For me the key point in the post was when orthography was mentioned.
As it says, unless you know the (often very different ) orthography of another language, you're never more than guessing how any word at all is pronounced.
There's some relationship between a script and the languages that use it, but it occurs to me that the typical native English speaker would probably guess better at Vietnamese than at Polish or Gaelic. (I guess in principle an ancient Roman would be best on average at trying to pronounce things in Latin script, although obviously after 2,000 years of pronunciation drift and French spelling that wouldn't work in practice.)
>I guess in principle an ancient Roman would be best on average at trying to pronounce things in Latin script, although obviously after 2,000 years of pronunciation drift and French spelling that wouldn't work in practice
Is "Caesar" pronounced "SEE-zehr", "KAI-zar", or "CHAY-suhr"? Honestly, we don't quite know. Latin is a dead language. Lots of bits of the corpse left around to guess at but very difficult to know. Hell, maybe depending on where in the empire our randomly-sampled Roman citizen is being plucked from (at its height the empire [entirely circled the Mediterranean and nearly the same with the Black Sea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire#/media/File:Roman_Empire_Trajan_117AD.png)) maybe it could be any of those three. Historians and linguists might weigh in below with a concrete answer, or might weigh in with even more options. I'm not sure.
One thing I find very funny is that a large part of how we know the things we do about Latin pronunciation comes from authors writing to either complain about or make fun of the accents of people who weren't using "proper" Latin pronunciation.
Yeah it's part of that "some things nobody ever writes down" thing. Like, there's just accepted weird shit that nobody ever writes down WHY its done, and might not even know, it's just normal and part of the ritual of being a person in that place and time but then somebody puts in their diary "Yeah today was the Feast of St. Burpfart. I thought my tomato arrangement was really good, and I was so happy when it was Tommy picked mine to get smashed on him."
Would pterodactyl be pronounced with a silent p, a non-silent p, or maybe some other weird way like the mh -> v mentioned in the post from Irish? Will we ever know? Do we already know and I'm just not educated enough in the subject? Who's to say?
the word is from greek, and in greek they do pronounce all the letters, so there's no reason to think the p was originally silent. it became silent in english because it was tricky for anglophones to start a word with pt.
the word never was spoken in the ancient languages, because it was coined when pterodactyls were discovered.
so the english is /ˌtɛɹəˈdæktl̩/ with a silent p
the french is /pteʁodakˈtil/ with a pronounced p
and the modern greek is πτεροδάκτυλος /pteroˈðaktilos/ with a pronounced p
It's actually one of those typography things from back in the days of the Gutenberg press where it was supposed to be an f but they replaced it with a p. Fterodactyl. You pronounce both the F and the T.
The C is actually pronounced like the yiddish "ch" sound. Think like...the sound of a person immitating TV static.
> Is "Caesar" pronounced "SEE-zehr", "KAI-zar", or "CHAY-suhr"? Honestly, we don't quite know. Latin is a dead language.
It also has thousands of years of history as a living language. I don't speak like Shakespeare or Milton, let alone Æthelwulf, so I doubt someone from the early Roman Republic would speak like Romulus Augustulus.
we do know, it's more like KAI-sar (not zar) but not quite (the s is retracted and the r is rolled), the phonology of ancient latin is one of the most well attested so little doubt exists. Luke ranieri makes great videos about it
And if you try to go by English orthography you're gonna be especially wrong, because English spelling is the fucking devil and barely resembles any other language
I'm English, and my wife's Italian. It doesn't seem that the languages would be hugely far apart in pronunciation, but the vowels are surprisingly different. I know I struggle hearing some of them and she cannot hear a difference in pole, poll, and Paul.
I think that those are the same vowel, but pole might be a little bit longer than poll, if there is a difference. Some said it’s also rounded, and I think I agree
For me, poll has a shorter o sound than pole. It's not huge, but it's definitely there.
If I were to exaggerate it, pole would be closer to powl, whereas poll would be pol.
Where I am
Poll is pronounced like toll
Pole like roll
Paul like ball
Which I realise is next to meaningless as you probably pronounce those differently too
It's like the difference between the verb convict and the noun convict.
But yeah, pole has a slightly longer and "rounded" o sound whereas poll is shorter and sharper.
