Hacker News Reader

Comment by teach | Hacker News Reader

This is really interesting! Instead of "here's how you are SUPPOSED to pronounce" any given word or phrase, you show how a bunch of native English speakers actually pronounce it.

Maybe everyone is wrong, but if your goal is to be understood then you'd be better mimicking what they do than just being technically correct. :)

For example, there's a street in the city I live in spelled "Guadalupe". Natives pretty much uniformly pronounce it GWAD-uh-LOOP.

View on HN

That's not an English name. It's the name of a spanish river. Wad is river in Arabic. They pronounce it correctly. It's common that foreign words are adopted and adapted to the host language, but sometimes, specially if they're names, the original pronounciation lingers.

I think that's their point. I think the proper (Spanish) pronunciation is gwah-dah-loo-peh.

Isn't that the same? I mean for a native English speaker. Both seem good aproximations (from a native Spanish speaker pov).

Loop vs Lu-peh. One has two syllables on the ending and the other has one. Surely that sounds noticeable different.

Not saying it's right or wrong, but the two are different.

I notice English speakers have a tendency to assume final e's are silent.

There's a good reason for that: in English, a trailing e tends to be silent, but also to indicate that the previous vowel is different (long vs. short usually).

So, to an English speaker, "lupe" looks like LOOP, which is different from "lup" which would be LUPP. Those aren't real words of course, so some similar words with this effect might be "flute", "lute", and "glute". "flut" and "lut" aren't words AFAIK (but "flutter" is), but "glut" definitely is, and has the short-u vowel sound as opposed to the long-u that "glute" has.

The pronunciation rules in English aren't very good and are full of exceptions, but speakers are still just trying to apply the rules they know, based on other words they know, to foreign names.

That's the correct pronunciation, yup

right.

And funny that I once ordered a sandwich in mexico, but they couldn't understand me until I pronounced it like san-doo-weee-ch

I did not know it was a river in Spain, coming from the US I had always assumed it was some catholic religious phrase or a mispronunciation of a native word.

It makes me cringe to imagine people saying "GWAD-uh-LOOP" but I guess its not even that bad compared to many mispronunciations

I think it is not uncommon in the US for place names to take on a local pronunciation. It seems to become part of the local identity. For instance, Cairo (kay-roh) Illinois. The locals know how it is pronounced when referring to the city in Egypt, but they will correct you if you pronounce the name of their town that way.

> It makes me cringe to imagine people saying "GWAD-uh-LOOP"

What's the better/closer-to-original pronunciation?

I have always heard "GWAD-uh-LOOP-eh" or "GWAD-uh-LOOP-ay" around where I live but native spanish speakers elsewhere on this thread have said that "GWAD-uh-LOOP" is not that bad of a pronunciation so I imagine it is a highly regional thing.

It's a river, a town, a religious icon, a name in Spain and then, when conquistadores from the area went to Mexico, they named another town, another icon... Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe is the patron saint of Mexico, so it's a big thing there.

That pronunciation is not so bad. Source: I'm a native Spanish speaker and dated a Guadalupe for years :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalupe_(name)

There is an island in the French carribean called "Guadeloupe" which is pronunced the same. Don't know if these are related too.

San Francisco is famously a hodgepodge of Spanish-looking names with canonical hybrid pronunciations.

- Divisadero: duh viz uh derro

- Arguello: are goo-ell o

- San Rafael: san ruff ell

- Tomales: tuh mal es

- Gough: gawff (not Spanish, but still surprising)

Gough is pronounced like cough. Not that surprising, just a very old way of spelling

aaand that reminds me of "Torpenhow Hill".

> When the Saxons arrived and asked the Welsh the name of that hill, the Welsh said “pen” which means "hill" in Welsh. So the Saxons used their word for hill, “tor,” and called it Torpen (hill hill). > > Then the Norse arrived and the same process added the their world for hill “Haugr”. So now it was Torpen Haugr (Hill Hill Hill). > > Later, the English called it Torpenhow Hill (Hill Hill Hill Hill)

Turns out the rise near the village of Torpenhow isn't named Torpenhow Hill, but I digress... Here's a quick YT on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUyXiiIGDTo

This is a fun hoax that was invented 70 years ago, in 1953. It was debunked at least 20 years ago, but it's still more popular than facts.

There is a Tarpenhow place in the UK, but it has no hill. So Tarpenhow hill does not exist. No mention of Norse either in the Oxford Concise Dictionary which describes the word as "Torr pen", top of the hill, from the Welsh "pen", and Old English "hoh", ridge.

I really enjoyed that, so will you kindly cease and desist from ruining a wonderful story with facts.

How am I supposed to delight my friends by telling the tale of the Hill Hill Hill Hill if people insist on ruining it by correcting me?

I don't see any contradiction between saying something comes from "old english" and saying it comes from norse.

Old English was mostly Anglo-Saxon. Old Norse was mixed in later, and after the Norman invasion it became Middle English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English Also, read this interesting theory: https://partner.sciencenorway.no/forskningno-history-languag...

