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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

Please forgive my ignorance, but how do you pronounce Hodów?

Hodoof if it where spelled in English. V is probably the correct letter to use for W instead of F but its sounds closer to F when pronounced

You can also go to Cyrillic and then use the standard English transliteration: Hodów -> Ходув -> Khoduv.

Though it might also have been Годов -> Hodov, with the Г pronounced in the Ukrainian / Belarusian / Ruthenian way, as a throaty H. Seeing old Polish names through those languages is often a worthwhile enterprise.

EDIT: I forgot to do the obvious, and check the current name of the town: Годів - Hodiv - https://maps.app.goo.gl/h6zA61k6CNTAEf787. Here Г is pronounced as a throaty H.

You can use google translate - it pronounces it correctly - https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=hod%C3%B3w&...

That’s a rarity. Wikipedia sometimes has IPA pronunciations and even – once in a blue moon – audio snippets that I trust far more when I don’t know the language.

YouTube has content farms that produce 30s clips for “how to pronounce <any word under the sun>”. YT used to be a good option before the content farms took over, now I hear some ridiculous pronunciations just for the sake of the clicks and the ad views and can’t recommend it any more.

Polish is almost completely phonetic. You can put any polish word there and 99.99% of the time it will read it correctly.

Well except when it doesn't, I guess. All combination of consonants may unpredictably get rounded down to f (wszystko) ą pronunciation at the end of the word has a wide range of sounds depending on regional accents, ę is the same but worse because it's usually ignored even in common words (część), you have all the usual Ci Cy Ca rules for palatal consonant, except these characters can also be part of longer sequences that are hard coded to a specific sound like szcz that is pronounced like "an untuned FM radio sound"

I would not be so optimistic to say 99%, but I think a lot of things like that could be actually assigned to some rules that are, well, actually applied pretty consistently. E.g. isn't devoicing of 'w' in 'wszystko' just the case of clusters of voiced and voiceless consonants? Similary 'Hodów' shows devoicing consonants at the end of a word.

I'm not sure about 'ą' - some examples would handy, but if we are talking about differences due to regional accents then following rules would be perfectly fine. With 'ę' - how do you pronounce 'część' actually? Again, I think the worst that can happen normally would be to be judged as 'ą ę'* ;)

I think that in general Polish pronunciation is fairly 'regular' and with applying just a few rules you would be almost always OK. Obviously I haven't try to learn Polish as my second language.

* For non-Polish speakers - if someone is 'ą ę' it means that (among others) he/she tries to be overly 'correct' in pronunciation.

Well ę in część is without the n never heard it with n, but I definitely use the n in words like jęzik, so yeah you cannot generalize between those nasals and "say n if it's in the middle of a word" only goes so far

Ą is a bit more regular at that, so usually loses the n when at the end of a word and never heard without n when in the middle of a word, except in places like Warsaw, and other cities up north, where I was called out as gòralski (which is funny considering I'm Italian, I guess I'm learning polish wrong but convincingly enough)

My first reaction was that I would pronounce 'ę' in both 'część' and 'język' in the same way, i.e. without 'n'. But I can see that pronunciation of these words as per https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cz%C4%99%C5%9B%C4%87 and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/j%C4%99zyk disagrees. And then a quick search brought these 'simple' four rules (https://sjp.pwn.pl/poradnia/haslo/Wymowa-samoglosek-nosowych...) for pronouncing 'ą' and 'ę' in the middle of a word ;-)

So yeah, everything is easy, simple and obvious when you are a native speaker and I stand corrected :)

Ah also chcesz I've no idea how to pronounce that maybe an X at the beginning and a fshhhh at the end no idea.

There are rules to devoicings, it's just that nobody bothers to remember them because you know what sounds good and what doesn't "by ear".

Sz/cz etc are just your regular dyphtongs, like English sh/ch/th etc - they are perfectly regular and phonetic. The only tricky one is rz, but it's also regular - there's a rule saying when you read it as ż and when you read it as sz depending on the preceding letter. And there's like 3 exceptions when you read it as separate letters - in words like "tarzan" :)

As for regional differences - all versions are correct usually. People in Kraków even accent on the first syllable and read "trzy" as "czy" :)

The accent is not great, but the pronounciation sounds good to me.

What languages do you speak? If they overlap with mine I can find in those languages the correct sounds. They don't exist in English.

EDIT: what the other guy said, google translate is fine

For additional context, Polish words are always pronounced with emphasis on the second-to-last syllable.

So `HO-doof`.

Grzmot?

How about surnames? Jóźwiak -> yoo-ZHVI-ak or YOOZH-vi-ak?

Hehe! A good one!

YOOZH-viak

grzmOt

oh interesting point: the slavic y+{a,e,i,o,u} thing turns those surnames ending in consonant+iak into a single syllable, whereas in germanic the y would be a glide, demarcation of a syllable to its left and another to its right?

'grzmot' has just one syllable, right (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grzmot). So yes, you can't stress the penultimate one, as it isn't there. ;-)

I think 'Jóźwiak' would be syllabified as 'Jóź-wiak' or 'Jó-źwiak'. I may be wrong, I think we don't have always just one way to syllabify a word in Poland.

One exception would be words loaned from Greek, like 'matematyka' or 'fizyka'. But I think they are being 'assimilated' so one can say that they do not count anyway.

Polish has also a fairly rich system of prefixes and suffixes and I think some of them would result in stressing some other syllable than the second to last (penultimate).

Maybe something like: hodoov

Bite your tongue and say: HODOR!

haduucat

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