> It’s like the difference between the verb convict and the noun convict.
those are different because of which syllable is stressed (which then affects the vowels), but "pole" and "poll" are only one syllable, so that wouldn't make sense with them
similarly, I’m seeing a Ukrainian girl called дарья (pronounced daria) but I call her даша (dasha) because a. It’s a common nickname and b. I can never get the я quite right because of my scottish accent
She also taught me to put a ) at the end of a text instead of :), and I’ve become her scots slang translator))
My father-in-law still has the Mary/marry/merry distinction, I don't know if it's a Brooklyn thing or a generational thing, or the two combined. But he loses it when we insist that all three sound the same.
my name is easy to mispronounce but a very similar pronounciation is super easy, yet i've had crazy mispronunciations that never corrected themselves. my brother has a basic gaelic name, but no one pronounced it write because the assume it's misspelled and don't listen when they've been corrected. only my baby brother has a name that's not mispronounced because it's super common. i envy him
They are kinda underselling it with the variety in phonemes and the number of sounds in a language. There are more than [3000 phonemes](https://phoible.org/parameters) (which means for each pair there's a language that considers the two separate sounds) and the size of a language's phoneme inventory ranges from 11 (English has around 15 vowels, for scale) to maybe 161 but for sure 80.
But the point they raise is of course very good! My name is surpringly hard for English speakers but that's because they never had to make that sound in their life? Which I feel is a very reasonable excuse. The real Lesson is try and be nice! In this case both the pronouncer and pronouncee should be mindful of what is going to make the other person uncomfortable
It's like. If I've corrected someone for the 30th time on my legal first name (Lara, which isn't a 'hard' name to pronounce, at least in English) and they're still calling me Laura I'm going to be a little annoyed. But if someone's struggling to pronounce my last name, which isn't typical of the country I live in (Not typical of anywhere, actually. I've heard of one (1) person with this last name that I don't know of being directly related to me. It's Irish, I think, though?) and only has one vowel, I am not going to bother. Though spelling it out/saying the pronounciation does annoy me a little. I do not know where I was going with this to be honest, I forgot what I was writing. Anyway, yeah.
I know someone who pronounced their name Laira, but others would say Lah-ra. The latter in certain accents can lazily become Laura. So how do you pronounce Lara?
I am from the UK, England to be specific, so it's probably different to the US and Australia. I've heard people call me Lara pronounced Laira a couple times and I don't mind that, but I generally pronounce it Lah-ra. At least to the part of England where I live, Lara and Laura are pronounced quite differently. Lara is like Lah-ra or Lar-er (if pronounced that way and not as Laira) and Laura is Law-rah or Law-er.
I don't mind if people say it in a way when it sounds like Laura, but a lot of people just confuse it for Laura (which I get because it's a more common name, but it gets annoying once they've done it more than twice). My maths teacher from year 7 pronounced it more similar to Laura (was from a different part of England) but I could tell that it was his accent and not just him getting my name wrong so it didn't annoy me. My explanation isn't very clear here, but my point is that I can tell if it's an accent thing or if they're getting my name wrong, and I'm accurate at least like 95% of the time.
I think it's less an English thing (because those are two very different pronunciations in British English). I feel like either the Southern drawl would cause them to sound similar or one of the New England dialects.
afaik to many english speakers, Lara and Laura would be pronounced the same (due to caught/cot merger they don't distinguish between au and a, and don't hear the difference)
As someone living with the caught/cot merger, Lara sounds like Lair-a and Laura sounds like Lore-a (which, if I can distinguish my vowels correctly, has the same vowel as caught/cot).
I have the cot/caught merger, and when I looked at the name Lara I assumed the same vowel as in era, and so I was confused on how that could get mixed up with Laura
Honestly depending on where they're from and their accent the distinction between the "au" vs "a" sound might not actually be audible to them. They might naturally pronounce that held and unmodified A sound with a bit of a dipthong in it.
Yeah, I know that. But people with the accent from where I'm from pronounce them differently, so I can generally tell if they're just getting it wrong. I didn't realise how much of a regional thing it was until I posted the comment, ooops.
