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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

In IPA, the name is /dɛikstra/. Americans (English vowels vary quite extremely by dialect/accent, so I'm sticking with Standard American English) can easily pronounce ɛ, we say the word 'bed' as /bɛd/.

But the 'ɛi' is a dipthong, and we don't have that dipthong. We have aɪ, as in 'bride' /bɹaɪd/, which is what usually comes out, at least for those of us who know that /dʒɪkstɹə/ is not even close to right. What you'll hear is generally something like /daɪkstɹə/, which make sense, as we pronounce 'dike' /daɪk/ as well.

So yes, completely correct, I just wanted to add the IPA for clarity.

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To my understanding, most American and British English dialects[0] have /eɪ/, e.g. in "maze", which I imagine is quite close to /ɛi/.

[0] The exceptions being dialects where it monophthongizes to /eː/

"monophthongizes" Heck of a word is that.

hey, I don't make the rules :-P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophthongization

Dutch /e/ has the tendency to become /eɪ/ as well (not in Flemish, I think), so /eɪ/ just sounds mostly like "e" to us (Dutch speakers in NL). The "ij" is really /ɛɪ/, but because we don't really have /aɪ/, it turns out that /aɪ/ works fine as a fairly non-ambiguous substitute.

That is indeed pretty close, but not exact.

True, but to my ear at least, /eɪ/ is further from /ɛi/ than /aɪ/ is. Maybe more to the point, English speakers (American ones at least) are going to "realize" the name Dijkstra with an /aɪ/ dipthong. "Dayksra" would not occur to us to say.

Phonemes are a funny thing: if an American were to pronounce that last name perfectly (or a Dutch person speaking English, for that matter), other Americans would still hear /daɪkstɹə/, or at most, "/daɪkstɹə/ but it sounds a bit foreign".

Some sounds which we don't produce are audibly not-English-phonemes, like German ü or Scandanavian ø, but others are not. Another example of this is that native English speakers aren't usually sensitive to the difference between the r sound in our word "pear" and the r sound in Spanish "pero", but recognize that "perro" is a different rhotic sound.

> True, but to my ear at least, /eɪ/ is further from /ɛi/ than /aɪ/ is.

If I may ask purely out of curiosity, are you a native English speaker? I only say this because, to my American English ear, [eɪ] and [ɛi] are virtually indistinguishable. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what you're trying to say....

I think you're wrong about that, sorry. As in, you're not getting the right sound out of the string /ɛi/ when you read it off.

I encourage you to listen to a native Dutch speaker pronounce Mynheer Dijkstra's name, which you can do on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra

Does that sound more like "dike" or more like "day"? To me (yes, native American English speaker, of one of the dialects very close to 'Standard'), it is obviously more like the former.

Sorry if I sounded argumentative by the way, that was not my intent at all—it was an entirely honest question, and I'm really bad at wording things (especially via text).... I do agree that the WP recording of "Dijkstra" sounds more like "dike" than "day".

I might've figured out the disconnect. According to this image on Wikipedia[0], the Northern Standard Dutch realization of [ɛi] starts lower than the monophthongal [ɛ] in the same dialect[1]. Just speculation on my part, but maybe in the context of Dutch linguistics, [ɛi] conventionally signifies a wider diphthong than I would've naïvely thought? (If so, I guess this makes me a cautionary tale against directly comparing IPA transcriptions between languages....)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology#/media/File:Du...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology#/media/File:Du...

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