunciation of their letters.

⟨y⟩ is often transcribed as /ɨ/ but it is in practice closer to English schwa.

And to correct one thing: because of Polish orthography rules, ⟨w⟩ can also be pronounced:

• as /f/ if preceding consonants are voiceless as in the second w in Lewando__w__ski, although I think one would still be understood if that rule was ignored

• as /w/ if the word is an English loanword, as in „weekend” /wikɛnt/

the original sound quality of ⟨v⟩ in Latin was also /w/

IIRC, there wasn't a U letter in Latin, so the vowel was written as V. I guess it tended to souns like W when starting a syllabe, as in versus.

> there wasn't a U letter in Latin

Yup they used V for both. This is probably why German (and then Polish) uses W instead of V - to distinguish it from U.

When the Latin alphabet was first used in Old English, Latin w had already come to be pronounced v. The was no need for it in English at that stage, because v was just considered a variant of f.

But English made good use of w, and there were two ways of writing the w sound: either as two u's (because that way you can indicate the consonantalness of it, even before consonants as in writan) or using the old rune wynn. The uu approach spread to the continent and Old High German (which still used the English sound) adopted it. Old High German also didn't have a v sound at that time, and v was considered a variant of f - which it still is in modern German (e.g. Vater = father, pronounced fah-ta). Meanwhile, uu fell out of use in England, and the runic wynn dominated. But the English spelling system was gradually replaced following the Norman invasion, which led w to dominate over wynn. And v was now considered its own sound, so the letter began to be used for a v sound. So even though English seems to be a bit of a exception, with w=/w/, it's a practice that came from England and came back to England and was a medieval norm.

But the w sound changed to v in German too. They didn't have such a radical interruption to their orthographic tradition as the English did, so the idea that V=F remained, and the letter w just come to be used for the new v sound. It spread from there.

So it's not really w instead of v to distinguish /v/ from /u/. It's more w instead of v to distinguish /w/ from v=/f/.

The crazy thing about that is it wasn't until several centuries after all that transpired that v and u became separate letters. So the Germans were using u for the sound of Buch and the sound of Uater (=Vater), and a different letter w for the sound of Wasser, when W and U=Buch were very similar and U=Buch and U=Vater were very different.

'w' - it's a hard 'v' as in 'very', 'vary'. Always, no exceptions and never anything else

I've been interacting with a Polish web and got very confused because what happens with stand-alone w, that seems to mean in. Indeed Google Translate pronounces it as a v. First time I see a word in any language that consists only of consonants :-m

It is quite funny, because when I was learning English, it was so bizarre that the first-person pronoun was only one letter (putting aside the required capitalization). On the other hand, having to write and instead of i still seems quite unwieldy to me.

Well in English it's actually 2 sounds (a+i) they just have them mixed into one letter :)

Not unlike Russian where the reversed R is the same sounds just in reversed order (i+a) and it also means I.

Polish prefers to have sounds separated so it's "ja". And it's never capitalized, English is very egocentric about it's pronouns :)

> First time I see a word in any language that consists only of consonants

Polish is quite tame with these as far as Slavic languages go. "Strč prst skrz krk" is a proper sentence in Czech and Slovak :)

Romanian has the opposite oddity: we have whole words made up of vowels, with a proper sentence like that: "Aia e o oaie" ("that is a sheep", pronounced roughly 'ah-ya ye awe wa-ye').

Except in most Slavic languages r can work as a vowel.

(if you are confused think about how the y in year is a vowel sound but works as a consonant in the syllable)

Y in year does not represent a vowel sound.

Phonetically, it is a vowel (a sound produced with an open vowel tract), but phonologically, it is a consonant (a sound that forms the onset of a syllable).

English has a couple of pure examples: 'Mrs' and 'Nth' I can think of.

You can extend this with exclamations/onomatopoeia (eg: 'hmm', 'shh', 'brr'), but can see that these are not 'normal words'.

Interjections can contain sounds that don't occur in ordinary words. In German there's "tja", and in English there's "tsk", which is a click, quite an unusual sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_click

What about rz, is it same as ř in Czech? Good luck with this letter to any native English speaker. :-))

No, it's either the same as "ż" (in most cases) or the same as "sz" (after devoiced consonants). And there's like 3 words where it's pronounced as separate r and z letters (tarzan, marznąć, I don't remember the 3rd :) ).

no, it traces back to the same thing pretty much, but in modern Polish it's indistinguishable from ż (ž?) I assume that long time ago it went like this r' -> ř -> řż -> ż, which effectively removed the foundational r-ness of the thing.

Off the top of my head, the Polish language has lost the phonetic distinction between

rz and ż -> ż,

h and ch -> ch,

u and ó (flat u vs long o) -> u

In some regional dialects near southern/eastern borders you could still find some of these distinctions, but in modern Polish it's gone.

at a glance shit looks unnecessarily confusing especially for non-slavic foreigners, but once you look more into it explains many things and helps greatly with writing of related words, declination and conjugation, eg where grammar mandates sound substitution (assuming you are Czech you are probably aware of this effect already) For example there are clusters of sounds that often change one into another.

g/h/ż are one such cluster of closely related sounds

noga (leg, noun) vs nożny (adjective)

drugi (second) vs druh (friend, companion) drużba (guy helping the newlyweds with wedding)

Sapieha (noble name of Ukrainian origin) vs Sapieżanka (daughter of Sapieha)

rz/r:

drzewo (tree) vs drewno (wood)

ch/sz is another:

mucha (fly) -> muszka (diminutive)

ó/o/e is another:

bóg (god) vs bożek (lesser god)

pióro (feather) vs pierzyna (bed cover stuffed with feathers)

It also helps seeing similarities between Slavic languages, as this stuff preserves a ton of the common roots. Any Slav seeing 'góra' will know what's up, not so much with phonetically equivalent 'gura'.

there is still distinction between ř and ž in Czech and it would be noticable to native speaker, though I guess non-native speakers would not notice the difference, same can't be said about Slovak ä vs e unless you try to speak extremely clearly and pronounce very hard (which would look odd), for most of the people ä was completely replaced with e

dřevo in Czech is actually drevo in Slovak

noga, drugi, bog, you can in all replace g with H and you will have CZ/SK version, seems Polish is in this aspect way closer to Russian with overused G instead H

Also, in Polish a regular 'c' is pronounced approximately like an English 'ts'

> pronounced as in 'put'/'dude'.

FYI: "put" and "dude" have a different vowel sound in most dialects of English.

Yeah, that's why you can hear 'polish/slavic accent' because it's hard for us to say it differently

Now practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaMcIbIWt_4

Thank you very much for this summary! I have a lot of polish colleagues in my work, and I always feel bad for not knowing how to start pronouncing their names aside from memorization (which I will promptly forget). This will definitively help me.

> and I always feel bad for not knowing how to start pronouncing their names

No worries, give it your best approximation and if it's way off or if someone cares a bit too much they will correct you, use the corrected version since then and you're golden.

We know it may be hard, no problem whatsoever and no one cares, don't worry about it one bit and definitely don't feel bad about it. I think poles actually prefer if you say their name in 'english way' rather than super-correctly in polish because it sounds more natural instead of being suddenly jerked back into polish for a millisecond and then back into english. Just remember the 'w'->'v' and you will get a lot of street cred for free

I took a Ukrainian class but this also applies to Polish:

The tip they gave English speakers for pronouncing "szcz", was that it sounded like the sh-ch connection between the words "Fresh Cheese".

