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Comment by iainmerrick | Hacker News Reader

English also seems very amenable to loanwords from other languages -- you can usually just drop foreign words directly into English without any special twists. It seems much more fiddly in French, German, etc. In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words (though maybe that comes easily with practice); in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc.

Am I right in thinking English is unusual in that respect? I'm not expert enough in any other languages to know for sure.

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"English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."

- Terry Pratchett

I would say it does the needful.

On one single occasion I said this at work without thinking about it. I'd been working exclusively with Indian devs for months and it just slipped out.

Thankfully it was taken well.

Funny enough, I’m from south GA. But when I speak on conference calls to customers, I try to speak without my natural accent especially since many non native speakers especially who aren’t in the US seem to struggle to understand my natural accent.

I was using my normal “consultant voice” with some clients in Tennessee and as I started talking to them, I naturally without thinking started being less careful and throwing some “y’all’s” and southern twang came out.

I heard second hand that they thought I was mocking them. I had to explain I was born and raised in South Georgia and that was my natural voice.

> you can usually just drop foreign words directly into English without any special twists. It seems much more fiddly in French, German, etc. In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words

I dunno what you mean by "have to" here, but English, like most languages, has both a limited set of phonemes and unique patterns of how they are combined and how stress is distributed, and, like most languages, loanwords will usually have their pronunciation changed to fit that phoneme inventory and construction patterns.

English, because any phonetic interpretation of its spelling is more what you'd call guidelines (or may be just jokes) than actual rules is probably less likely to change the spelling of loan words from other languages that use the same alphabet or one with a well-established transliteration, but the actual pronunciation is a different story.

We do Anglicize pronunciation of loan words, heavily. "Karaoke" is actually a good example of that: https://forvo.com/word/karaoke/#ja

Curiously, we also anglicize, to a large degree, the pronunciation of words even when the intent is to approximate the native pronunciation as closely as possible, such as in popular phrase books for travelers - to the point that I often ask myself if the native speaker would be able to understand me if I speak like that (which I try not to). 'Pway-day ayoodar-may', anyone?

Funny you mention karaoke, the Japanese do the exact same thing to a much further degree.

This was not the point they were making. The context is the previous post that said English just accepts foreign words without changing them. It does not, and loan words like karaoke are mangled in English just as in any other language. Hence you agree with the parent.

(Karaoke is not a gotcha or a complete fluke; it’s discussed all over the thread)

"Carry-Oky"

Brr…

Kerioki lol

There are no special twists in that AFAIK there are no rules that specify for example that "Mathematics" needs to be transformed into "Matematika", but a lot of words do get some sort of alternate English pronunciation that is not the same as the original, even when the original is perfectly possible in English. Your example of "karaoke" (which most people pronounce in English as keriyoki) is one such example. Israel should be pronounced with an "s" sound, not a "z" sound (well, and you use a different "r" sound).

And of course, not all sounds even exist, "Hummus" has a Het sound, not an 'h' and is pronounced as khoomoos, not haamas. Gaza is closer to being Raza than Gaza, etc.

> Israel should be pronounced with an "s" sound, not a "z" sound (well, and you use a different "r" sound).

Should it, really? The concept of Israel dates back millennia; which was the original prononciation? Should we all say it as it was in Aramaic back in the day? The h/g cases you mention are a good example: many languages just don’t have these soundsIn cases like bilingual countries, which of the prononciation is supposed to be canonical (bearing in mind that the linguistic borders shift significantly all the time)?

Arguing about the prononciation of proper nouns always seems foolish to me. There is no solution to these questions.

> in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc.

Oh god no. I am Spanish guy living in Japan, our languages have very similar sounds, so much so that we can usually get the pronunciation right on the first try, much to the surprise of Japanese people. English speakers on the other hand tend to butcher the pronunciation so heavily that the words become really difficult to recognise.

But to be fair, the same happens the other way around. All languages adapt foreign words to their own phonology.

In languages which are truer to spelling in pronunciation than English, changing the spelling of loan-words is usually necessary. For example, the French word bureaucracy is used in English with the French spelling, whereas in Norwegian it is written 'byråkrati' which, pronounced according to Norwegian spelling rules, sounds roughly the same. One result is that Norwegians tend to pronounce any word they see as if it were Norwegian, resulting in a kind of 'Norwenglish' where words, after being loaned, seemed to take on a second life. In this way, I feel English spellings 'reference' their origins where possible and English speakers often learn to detect the roots of words and adjust pronunciation appropriately.

> For example, the French word bureaucracy is used in English with the French spelling,

"bureaucracy" is the English word, but the French word is "bureaucratie" (which is closer to the Norwegian spelling than the English is.)

> In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words

I can assure you that the way foreign words are pronounced in English is usually quite far from how they would sound in their original language. There is a simple reason for that: foreign words have sounds that do not exist in English and that English-speaking people don’t know how to pronounce without training, about which most people don’t bother. English words sound weird in Japanese, but the opposite is also true.

> in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc

This is no different than many other languages. In fact, Karaoke and tsunami are used exactly the same way in French, German, Dutch and Spanish.

> Am I right in thinking English is unusual in that respect? I'm not expert enough in any other languages to know for sure.

It is not really. English is completely inconsistent because of its history as an amalgamation of very different languages, but apart from that it is not really remarkable in the way it treats loan words.

We definitely don't shy away from butchering the pronunciation of our loanwords.

You often have to modify pronunciation when you translate a word to Japanese because most Japanese syllables consist of a consonant followed by a vowel. So an English word that ends with a consonant will need a vowel added (unless the consonant is n, which is allowed to be a standalone sound in Japanese).

The word "consonant" would probably have to be pronounced "konsonantu" in Japanese.

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