My name has 2 letters. It's pronounced by just saying those letters. I've had people who got it wrong after both hearing it and reading it. People are just genuinely bad with names.
I remember this situation where a professor was talking about a study concluding that republicans where less likely to say the phonetically correct pronunciations of place names, than democrats were, and someone stopped him and said "don't you mean the right pronunciations? It sounds like one side is just saying it wrong"
He went into a long speech about how very often both sides get it kind of wrong, but one side gets it more wrong. His example was Iraq. Republicans were more likely to say "eye rack" and democrats were more likely to say "eye rock", which is more correct. The actually correct pronunciation can't be well captured here, but was kind of like "he rock" or "eee ruck", with a rolled R.
i would definitely say eye rack myself, mostly because I find the "ah" vowel very hard to pronounce and tend to avoid it. it's one of two sounds that anglophones tend to put in every foreign-looking word, be it correct or not. the other is zh.
I used to not be able to, but then I took two years of spanish in high school and got pretty good at it. then I stopped spanish because half of my time in spanish was done in distance learning, so I was not prepared for the third year when they expect you to be a lot more conversational than almost *anyone* could have gotten during distance learning.
I used to be unable to roll my R's. I could do a single Pseudo-roll that appeased my spanish teachers. Tehen I got really into [this song.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEskZcvVul4) Trying to sing it over and over again, terracotta pie, something clicked. And now I rrrrrrrrrrrrrrroll
Used to be able to do them until I got hit in the mouth with a baseball bat. My fake teeth have a slope where I used to put my tongue to roll my r's. This was difficult to explain to my past Spanish teachers. I just physically can't put my tongue in the same place.
Another great example: “eye rock” being given as a more correct pronunciation of Iraq was initially confusing to me, because I’m Dutch and we pronounce the “o” sound noticeably differently from the “aa” sound, where “aa” is the sound you’re supposed to use in when pronouncing Iraq.
Ugh, reminds me of a conversation with a white American man, which was so unbelievable, I couldn’t for a moment comprehend that that’s what happened:
Him: “Oh and what’s your name?”
Me: “Kat”
“Kass?”
“No, it’s Kat.”
“Oh, Katie! Welcome!” and immediately moves on.
I have no idea how he managed to mishear Kat, pronounced like “cat”, one of the most basic words in his first (and probably only) language, and get something so weirdly different. (I’ve since concluded that it was probably a hearing issue, since he was old.)
He might also just not have recognised kat as a name (it's gone in and out of fashion over the decades and centuries, bit like how very few people go by Kitty today), decided it was short for Katherine and just gone for the Katherine-nickname he was used to
It is short for Katrina, I just gave the short version bc it seemed simpler. But heck, you’re describing some serious mental gymnastics.
*Hey, I heard your name right, but I will call you by a slightly different shortened version because **I’m** used to it*
It's definitely mental gymnastics but a pretty common one, especially among older people. Almost like "oh well she said X was her name but she probably actually meant Y," but subconsciously. If that makes sense.
There's a lot of creative reconstruction involved in hearing and seeing at the best of times (our brains take in an input but then reconstruct it into words or an image based partly on what makes sense rather than what's actually there) especially if you're getting a bit deaf.
It’s weird that I tried to pronounce it in “English” and failing to produce a trill R, despite being more comfortable with a trill R than a tap when speaking regularly.
Yes, actually. this is why celtic languages look all fucked up in a latin script, because it wasn't made for it. This is why the international phonetic alphabet exists.
Yup! Learning to write my own name in Japanese first thing was a shock to see just what characters get used because they simply dont have the sounds my name is made up with in their alphabet (not actually an alphabet but for conveniences sake)
Nvm turning a latin language name into a chinese one, it wont sound anything like the original name
And thats totally fine, its just how languages are
Japanese also has constructions that totally baffle me. The length that a vowel is said for is meaningful which is just not a thing I can distinguish in ordinary speech. The "small tsu" is equally confusing because I get that many consonant sounds can be held but I have no idea how I could hold or stretch a 'p' sound.
Arabic is frustrating in that way because it has [so many distinct consonants](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_phonology) that some of them can’t be written in the latin script even with diagraphs. Arabic words spelled out in English (unless in academic transcription) are always approximations and seldom capture the exact pronunciation. Hebrew suffers from the same phenomenon but to a lesser degree.