Ironically, I didn't know how to pronounce it properly until then and it's in my last name! I always anglicized its pronunciation to "sha".

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.

Good points.

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... )

> (imagine someone saying "Dive" instead of "Dave")

So, an Australian? :D

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.

In parts of the American South, “wh” is still pronounced, though it is fading.

The South had a large influx of Scottish immigration 200-300 years ago and it still shows.

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? :)

Yeah, I was kind of blueballed by the page. Maybe the author expected pull requests for other languages?

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.

Of course.

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.

I agree, it's crazy how often the news talk about China nowadays and almost nobody pronounces the names correctly.

It’s not a big deal. Watch some news in Chinese and you’ll hear similar butchering.

It’s so exaggerated US cities are given totally different names in Chinese -there is little resemblance to the North American name of the city.

That's true, although in Chinese these are official transliterations as Hanzi.

I think if someone says Milan in English instead of Milano it's fine because the city has an English name as well.

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

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

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

> 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"?

Hmm, I don't know.

> 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.

[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.

> 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.

Compare the t in 'stellar' vs the t in 'tell'.

What's the difference between the t in 'stellar' vs the t in 'tell'? I seem to pronounce them identically, dictionary pronunciation guides (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis... and https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...) do not make a distinction..

[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.

Maybe these recordings are helpful to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant#Allophonic

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.

The Wikipedia articles on it might be approachable for a layperson with no particular background. I studied some linguistics in university and it's a hobby interest so I can't really judge that anymore. The articles have plenty of sound examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_(phonetics)

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...

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

A Chinese teacher once told me that pinyin is based off Russian

That's more wrong than correct. There's only one minor part of the design where we can see a relation: Latin q resembles Cyrillic ч.

> 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.

> So he did get the fricative right after all?

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

> "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.

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....

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

If you're interested in learning to pronounce non-English things, I highly recommend learning the IPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA

This would be a bad idea, due to inter-dialectal variation. As I said in an earlier comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27070624]:

> 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.

> 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.

The most basic form of respect is to get someone's name right. Or at least make the effort.

"Non-English" -> Mainland Chinese.

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

Thought the same, would like to know how to pronounce some Polish and other Scandinavian and European pronunciations as well.

That’s the one I looked for on the list.

I knew a guy that went by “Win”, is it always that?

Personally I can more or less do Nguyen but I still don't know how to pronounce Huynh.

Ng is a sound most Americans cannot make, including myself.

I just say 'wen' now, which is a step up from my initial 'engooyin'.

The "ng" sound exists in English, it's just that we don't have it at the beginning of words like Vietnamese does.

Say "singer", then say it again without the "si". Congratulations - you know how to pronounce a word that starts with "ng".

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.

A good addition might be to point out good first guesses for the vowels in non-English names (Examples used assume a General American accent):

* "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")

> "A" as in the "au" in "caught"

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?

Try "ah". This confusion could be caused by the caught-cot merger, possibly in combination with the father-bother merger.

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.

* Spanish: "hacer"

* 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).

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?

Oh wow, my mistake!

I personally have the merger, and so I misunderstood which direction the split went.

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.

In southern English English, it rhymes with the number 0 (nought).

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.

Gotta be careful with “caught”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot–caught_merger

"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/."

Most of New England, as well as much of old England

This too can be looked up

> 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.

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

Example?

I appreciate the effort, but I don't like this attitude of blaming the speaker. My company once even had a video saying that mispronouncing a name was a 'microaggression.' That insanity aside, there are sounds and consonants people just cannot make past a certain age. As long as we aren't being demeaning, why go for perfection? Nearly every foreigner pronounces the short 'i' in my name as 'ee', and I've never once cared enough to be upset or attempt to correct them.

Not even age... English-only speakers generally (let's say it never happened and my business is with British and Aus people mainly) cannot correctly pronounce either or both my first or last name. Some of them, especially the closer partners, want to try but we literally had sessions where we recorded me saying it and them saying it and listening to it to show them it was still different even though in their head it sounds exactly the same... and I really really don't care: I have a client calling me 'tiktok' (long before the tiktok app) because he got fed up struggling with my name. Fine with me.

Had a native English speaker as a coworker who struggled with U vs Ü in German. No matter how we tried to convey the difference in sound, "you're saying the same thing".

Thanks for sharing. The worst for me personally is 'ng'. My wife has tried a hundred times to teach me. To me it just sounds like a nasally 'n'. I tried that and get laughed at. She tries our short 'i' and gets laughed at. All in fun of course.

When I (German) was ~15 I was blaming esp. US folks for not managing to pronounce my handle correctly. That changed when I completely failed to pronounce Baltic and Arabic names to the name-holders satisfaction. I can't even hear where I am going wrong.

> I can't even hear where I am going wrong.

Same effect for me, once on a flight between Florida and New York I asked for water (I'm French), I did my best to pronounce it correctly but the flight attendant couldn't understand me. Another passenger told him "I think he wants water". For me, he used the exact same pronunciation as me.

I never understood what was wrong.

No kidding, try asking for "agua" (Spanish) next time.

> there are sounds and consonants people just cannot make past a certain age.

It's not that people can't make the sound above a certain age, it's that above a certain age it becomes difficult to learn new sounds that are not in your language.

This age varies by person, and for some people it is well before adulthood arrives (when you are likely to be exposed to a much greater diversity of names).

One of my linguistics professors, whose specialty is to learn and document 'dying languages', told me that if I wanted to learn a new language, I should do it before 30. Even for him — a trained linguist who knows the IPA forward and backwards — age makes a difference.

Thanks for your experience. I think the age is closer to 13 than 30.

You can learn and speak 'well enough' at many ages, but past a certain age you will always sound different, and it's much younger than 30 for the majority of folks.

I heard from a linguist that the best way to learn foreign pronunciation as an adult is to learn to imitate the accent of a native speaker of that language. Which of course is also a microagression, so you just can't win no matter what you do.

It makes sense, though. Trying to learn the grammar, vocabulary and phonology all at once makes you task saturated, learning them separately is easier.

> there are sounds and consonants people just cannot make past a certain age

That's false.

> why go for perfection?

It's politeness, nay, more than that: respect. Trying hard to produce a name as accurately as one can shows one's dialogue partner or audience that one is making an effort. A name is a very personal thing. People like it when they notice that they are paid attention to, and will approve of and in their mind raise the social status of the speaker.

Positive examples are:

• Max Miller of "tasting history" who quite obviously spends some time to learn a word or name correctly from an experienced speaker.

• Louis Rossmann who does not prepare, but is apologetic ("pardon me for butchering the pronunciation") or would altogether skip reading a name out loud rather than mangling it. This is okay because the text of the news article is also on the screen.

Negative examples are:

• Most other people who in general just hope for the best and simply blindly apply the rules from the embedding language (here: English), or if confronted with something out of their experience, just make shit up.

• Adam Ragusea whose argument boils down to "I am American, therefore exceptional and I get a free pass to knowingly and willingly mispronounce".

