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Comment by schrijver | Hacker News Reader

Don’t see the problem with different pronunciations… I have a first name like Jules, I like it… indeed depending on whether people are French or English speaking they pronounce it differently—but that doesn’t bother me at all! It still feels very much like they are referring to me, and it feels like two versions of the same name, not two names.

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None of this is a problem in any objective sense. It's just that if your goal is to use one name across two languages, it's not exactly what you get in this scenario.

Stuff like that doesn't bother me at all, but I bumped into quite a few immigrants who had strong preferences one way or the other.

I perceive my name to be how it is pronounced, with writing being secondary. Interesting that others see it the opposite way. Maybe related: I remember stuff best when it's spoken, whereas apparently most people learn best when they read it or hear+write_along. I'm not dyslexic so it's not that I don't read well or anything, but still, audio seems to be my brain-compatible format.

When someone says luke, yeah I'll get it and I definitely don't mind, but IPA /lyk/ or French Luc is what my name is. Apparently the /y/ sound just doesn't exist in most languages I interact with and that makes it impossible for virtually any non-French/Dutch person to pronounce it properly. I don't fault them, I don't mind, but I appreciate if someone makes an effort (even if it's wrong, it's only about trying) to call me by my name rather than by a translation thereof.

(Edit: wtf, don't trust tools like http://ipa-reader.xyz that is near the top of search results. The default american voice pronounces /y/ like the "o" in "who". What's the point of IPA reader if you're going to pronounce an A like a B when your language doesn't have the A sound?! Accent is fine but don't change the sound to a different IPA character altogether... For the symbols /lyk/, I've tested all voices: Dutch, French (+Canadian), Icelandic, German, Norwegian, Turkish, and Swedish are correct, whereas English, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese incorrectly read the IPA. Some others are glitchy or mixed results between male/female voices.)

I agree with your take that the spoken version of my name is what I identify with most, not the written one. This is maybe a little more relevant to people that have names from languages with non-Latin alphabets or with Latin characters that use different sounds than in English. (Sz in Polish for example.)

I know exactly how Luc is pronounced in French, but I wouldn’t do so (unless we were speaking French) because it sounds weird to use non-English sounds in English.

Btw, this sound also exists in German and is spelled “y”. If you meet a German and want them to say your name in your preferred way, tell them to imagine it’s spelled “Lyk”.

German has the sound indeed, it's just one swapped symbol (and probably an unusual character combination/sequence), that's why I feel like they ought to be able to easily. Usually it's written ü though (ironically, in IPA /ü/ sounds like the german u without umlaut!), but they tend to forget what the pronunciation was even if we speak somewhat regularly. It's just foreign to them, I can understand ^^. Got one south african colleague who does it perfectly every time, native english speaker so it surprised me a lot (they're the only one so far) but probably due to afrikaans as second language it just clicks for them.

Lyk is an interesting option I should try with germans. It makes the vowel sound a bit too 'short' but it's very close indeed. Let's see what results that gets compared to Lüc :)

> Edit: wtf, don't trust tools like http://ipa-reader.xyz that is near the top of search results. The default american voice pronounces /y/ like the "o" in "who". What's the point of IPA reader if you're going to pronounce an A like a B when your language doesn't have the A sound?! Accent is fine but don't change the sound to a different IPA character altogether...

I'm guessing the goal is to reproduce an accent, but if the natural language doesn't have the IPA in its phonology, then it's going to be mapped to the nearest representation. English doesn't distinguish between /y/ and /u/, so a native English speaker being asked to reproduce a /y/ sound (especially in running speech where you're not thinking about how to pronounce the sound in particular) is likely to end up with something near /u/ anyways.

For an IPA-to-sound converter, if the chosen voice doesn't have the sound that the user is asking it to render, it should: either throw an error, find an English speaker that can, or synthesise the sound altogether.

Giving you flat-out the wrong sound (not an accented rendition) should not be default behavior. There could be an option for rendering "how would an american approximate/recreate this sound after I sounded it out to them", but that's a different tool and not an IPA-to-sound converter.

> I perceive my name to be how it is pronounced, with writing being secondary.

> When someone says luke, yeah I'll get it and I definitely don't mind, but IPA /lyk/ or French Luc is what my name is. Apparently the /y/ sound just doesn't exist in most languages I interact with and that makes it impossible for virtually any non-French/Dutch person to pronounce it properly.

The consonant at the end of my name makes it impossible for many people to pronounce it correctly. You would have a similar problem; a Mandarin speaker would have no difficulty producing /ly/, but in the best case your full name would come out in two syllables as /ly.kɤ/.

If it's any consolation, the original form of the name had /u/, and the French /y/ is a later historical development internal to French. ;D

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