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Comment by jaimebuelta | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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

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...

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

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..."

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!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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