Maybe I should submit a pull request for Spanish names. It'd be nice to get Arabic, Hindi, and Russian in there too.

Common errors I've heard for Spanish:

- Juan being pronounced as [wan] rather than [huan] or [xuan]

- Jesus, of course

- Javier mysteriously gets mispronounced (only by British English speakers!) with the akSENT on the wrong syLOBBle, as ['hav jɛ] HAVyer instead of [hav 'jɛ] hav YAIR (the closest approximation fitting English phonotactics to the correct [xaβ i 'eɾ]).

Other people in the thread mention Jaime, for which [hajmej] is much more reasonable than the commonly heard [dʒejmi], and Vicente for which [bisɛntej] is a lot better than [vɪnsənt] or [vintʃɛntej]. (I'd be careful about [biθɛntej] though; Vicente might be from Latin America.) I bet Julián gets [dʒuliən] rather than [huli'an] pretty often, too.

The only one I've noticed from Hindi is people pronouncing "Rohit" as "Roheat" instead of the straightforward "Rohit". Like, "row hit". Couldn't be easier, but for some reason English-speakers screw it up all the time. But then, I don't speak Hindi or any other Indian language (yet!) so there may be a lot of others I'm overlooking.

Also in 02021 there is no excuse for not having some reasonable idea about how to pronounce "Nguyen", even if [wɪn] is the best you can do. Don't go around saying [nəgajən].

I would submit a small rule for almost all foreign names and words, or at the very least European and Middle Eastern ones: The letter "e" is almost never pronounced like "bee."

Though I shouldn't be, I am continually surprised by this Anglophone quirk. Just yesterday I was at a book club after we had all read the book "Piranesi," and without failure every American pronounced it "Piranisi." There are two different vowels there, i and e. Most languages besides English have the expectation that different letters are pronounced differently. I know English is weird in this regard.

My rule of thumb: if it's a foreign word and it has the letter "e," default to "eh" and you'll be close 90% of the time.

Well, it's certainly true that "e" for [i] is almost unique to English.

But it's pretty common for languages to preserve phonetic distinctions in their orthography that have disappeared from the spoken language—Latin American Spanish has silent "h", "z"/"c"/"s", and "b"/"v", so "Helvecia" would be pronounced exactly the same way if it were spelled any of "Helbecia", "Helbezia", "Helbesia", "Helvezia", "Helvesia", "Elbecia", "Elbezia", "Elbesia", "Elvecia", "Elvezia", or "Elvesia", and if you think "Helvezia" is impossible I refer you to "azimut", "zinc", and "enzima". And on my local blacksmithing group on Fecebutt I regularly see people spelling "haber" as "aver". Not to mention "k"/"qu"/"c"—no reason "cuákerismo", "folklórico", and "kilovatio" couldn't be spelled "cuáquerismo", "folclórico", and "quilovatio", but they aren't. ¿Kesesto? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4DbC1rbERg

In the other direction, it's pretty common for languages to have more vowels than the Latin alphabet, like English's 13 or so (14 in my idiolect). Even Latin itself had 10 vowels. There are several different ways to handle this problem: you can just hope people guess the right pronunciation from context (like modern English and classical Latin, though modern transcriptions of classical Latin often have macrons to help you out); you can use digraphs, as in "floe" and "each"; you can use a different alphabet with more vowels, like bopomofo (12 or 17 vowel signs, depending on whether you count codas that include consonants) or Cyrillic (9 or 13 vowel signs, depending on how you feel about diacritics) or hangeul (10, 21, or 22 vowel signs, again depending on how you count); or you can use diacritics, as in Portuguese "à" [a], "â" [ɐ], "ã" [ɐ̃], "à" [a]. Or some combination.

Speaking of Portuguese, though, many dialects of Portuguese are an exception to your generally excellent rule: "livre" is totally pronounced [livɾi] in, for example, Rio Grande do Sul. This is made more complicated by the fact that in stressed syllables it's totally [ɛ] and not [i].

I think [ɛ] "90% of the time" is an exaggeration given that only 86% of people are non-Chinese, and Chinese is another exception; as noted in the original article, "e" in hanyu pinyin is [ə], as in French (another 1% of people). But [i] is a very rare value for "e" outside English.

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.

If you happen to know German, ui --> au is an amazing discovery (huis --> Haus, uitgang --> Ausgang, various others).

I cannot thank you enough

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".

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.

> The basic ones I can think of that would increase accuracy measurably are:

> 1. How to pronounce “Nguyen”

You say that like there's only one way to do it.

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).

I just say "Win" and hope for the best. lol

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.

It's not even one name. Nguyễn is the very popular family name & Nguyên is a distinct given name with a distinct pronunciation.

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.

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."

Yeah, I don't understand this one either. One of the first few names in this doc too.

That one threw me too, quite a few did, and it's certainly not a north/south accent thing.

It might be easier just to use one of the many dictionaries with embedded audio.

> The vast majority of Chinese people in the world today writing their names using the English alphabet use a system called Pinyin

Pet peeve of man, but roman script is not the 'English alphabet'. Unless you think people write Spanish in 'English'...

If you want to be super pedantic and say you can write pinyin using the subset of the roman alphabet that English uses, I can in turn be even more pedantic and say Pinyin is meant to be written with tone marks.

Pinyin uses English style punctuation, which is different from what is used in other Latin alphabet languages

It also contains the letter ü. Do people also write German in English? :)

> The way English speakers say Tokyo as 'Toh-Kee-Oh' is the mistake you want to avoid here. Toh-kyoh.

I once came across a “how to speak English like a native” video on YouTube aimed at a Japanese audience. It spend a lot of time teaching the viewer to say Tokyo with 3 syllables instead of 2.

Which is funny, because pronouncing it correctly doesn't cause any confusion. I've been learning Japanese for like 10-15 years now and that has changed my pronunciation of Tokyo, and nobody is confused when I say it correctly. They never even try to correct their pronunciation, but I take that as further evidence that they don't even hear anything different.

> 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.

Yup, better would be "pronounce a surname from a non-English speaking culture in a way that sounds reasonably correct."

There’s a lot of redundancy in the opening part of the sentence.

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 Anthony is a transliteration rather than a mispronunciation is it not?

It's more of a translation than transliteration.

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.

No one is reading "Markus Antonius" and pronouncing it as "Marc Anthony".

A few historical figures have Anglicized names for whatever reasons, so we use those.

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.

I don't think they pronounce it "Clean-tone", though. Knowing Italian, it's more likely to be Clean-tohn.

Indeed, it's more like "tohn" (is there any common English word with that sound?)

It was in Spain, say 20 years ago, and they pronounced it as though it was Spanish words. I suspect you know a different demographic from that I knew.

Useless fact about Russian names surnames - if you'll try to read how it is written in an ID (e. g. a password) you'll likely mispronounce it, but if you'll read how people write their name in less formal situations e. g. in email, you have more chances to get it right.

There are multiple common ways to transliterate Russian to Latin alphabet [1]. For some reason for passports Russian authorities chose the scheme which is more confusing to English speakers than other popular schemes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian

Four points for Italian:

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.

And don't even get me started on French...

My last name has an 'ough' in it and that has made me intensely aware of that fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)

No one could produce the sounds for my name in Thailand, so I just picked a nickname (as is the local custom) and I've rolled with that as my primary name ever since.