> There is a Tarpenhow place in the UK, but it has no hill

> Oxford Concise Dictionary which describes the word as "Torr pen", top of the hill

Are you and the dictionary authors, respectively, sure? :)

there's a 3x hill name in Pilton, uk/ on the site of Glastonbury festival

"You see, in Welsh (Romano-British), PEN means hill. In a slightly different version of Gaelic (more common in Ireland and Scotland), ARD means hill. So, Pennard Hill is "Hill Hill Hill". For generation after generation, newcomers to the region have been referred to "that hill over there" - and completely failed to understand. A few more millennia, and the name may be longer than the hill. "

from https://www.strum.co.uk/twilight/pennard.htm

My favourite example of this sort of redundancy is the fact that there are numerous rivers in England called the River Avon. Avon is believed to come from the Proto-Brythonic word "aβon" [0], meaning "river".

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Brythoni...

Yeah I jut looked up some examples from this list <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-49813249> starting with 'Frome'.

The first video hit had someone pronouncing it rhyming with 'home' when it's meant to be "Froom".

Ok, so it got 'Ballachulish' from a video specifically about Scottish Gaelic. (As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult?)

> As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult?

Same way as every other English word - the spelling seems unrelated to the pronunciation.

I've never heard this word. Is the 'gh' part pronounced as in though or as in tough?

The gh is silent.

Neither!

> English word

Oops! Hah. It's a town in Northern Ireland.

Actually it had not occurred to me that the gh is silent. Guess when you know how to say a word it's 'obvious' when of course it's not

Pronounce as follows: say "Oh mah gawd" then elide the "gawd".

Unless you are in my city, where it is Frome like home. It's probable the whole city is wrong, since the namesake is British, but no one will recognize a Froom street.

I agree with you but nativised nouns are an edge case that you likely can never stamp out without a huge amount of context that would neuter any usefulness the tool has.

Like any tool for language learning its big limitation is the fact that it appears to be writing based.

That's a big part of immersion learning techniques, which even go as far as having you pick a "parent" to binge watch as you will naturally imitate their accent and cadence.

That's the theory there too, if you wamt to speak like a native, let your brain bathe in native speaking and it will be absorbing all the nuance that won't be in textbooks or classrooms.

Language (especially spoken language, most especially English) doesn't really have a "right" or "wrong." It has "likely to be understood by receiver" and "unlikely to be understood by receiver."

The real correct answer to anyone's "what's the right way to say...?" question is a probability distribution.

Language do have right and wrong pronunciation and, in many cases, it is also tied to the script. e.g. in Hindi position of tongue, lips and sound from vocal cord is defined for every phoneme.

That's why games like spelling bee make no sense because if you can hear the word, you can write it there is no ambiguity. Some may pronounce words it differently, but they are mostly different dialects. Or in some cases it is accepted as wrong but common pronunciation.

Oh man, one of the worst examples of this.

Versailles missouri. They pronounce it "ver-sail-ees"

Same for Hermosa Beach, Los Gatos, and many other CA towns. Even though I speak Spanish, I'm always caught off-guard when someone pronounces these places the Spanish way.

The one that weirds me out is San Pedro, CA vs San Pedro Square in San Jose, CA.

The first one is pronounced peedrow, nearly always. The second one is pronounced paydrow (as it would be in Spanish, or for a person), most of the time. San is optional for San Pedro, but not for San Pedro Square.

Very interesting! My grandfather had a store in San Pedro, and I always heard it pronounced the way you describe. I live in the Bay Area but have never heard of San Pedro Square. I wonder if it's pronounced more authentically because of (1) the time period in which it was built/popularized, or (2) the local population. I assume that geographic areas named these days are somewhat more likely to be pronounced authentically (at least Spanish-language ones, in areas like CA that now have large Spanish-speaking populations). Also, from a look at Google Maps, it appears there are a lot of Spanish-language businesses in the area. If the area is largely Spanish-speaking, there's a much better chance it would be pronounced authentically.

Nucular. It's pronounced nucular.

Nah its pronounced nuclear. A lot of people mess it up but most people pronounce it correctly. Its sorta like library -> libary. Its a common mispronounciation but it is pretty universally recognized as wrong.

It was a Simpsons reference I'm pretty sure :)

That's similar to the technique I sometime use when I hesitate between two spellings or expressions. I do a Google search of both, the one with the most results wins. There is a website called Googlefight that does that for you, but it doesn't seem to work anymore.

It may not be correct by the book (though it usually is), but it is what people use.

don't forget the manchaca (now menchaca as it should have been the whole time!) being said as "man-CHAK".

that or the one from the other major city, good ol kuykendahl aka "kir-KEN-doll"

The Pedernales River: PUR-də-NAL-iss

i've always heard it said as PED-er-NAL-iss

other honorable mentions: puyallup, washington (PYOO-al-ip) koenig ln, austin, tx (KAY-nig) - though admittedly this one is likely originally german König, and what texan is going to pronounce German words like Germans? aqui bleiben wir with Stolz, y'all

I've heard it that way too, but the pronunciation I posted is "canonical", or at least copy-pasted from Wikipedia.

When I first landed up in Austin, Texas that's what I look around the street and went hmmmm, perhaps, I need to learn a tad bit of Spanish -- at-least swear words.

that's a perfect example.

reminds me of that "what would a 5th grader say" skit where the "which president" answer was something like benjamin franklin...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com