Hacker News Reader

> the name is pronounced Parandzem (not P'aranjem)

Even with the same pronunciation, the spelling depends on the chosen romanization scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Armenian

(Based on the table in that article, I think "P'aranjem" is using the ISO 9985 scheme.)

View on HN

I mean, I've never seen an English speaker pronounce 'j' as 'dz', but the Armenian letter ձ is pronounced exactly like 'dz' and never like 'j'. So, dare I say, ISO 9985 is wrong?

The goal of a romanization isn't always to represent the pronunciation in English. They may have other goals, like a one-to-one mapping of letters between alphabets or something. English doesn't pronounce 'q' like 'ch' or 'c' like 'ts' but that's more or less what they represent in pinyin.

So I agree you are right about the pronunciation. I just don't think the article claimed they were spelling it phonetically for English.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com