Having a common name they’ve heard before helps to some degree here, but also there’s a Thai way of saying it and woe-betide you if you don’t say it the Thai way…

My favourite Thai pronunciation is the common Thai nickname “Apple” which is a loanword. However they pronounce it “ah-poon” because the character they use for the l sound (ล) is pronounced as an n in the terminal position. Also, Thais like to shorten words, so sometimes this nickname becomes simply Ple, pronounced “Poon” O_o

The schwa + 'l' ("le") is the exact sound I'm talking about. As a someone wanting to practice good privacy, having an alias is always nice.

It's pretty obvious now though. Most all 'weird' Thai pronunciations for English come from transliterating English into the RTGS Romanization system (whose sounds don't align with English, like 'p' being ป, the unaspirated version of that sound which English doesn't have) an then translating from the Romanization to the Thai abugida to be pronounced. Speculating, since someone misunderstood stress syllables always put a falling tone on the final syllable and now you have the Thai pronunciation. Pepsi isn't translated as phonemes as เพพซิ, but p-e-p-s-i as ป-เ-ป-ซ-•ี; smash in that falling tone and you get เป๊ปซี่ which honest to Godzilla sounds like bep-SEE instead of PEP-si. Ask someone to read your ID and they'll use this same system to read it instead of trying to think about how English writing works.

I don't care how you pronounce my name at all. However I do care about how people write it - if they have a way of knowing the correct spelling. I find it quite baffling that some people don't even bother to look at the signature, much less copy paste it.

Making people who dwell upon pronunciation is harder. The article misses half of the story by ignoring Chinese tonalities. Also in my experience many sounds from Eastern European languages are indistinguishable by some non-practitioners. (E.g. a difference between a "n" and "ň" is seldom heard by the French)

Wrong title, should read Pronouncing Chinese and Japanese Names For English Speakers

I thought it will be some great tool where I enter nationality/language of certain person, enter their name and I will get pronunciation in English, meanwhile all I got is some blog about pronouncing Chinese and Japanese names (which I already knew anyway)

> First, if you can remember only 3 things:

> Zh is like a J sound (as in "Jam") > X is like a Sh sound (as in "Shot") > Q is like a Ch sound (as in "China")

This is very useful to know, but I have a question. When converting the original characters into English, why didn't the creators of this system choose letters which more closely match the native pronunciation? For example, why "Qi" instead of "Chi"?

Native Chinese speaker (though not linguist) here.

For "q" and "ch", both are valid pinyin. "ch" in pinyin is actually the same as "ch" in English in terms of pronunciation. "q" in pinyin doesn't have a equivalent in English so it is just "q", which is similar to "q" but not really.

It was explained to me that the difference between "q" and "ch" (and the same for "j" and "zh") is the position of the tongue, that is it is rolled back in "ch" and "zh". Correct?

That is correct. However it's quite hard to describe how to pronounce it exactly in words. I guess it comes from hearing it and practicing it.

Basic-level Mandarin speaker here, but well-versed in Pinyin.

There are actually kind of 2 "sh" sounds and 2 "ch" sounds in Mandarin.

"Sh" is a "heavy" sound, as in "shot", where your mouth makes an O shape, whereas "X" is a much "lighter" sound that AI don't believe has a comparison in English.

Similarly, "Ch" is a "heavy" sound, and "q" is much lighter sound.

> When converting the original characters into English

Latin characters is correct, not English

> why didn't the creators of this system choose letters which more closely match the native pronunciation?

Because among other things the designers of Pīnyīn wanted the users to be able to type the letters on commonly available typewriters (in the 1950s).

A 100% match is of course the IPA, but that was exceedingly difficult to type until late after the advent of personal computers. Pīnyīn is a compromise. Compare:

tɕʰiː˥˩ · qì

ʈʂʰɻ̩˥ · chī

As a guy with a name that's hard for everyone except my nationality, I don't really mind much. People are not doing it to be assholes, sometimes it's just hard to make certain sounds, if they're not part of your language.

Now try German :) Personally I don't have a problem with foreign speakers butchering my name. And what's the correct pronouncation anyway for a first name that's the French version of a name with Greek origin that seems to be most popular in Russia, and a family name that's an Old-German word for a profession that died out many centuries ago but somehow survived in some backwoods.

If you speak any non-English language, you will know that this obsession with getting English-language speakers to pronounce foreign words "correctly" is unique. No speaker of any other language in the world even tries to pronounce foreign words like foreigners do, nor are they expected to.

Just pronounce it the way it's spelled, and if you're speaking English, that is the correct way. Join me in my militant quest to aggressively redefine what it means to "correctly" pronounce foreign words in English: go ahead and proudly say "g'nock-chi" for gnocchi and "buy frost" when you mean the Bifrost Bridge.

If someone gives you a hard time, smirk at them for being the unsophisticated provincial they are. "When I speak Japanese, I will say Kyoto with only two syllables, even accent on each. When I speak English, I shall proudly, without shame, pronounce it KEE-oh-toe. When I speak Dutch, I will pronounce Van Gogh with a soft consonant at the end. While speaking English, it shall remain van go."

Celebrating incorrectness, eh? Nothing wrong with being wrong, but not willing to learn... I don't know.

> If you speak any non-English language, you will know that this obsession with getting English-language speakers to pronounce foreign words "correctly" is unique

It's not unique, you think is unique because you are English-language speaker. Anyone speaking X natively will correct others learning X if they ask, but they will not mention it or pay attention to it if they are just talking, only encourage it. The proper 'correctness' will come much later when you really want to learn the language but at that point you will ask for the correcting yourself

And if you mean the names of people/places/movies/etc. how can you not be corrected? It's literally the name you are trying to say

> you think is unique because you are English-language speaker

I am a native English-language speaker, but I speak other languages as well. In all languages, there is exactly zero expectation that speakers will pronounce English words like English-speakers do. Because in all languages, foreign words are remade into native words. As it had been in English until the mid 20th century.

>And if you mean the names of people/places/movies/etc. how can you not be corrected?

Not sure what language you speak natively, but no one corrects Italians for saying "Germania" instead of Deutschland, nor Spaniards for saying "Nueva York", nor the French for saying "Angleterre".

You are being downvoted, as should you, but I still want to answer your questions.

> Not sure what language you speak natively

Polish

>but no one corrects Italians for saying "Germania" instead of Deutschland, nor Spaniards for saying "Nueva York", nor the French for saying "Angleterre".

It's literally the second thing people learn when learning a second language. The first is how to say your name, the second is where are you from. And then you pretend to be from somewhere else and do to the above. After the first lesson of any language the only thing you know is your name and names of other countries lol so I'm not sure what are you talking about

> You are being downvoted

I am not being downvoted

> as should you

Downvotes are for "contravenes guidelines" not "holds opinions with which I disagree"

> lol so I'm not sure what are you talking about

With sincere respect, I think you should take the time to understand my argument instead of assuming it is invalid.

> no one corrects Italians for saying "Germania" instead of Deutschland

This is a strawman.

Italian here. I would never dream of using the word "Germania" with someone that does not speak Italian expecting them to understand that it's the Italian way to pronounce Deutschland.

Great.

> I would never dream of using the word "Germania" with someone that does not speak Italian...

That's the strawman. In the example, we're talking about Italians, speaking Italian, not being corrected for speaking non-Italian words like Italians do.

So, when speaking Italian, if a German insisted that you pronounce his homeland as Deutschland not Germania you would think he was a nut.

So, when speaking English, why would you insist that someone saying "brusheta" is wrong? Help me understand.

"Just pronounce it the way it's spelled" might make sense in some languages, and it probably makes a lot of sense in Russian, say, where the person who transcribed a name from Latin letters has already decided how it should be (mis)pronounced (though the position of the stress makes a big difference in Russian), but it doesn't make sense in English because the spelling is rather inconsistent even if you're looking just at ordinary everyday words like "machine", "chemical", "bough", "cough", "put", "but", whatever.

Yes. This confusion of spellings is due to English having a long history of literacy. The k in knock is silent, but once was pronounced. The pronunciation of knock changed but its spelling did not. Nevertheless, there are historical reasons for these various spellings, its not just "whatever". In any case, these are English words, not foreign words.

English words follow specific conventions. This is why English speakers who read "bruschetta" will not pronounce the ch with a hard k, as Italians do. Unless they are told this pronunciation is "incorrect". If it's really important to bruschetta marketers that English speakers pronounce it the way Italians do, they should consider spelling it using English conventions, eg brusketa

As you pointed out, English spelling is confusing. We don't need to add to the cognitive load by insisting that words spelled according to foreign conventions be pronounced that way too

You have it backwards. Pronunciation in English does not follow many strict conventions -- and when it does it doesn't do so consistently -- and it's precisely because it's taken on so many loan-words and kept something close to the original pronounciation.

You suggest "ch" should be pronounced as in "cheese" in English. Well, what about chemistry, christian, school, alchemy, anarchy, anchor, chaos, archeology, echo, and literally hundreds of other words in English with a hard "ch"?

Yes, unless a child is told that pronouncing them with a soft "ch" is "incorrect" they will pronounce all those words incorrectly if they come across them written down. Such is the burden of the English language, the language with the least consistent spelling-to-pronunciation rules on Earth.

Yes, English spelling is not regular. It's mostly from all those loanwords. It's unfortunate, and is the cause of such weirdly quirky Anglophone things such as "spelling tests" in schools, and "spelling bees" where one can win a modicum of fame and money -- they don't have this in other alphabetic languages. But's it's the way it is and refusing to pronounce words correctly isn't taking some kind of principled stand.

(Or should we say, for all those, "If it's really important to schoolteachers that English speakers pronounce it the way Italians do, they should consider spelling it using English conventions, eg skool"?)

> refusing to pronounce words correctly

That's skewing the argument. The discussion is "should English speakers be expected to pronounce foreign words as they are pronounced in the original language"?

Not "pronouncing words as foreigners do is the correct pronunciation when speaking English"

Despite the stereotype, it's not Americans running around telling foreigners how to pronounce English words in their native tongue. No American tells Poles how to pronounce New York nor Yoruba how to pronounce jazz nor Italians how to pronounce pepperoni.

> Despite the stereotype, it's not Americans running around telling foreigners how to pronounce English words in their native tongue.

This seems to be the root of your annoyance, but it's also false. If an Italian said "President Bee-den" there would be plenty of Americans falling over themselves to let them know that it's pronounced "Bye-den." I've been there. I've experienced it.

Were they speaking Italian at the time, or English?

It doesn't matter, they'd try to pronounce it correctly.

This whole thing is a strange strawman regarding your belief that other cultures pronounce things however that spelling would be pronounced in their country, but there's simply no citation for that.

You brought up the pronunciation of "gnocchi." I have heard French people pronounce it while speaking French (I have travelled in France a lot). They pronounce it as the Italians do, while speaking French.

How did they learn that? If a French kid saw the word spelled out the first time, and hadn't been taught Italian, they'd have no idea what to do with that "ch." (The "gn" would have been less confusing.)

Yet they did pronounce it correctly, because, like most words, the word would generally have been learned orally. And if some French school kid started saying "gno-shi," his peers would have corrected them.

> It doesn't matter

That is exactly the entire point. I dispute the idea that "correctly" means what you say it means.

If Italians collectively decided that "be DEN" was the correct Italian pronunciation of the American name Biden, it's arrogant to tell them "No, when speaking Italian, you must say BYE den"

If you can agree with that even a little bit, then you agree a little bit with my larger point.

I don't know what conventions that would be, are you familiar with the poem 'The Chaos'? https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

Just one example" " Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it's written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe."

It seems that any English speaker expecting a certain pronunciation from spelling alone would have quite a hard time.

Agreed. Changing pronunciation mid-sentence to a language you don’t even speak is very difficult, and in any case comes off as pretentious.

Non-native speakers will be used to the English pronunciation, even if it’s wrong. If you try and pronounce the name “correctly”, the chances are you’ll mess it up and cause even more confusion.

q.v.: The guy who over pronounces foreign words

https://youtu.be/fKGoVefhtMQ

> No speaker of any other language in the world even tries to pronounce foreign words like foreigners do

[citation desperately needed]

I'm a mothertongue Italian speaker. Never in my life I heard someone pronouncing "Bill Gates" or even "Google" with the Italian grammar/pronunciation rules.

People would routinely ask how to pronounce foods in a Japanese or Chinese restaurant. Or thank the waiter/waitress for correcting them.

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

This is incredibly arrogant.

I absolutely agree, parent comment is completely incorrect.

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

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

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

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

> Never in my life I heard someone pronouncing "Bill Gates" or even "Google" with the Italian grammar/pronunciation rules.

But if you native Italian speakers did happen to pronounce it "gah-tes" or "googleh" or whatever while speaking Italian, Americans would not insist that Italians are pronouncing it wrong. They would just say that's how Italians pronounce it.

By contrast, if a native English speaker pronounces an Italian word according to how it's spelled according to English conventions (we're using "bruschetta" as the example, so, as BREW-shet-uh), while speaking English an Italian will insist that this pronunciation is wrong.

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

> This is incredibly arrogant.

I was making a joke. Probably didn't land well with those who disagree with me.

It might be a cultural difference, but it strikes me as incredibly arrogant to tell people who are speaking their own native language that they are pronouncing a word wrong simply because it originated in your native language and they don't pronounce it like you do.

e.g https://youtu.be/rHBFt11zz7U

>If you speak any non-English language, you will know that this obsession with getting English-language speakers to pronounce foreign words "correctly" is unique. No speaker of any other language in the world even tries to pronounce foreign words like foreigners do, nor are they expected to.

Oh boy, generalize much?

If I had a dime every time an American explained to me how to properly pronounce Porsche, Adidas, Bach, etc....

Americans drive this too. If you read carefully I didn't say we don't.

You wrote "Despite the stereotype, it's not Americans running around telling foreigners how to pronounce English words in their native tongue."

Sure, technically 'Americans running around telling foreigners how to pronounce their own words in their native tongue.' is different, but it seems an even lower threshold.

If you'd like to address the original point, I'm happy to discuss. No, Americans generally do not tell people how to pronounce English words in their own native language. Not really sure the point you're making here.

I'm glad that you have full control over every American all of the time, but my experience is quite different.

You're telling us all that you have, on a regular basis, seen Americans telling non-English speakers how to pronounce English words while speaking the foreign tongue?

Reread your own comment to which I answered, which is quite different from what you're arguing now.

Honestly, I can't tell if you're just trolling with your baiting blatant indiscriminate generalizations 'No speaker of any other language in the world', etc. There's no point in arguing any of it, it speaks for itself.

> If you speak any non-English language, you will know that this obsession with getting English-language speakers to pronounce foreign words "correctly" is unique.

It's really not.

The entire point of language is to be understood by others. If you're unwilling to take any time to find out how to be understood, then you're really just failing at basic communication. It's not up to others to interpret your misunderstanding of how to correctly say something, it's up to you to put some effort into being understood.

And if you're smirking at people instead of taking the opportuinity to learn, well, I wish you all the best in your small minded world.

> "The entire point of language is to be understood by others. If you're unwilling to take any time to find out how to be understood, then you're really just failing at basic communication. It's not up to others to interpret your misunderstanding of how to correctly say something, it's up to you to put some effort into being understood."

These are all true statements. They are also non-sequiturs: true statements that have no bearing on the argument.

The question here is: Who gets to decide the correct pronunciation of a foreign word? Who gets to say brew-SKET-ta is correct and BREW-shet-uh is wrong? Italians? Native English speakers?

If you think "Well, clearly, Italians, because they invented bruschetta" then where is the line? Why would you not then pronounce "prosciutto" pro-SHOOT-toh? And the "Bifrost Bridge" BEEF-roast? And "sauna" SOW-na?

Who gets to decide that Hausa people must pronounce "New York" as Americans do, and that Japanese must no longer add a vowel onto the end of foreign words like "Disney Land"?

I'd love your principled answers to those questions.

I don't want my name to be pronounced natively outside my native language. It would feel strange. I very much prefer the English bastardisation of it, which fits better in an English sentence.

My name is Freek, a sort-of common Dutch name, usually people call me Frank from the start (when the name is not written anywhere and they only hear it being said), I'll leave it at that for Starbucks situations. Otherwise, in a Teams chat for example, people see my name and they call me Freak hesitantly. If I leave it like that they start to use it with more confidence. For long term relations I tell people to pronounce it like "Frake" (like brake and snake), which is very close to how it sounds if a Dutch person says my name.

Over time, I've come to see my name as a nice conversation starter.

The "opposite" side of this issue is people who intentionally adopt a pronounceable name of their destination country. I may have observed that, but I'm not really sure. Some of my Chinese students, who could barely speak French, were called totally french-sounding names like "Cédric" or "Pauline". I guess they invented them on the spot, to avoid people butchering their real names. But I never thought of a non-awkward way to ask them about that.

Chinese has this idiom 入乡随俗, meaning in other people's land you follow other people's custom.

It is a culture of us to make the hosts feel comfortable by giving ourselves a name of the hosting country, though of course some Chinese chose not to.

A french friend who worked in China for a long time gave himself a very nice Chinese name 欧大壮, literally Europe, Big And Strong. It is a very down to earth Chinese name.

He was liked instantly when he introduced his Chinese name.

At uni I had a Vietnamese classmate in my group called Thanh. This was easy enough to pronounce, or so we thought. One day he introduced us to his brother, called Than. If I remember correctly, the difference between their names was in the melodic intonation, which none of us could master.

Ultimately, we ended up naming then Hans and Daan. I don't recall if they were bemused or bewildered by our inability to distinguish their names, but they accepted their new names with grace.

Oddly enough, pronouncing non-German names is much easier for me as a German-native speaker as many sounds (in the linked github above) are pronounced the same in German as in e.g. Japanese (thus we'd always pronounce "a" as "ah" anyway or "i" as "ee"). I change how I pronounce letters for English, not for many other languages.

A great idea, and useful not just for English speakers. My French background doesn’t make me any better at pronouncing Chinese names!

> My French background doesn’t make me any better at pronouncing Chinese names!

It would have, back when the sound currently written "r" was written "j" instead.

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.

I cannot second the advice to remove the i in Yamashita such that it becomes Yamashta.

It could come across as rude, like you're just trying to spit the person's name out of your mouth to make way for more important words.

Just say ya-ma-shi-ta.

There is a way to actually devoice it so that it still occupies four beats without a prominent "i"; that is more acceptable: ya-ma-sh-ta. The airflow and tongue placement is more or less the same as "shi", just the voice isn't there.

If you don't speak Japanese, don't try to fudge it.

The "shta" elision is acceptable when you're using shita as "down", "bottom" rather than part of a name (even if it means "down" in that name). Or when -shita is the past tense of -suru.

E.g. "kutsushta" -> socks. "benkyōshta" -> studied.

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

I usually don't bother. People mess it up regardless, so for unknowns I'll use the "English" name of Tony. I hate it, but it's pronounceable by lots of speakers, including origins of several languages which also have trouble with other parts of my name. "Tony" works phonetically very well for a lot of people.

Other than the 'r' sound, it seems to overlap with Eunice.

(based on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDCDCFVuIls )

More or less.

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

It always puzzles me how little knowledge of foreign languages the average English native speaker has.

Every time I hear an English speaker trying to pronounce Italian or Spanish words it generally ends up in a complete disaster (especially Italian). For instance, lots of folks haven't realized that the Great Vowel Shift happened, and so try to pronounce vowels as in English, without realizing that 99% of cases, that's wrong.

Also, English speakers have an incredibly hard time not only pronouncing but even understanding the whole concept of geminated consonants, which makes them funnily destroy Italian or Japanese names (gemination is especially important for Italian, where certain words are otherwise undistinguishable, se calo/callo, casa/cassa, pala/palla, ..).

I’d be interested in some examples for both, if you could!

I’m a stupid/ignorant English speaker, because I only know English and German so can’t pronounce Italian intuitively.

Italian is somewhat simple to pronounce (probably it is not, but I like believing that).

- The cardinal rule is that EVERY SINGLE LETTER MUST BE READ. We don't write unnecessary stuff, we don't eat letters like in French.

- The only exception is the letter h, which we use sparingly by itself as a Latin leftover, and is ALWAYS silent. Like "ho" and "o" sound the same.

- there are only 7 vowels (English has around 16? 17?), and no "weird" consonants.

- E and O have two allophones, but everyone in Italy has a different accent so it's quite irrelevant how you pronounce them as long as it's a "boring" E and O, like in the English "eh". The O sound is especially difficult for English speakers, because O is almost always pronounced like "ou" /oʊ/. Just try to drop the /ʊ/ part. Italian vowels are boring and plain. They don't sound fancy or complicated. They are barebones and flat.

- In general, 1 letter = 1 sound. This is quite a hard rule, and it's rarely broken.

- There's a few gotchas to this, like [gn] and [gl] which sound like the Spanish [ñ] and [ll] respectively¹.

- [gh] is always a hard g, like in English "get". [gi] and [ge] are _always_ soft Gs, like the one in the English word "justice". The same applies to [c]: [ch] is hard (read it as k), [ci]/[ce] are like in "cherry".

- [l] is never dark, while in English it often is. L in Italian always sounds the same, /l/, as in "litter".

- Syllables are not as stressed as in English. English has this tendency to "squish" one part of a word together and then slow down at the end. Italian usually has a quite "constant" tempo, with a bigger emphasis on the "accent", which is a stress put on a specific syllable.

The biggest hurdle IMHO for English speakers are geminated sounds (i.e. double letters), which do not exist _at all_ AFAIK in English, and that are often fundamental to distinguish words in Italian. It's something conceptually similar to what Japanese go through when they learn English and discover that so many words require a distinction between /r/ and /l/, like right and light.

For instance, "pollo" means chicken, while "polo" is pole. An English speaker will usually pronounce them the same.

It's also important to remember that English went through the Great Vowel Shift, so it's whole alphabet is now way more messed up compared to basically every other language that uses the Latin alphabet. Also, the Latin alphabet was designed around the phonology of Latin, so it's very good at representing Italian phonetically, while quite bad to represent Germanic languages (way too many vowels). Given that you know German, you can use the German reading of vowel letters with Italian, and it would probably work better than the English one. German also has lots of vowels, but they tend to write them closer to how Romance languages do (so A is /a/, e is /e/, ...)

¹ [gl] sounds /ʎ/ only when followed by i, like in "sceglie". Otherwise, it sounds like /gl/ like in English "glue"

There are some geminated sounds in English, mostly in compounds e.g. "roommate", "midday", "misspell".

That's right, I had never realized those existed. They could be a good way to teach people how to pronounce geminated sounds.

You're making some very broad generalizations, which is why you are puzzled IMO.

Firstly, "English speakers" includes many people who speak multiple languages. Technically, English speakers also includes people who are non-native English speakers, who by definition know another language.

Secondly, there are many native English speakers who speak a second language, or who are at least exposed enough to second languages to know how they sound. For example, many states in the United States have a very large Hispanic population, parts of Canada have people who speak both English and French, many people from England speak second languages (French is fairly common if I recall correctly).

I think who you're thinking of are only the native English-speaking people who are not much exposed to other languages. There is a fairly large population of these, because the United States is fairly large and has lots of areas that are surrounded by only English speakers (as opposed to most other countries in the world, whose neighbors speak another language). Of course if you're only looking at the subset of people who aren't exposed to another language, you'd expect to see them have little knowledge of foreign languages!

(Side note: I wonder if even this phenomenon is decreasing, given greater immigration, the Internet, foreign TV/Movies being more available/popular, etc.)

In my (limited) experience there is no discernible difference between Americans and British people mispronouncing Italian (or German, for that matter) and to a degree Spanish words.

I think this is what the parent poster meant. If your native language is English AND you don't know any others, then your mispronunciations will be similar.

This, exactly. I also saw a quite big difference between monolingual English speakers and Italian speakers. The average monolingual Italian speaker that has had a basic exposure to certain English words through TV or media in general WILL definitely mispronounce the words, but the result is never so corrupted and garbled to result incomprehensible to an English speaker. For instance, the average Italian might pronounce a word like "cocktail" as /ˈkoktɛl/ instead of the correct English /ˈkɒkteɪl/, or "underground" as /andɛrˈgraund/ instead of /ʌndəˈɡɹaʊnd/; I've yet to find an English speaker that hasn't studied Italian that doesn't do butcherings like /ʃəˈbɑːda/, which an Italian won't definitely recognize as "ciabatta" due to the fact that it is supposed to sound /tʃaˈbatta/. I think it's a process somewhat similar to how Japanese corrupts loanwords, but in the other direction: English has a vastly larger array of sounds compared to Italian, so speakers somewhat fail to understand that Romance languages (except French and friends, but we don't talk about French) are usually much "flatter" in sound than your average Germanic language with 16 vowels.

I wonder if it is indeed a difference in base language, or just a difference of exposure. I assume that, even without "trying", almost every Italian has more exposure to English than English speakers have to Italian.

My personal theory is that it's mostly due to exposure and cultural influence. The English speaking world is mostly refractory towards the non-English speaking world, i.e., books and movies published in Italian will almost always never get an English translation because there really isn't a market for translated novels. In the same way, Italian singers and bands have 0 chances of success unless they start singing in English; that's also the reason why at Eurovision only a very few countries sing in their own languages.

This causes people to hear English sounds since their very early childhood - in song, mostly. Movies are dubbed, but in general names of non translatable things are kept as-is, with a "flattened" but somewhat correct pronounciation.

English is also a mandatory subject in school. While the vast majority of students suck badly in that subject (I think among my classmates only 3 people, counting myself, had a mark above a passing grade in high school), at least you get that Millennials and some Gen X at least can grasp how stuff is supposed to get pronounced, so they can correct their parents or relatives when they say something completely out of place. I don't think there are enough people knowing a foreign language in English-speaking countries to offset this, so the "creative" pronunciations tend to stick and become the norm.

I find it very annoying when Italian speakers pronounce foreign names using sounds that do not exist in Italian. Pronouncing “Merkel” as a German would, makes it impossible to write and unrecognisable to 99% of Italian speakers. It is not reasonable to expect people to be able to pronounce and process sounds from all languages. It doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t even try, but if your name is “ Friedrich” you should accept that it’s unpronounceable for an Italian and that “fredrik” is probably good enough. Likewise I don’t expect English speakers to pronounce my name correctly (they never will), and I’m sure I don’t pronounce theirs as a native speaker would.

As a side note, I find it funny that the English seem to enjoy pronouncing guttural Rs and nasal sounds when they say French names. The English love saying “Macron” (usually producing the sound of a lung exploding and being expelled through their nose), while they don’t mind vandalising Italian or Spanish names.

> if your name is “ Friedrich” you should accept that it’s unpronounceable for an Italian and that “fredrik”

I think that the only unpronounceable things in "Freidrich" for an Italian speaker are the guttural Rs and the /ç/ sound at the end. Most Italians are acquainted to the fact that 'ei' is /ai/ in German thank to South Tyrol and names such as "Einstein" being common knowledge - nobody would ever pronounce it /'einstein/. Thus an Italian would probably not mind pronouncing it as /fraidrik/, with a rolled R (which isn't technically incorrect in German, AFAIK) and a /k/ sound in place of /ç/.

I think people really overdo the idea that certain sounds simply cannot be replicated by non-native speakers. If there is any remote proximity to native speakers and a bare minimum effort is made to practice tricky sounds, it's totally doable.

I certainly picked up French quite easily in school. Later, in university, I picked up Italian very easily (though I had some exposure from older relatives). More recently, I absorbed a tiny bit of "hey how are you" Mandarin from coworkers, who were surprised at my ability to accurately parrot some words after a little bit of practice.

Sure certain sounds can definitely be picked by non-native speakers. I'm not an English or German native speaker, but I've learned to pronounce /x/, /ç/, /θ/, /ð/ and the guttural Rs just fine, all sounds I didn't grow up with. It took time, exercise and willpower, and I'm kind of a language nut so I always put in some extra effort to get my pronunciation right. A common person that doesn't know the slightest amount of German is definitely not going to put in the effort to learn how to say [ch] right, just to say "Freidrich".

Of course you can replicate all sounds, I can pronounce Friedrich, but an Italian speaker with no exposure to German (which is 99% of the population) will inevitably butcher it, because both the R and the “voiceless palatal fricative” do not exist in Italian phonology. This hypothetical Friedrich can either accept that he is talking to foreigners that can’t pronounce his name as native Germans, or he may spend 2 hours trying to explain how to articulate a voiceless palatal fricative, assuming he can put that in words (I wouldn’t know where to start to explain how to pronounce “gli”). We all know what a polite person would do.

Perhaps my perspective is skewed as a Canadian consistently exposed to multiple languages in media and in casual conversation.

Italy shares borders with two German majority speaking countries (Switzerland and Austria) and is close to Germany itself. Wouldn't Northern Italians especially have good exposure to them?

As for the Italian 'gli', that was probably the hardest for me to pick up.

No, apart from Alto Adige, which is an Austrian region occupied after WWI, still inhabited by Austrians, nobody has any exposure to German. (I honestly don’t know if they consider themselves Italians or Austrians, but they usually are native German speakers and have limited knowledge of Italian).

It is hard to find a 45+ year old Italian who knows a foreign language.

A Canadian journalist and youtuber covered this same topic recently in a decent amount of depth, I found it a decent watch:

Title: "The Impossible Challenge of Names"

subtext: "Foreign names are the biggest challenge of language, and it doesn't seem like we've ever come up with any good way of dealing with them — though some western countries have been trying."

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx7cIb1IRLc

Youtube is surprisingly great for this, has a "how to pronounce" video for just about every name going. (Usually more than one, so you can verify).

It is definitly a good advice to check out more than one source in that regard ;) :

https://youtu.be/d3_DjiLLDfo

I was wondering if someone could comment on the pronunciation of "q" in Chinese (Mandarin). From time to time the advice that "q" is pronounced as "ch" pops up. While I have no issues with "q" sounding like "ch" in "quan", but it bothers me that the "q" in "qian" sounds nothing like "ch" to me.

Thank you very much in advance!

Edit: added "but", "to me".

"Pronounce q like ch" is good advice for a English speaker, but it's worth noting that pinyin does have another consonant that's actually written "ch", and the two are quite different from each other. To my ear they kind of "sit on either side" of the English "ch", and it's not surprising to me that sometimes they don't seem to match.

Native Chinese speaker here.

I tried to tell the difference between "q" and "ch" here by pronouncing them. As the other comment noted, "ch" is actually a valid pinyin as well, so they are definitely different.

My observation is that for "q" your tongue tip is closer to your teeth and for "ch" your tongue tip is somewhere in the middle of the mouth. Hope that helps.

Is this the difference between cz and ć?

https://translate.google.com/?hl=pl&sl=pl&tl=en&text=cza%20%...

Click on the speaker under Polish.

I'm native polish speaker and after 3 years of learning mandarin, and I need to somehow confirm, and somehow rebute. Pinyin ch is almost exactly like polish cz. Pinyin q is quite close to ć, but to make that sound you need to touch your lower teeth with your tongue. In polish the tongue stays mostly flat. There is similar difference in x vs ś and j vs dź.

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.

Another aspect of pronouncing Japanese names is paying attention to how long you're supposed to hold a syllable. I knew a Japanese researcher named Yuuki (moderately common Japanese name meaning "courage") who was bothered by people always calling him Yuki (common girl's name meaning "snow") so he just went by a chosen English name.

This is not helped by many romanisations omitting the long vowels entirely (e.g. Tokyo).

There's a Sass for that:

https://cloud.name-coach.com/

I have my phone set up in English. Google maps is hilarious and basically unusable when it tries to pronounce street names.

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.

Wikipedia/wiktionary is an amazing resource for pronunciations if you can read IPA (or refer to their guides). It’s not a perfect solution but it’ll get you closer than just guessing until you get an opportunity to actually talk to the person. I’ve had great success with it for Irish names.

I know a Xue, and her pronounciation didn't sound like shoe.

More like kshoe but the end was something in between an "u" and a German "ü".

Languages are hard. I just have to think about "Ш" and "Щ" which both sound a bit like "sh", but with subtle differences for English speakers.

Decades of watching cricket has given me a bit of a handle on South Asian names. And I enjoy watching cricket.

One of us! One of us! One of us!

You can't solve this problem by compounding the issue: forcing people to know the spelling of every language.

The solution is to give people your IPA pronunciation. Instead of listening pronouns in Twitter you can list the pronunciation: "Ioan Răducanu /i'wan rədukanu/"

I would love see something like that for Germans. I have the impression that Germans get quite lazy or simply ill will to even try to pronounce it and it's quite disrespectful. If you are German and you are reading it. That's for you.

The sound most English speakers guess in these cases is to make them sounds like the Zh sound in the middle consonant in the English word "measure".

Then why the hell do we transliterate that sound as "Zh" instead of J?

Not sure of the reason, but worth noting that a good chunk of people in the south of China pronounce it like the English “z”.

The title reminds me my favourite yt video about Korean name.

https://youtu.be/p1RKkRCiU90 Title: "having a non-white name" by ProZD

I've had some luck with looking up name pronunciations on forvo.com. For common names, you can sometimes get several different recordings by native speakers, which may also help with regional variations.

Is this the wrong link? All I see is how to pronounce 3 Chinese consonants.

> rhymes with "fun" in US, in UK rhymes with the second syllable of London

Are there USians who pronounce fun like this (“I’m having fn”)? Struggling to hear it.

Question for someone knowledgeable - why doesn't Chinese transliteration make rational use of vowels and consonants?

Why Q? Why not simply 'Ch'?

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.

> “Ching” ㄔㄧㄥ is a technically valid syllable in the Pinyin system

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.

Yes, I mean that it is a valid syllable in the orthography rules but that does not imply it can be pronounced sensibly.

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?

[1] http://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202107151999911843.html [2] https://www.marieclaire.com.tw/lifestyle/art/58762

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.

https://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/break-through-chine...

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.

I am no expert, I asked the same question.

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

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

Thank you for clarifying.

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.

You can listen here:

https://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/transla...

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.

Perhaps add the phonetic pronunciation beside the name. Of course people would need to lean the phonetic alphabet.

> Zh is like a J sound (as in "Jam")

More like the "dg" sound, as in "Draw"

Nguyen... I've been told how it's pronouned several times but I always forget.

I've heard it's pronounced "Win", but don't take my word for it.

do you mean Chinese and Japanese names for English speakers?

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.

Pinyin has done more harm than good for translation.

Slavic pet peeve: Ivan is ee-`vahn, not `eye-vun.

Why the fuck is "zh" not transliterated into "j" if it suppose to be a Jay sound?

"j" is already used to represent another consonant that arguably sounds closer to Jay (not that it's supposed to specifically match how English uses the Latin alphabet, but in this case it doesn't matter). Both of these consonants could maybe have been represented by "j" since they're always used in different contexts (IIRC), but pinyin avoids writing multiple sounds in the same way.

The title should be “How to pronounce Chinese surnames”

The initial commit was 2 hours ago as I type this. The author is probably planning to expand it.

It annoys me when people use Github for blogging because that‘s what they‘re used to, especially if it‘s not the best medium.

What do you think, are elaborate markdown tables the best way to show how to pronounce something, or… a wav file?

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 mean, that sounds like a you problem more than anything.

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.

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