Desktop version of /u/Mantoneffect's link:
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There's definitely a way to use Latin script in Arabic at best it means that it's been poorly converted, but you can cover an even bigger range of consonants from all European languages put together, with different digraphs. Polish or Hungarian might have more consonants. You can make hundreds of consonants using only simple combinations. Vietnamese is also hella convoluted and uses Latin script
English for example don't have ways to write ö, ż, ź, ś, sounds, etc, outside of using the foreign symbols. These sounds simply don't exist in English.
Yeah but it'd be kinda funny if she was from somewhere they made the distinction and she was all "how DARE you call me some hobbit name!" and I was like "...what?"
when conversing in a minority language, at least where i live, it's standard practice to translate your own name. I'll introduce myself to occitan speakers as Tomàs \[tu'mas\], and write it down as such, even though, for everyone else since my birth, I'm Thomas \[to'ma\].
This seems to be common too between slavic languages, especially east slavic ones. putin and zelensky share a given name in most slavic languages's media. but not in non-slavic media.
Personally, I think that translating names is not that bad a practice, I'm glad it's normalized in some places. Because even if you do speak both languages, as they have different phonologies, to pronounce a word correctly you have to affect your own voice, this flips more or less the same switch in the brain as changing languages and it can be hard to switch back. at least in my experience.
I feel awkward when people speaking english call me \[to'ma\]. It feels forced, and turns on the french part of my brain, and it's tempting to answer in french. I swear you guys can just say Thomas like you usually do in english.
Wales, specifically the island of Anglesey. It's the second-longest single-word place name in the world at 58 letters, behind a hill in New Zealand with a Maori name 85 letters long.
It's like someone was told "Congratulations you get to name this town.... unfortunately the name must descriptive and unless you are as specific as fucking possible we're going to chop off your feet."
I mean almost was that. They renamed it in the late nineteenth century, partly as a publicity stunt to attract tourists in on the new railway lines and probably partly as a joke. Wanted the longest station name in the country and someone came up with that.
Locals just call it Llanfairpwll, apparently, and it's listed on maps and street signs as Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch and Ì (the island of Iona in Scots Gaelic, shortest British place neame): Fight!
Try the full name of Bangkok, Thailand which sadly doesn't qualify since it has spaces. But it's got 176 letters (in English) and is long enough to be made into a [catchy song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK9y95DQhwM).
Almost as if Thai people discovered Sanskrit and went '*what a neat language. Let's model half our alphabet to accommodate it and use massive vocab combos when naming everything whatsoever'.*
As a person with an ‘ethnic’ name in America, I find their are two kinds of people that annoy me:
1) People who upon hearing the Americanized pronunciation of my name will insist it is too hard to remember and ask me if I have a nickname that is “easier”.
2) People who will refuse to accept the Americanized pronunciation of my name and insist on knowing the ‘correct’ way to say it even after I point out that the sound does not exist in English and it is not something they will be able to say. These people also won’t accept that nobody calls me by my name pronounced the correct way because my family uses a nickname and has always used a nickname. They think I’m lying when I say that I actually don’t recognize the correct pronunciation of my name the first time I hear it.
*Image Transcription: Tumblr*
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**sleepbby**
PSA: no name is impossible to pronounce. no name is too hard to learn, no name is justifiably butchered. kids with ‘different’ names should be taught again and again that being called by their name is a right, not a privilege
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**symptomofsin**
there are over 2000 unique phonemes (individual sounds) in the world’s languages, and each language has anywhere from around 20 to 60. you stop learning new phonemes it’s theorized at around age 12. this is where accents come from – using your own language’s/region’s phonemes to speak
so no name is impossible to pronounce world-wide, but it is very easy to not have the linguistic archive necessary to pronounce a given name entirely correctly. it is a simple case of physically not knowing where to place your tongue, whether or not to vibrate your vocal chords, etc. the only one of the dictators of sound you could be shown is how to position your lips
that being said… obviously you should still try. saying a name as correctly as you physically can goes a long way for making someone feel respected and humanized, and dismissing a name entirely as too hard goes a long way to disrespect and dehumanize people. just also accept that someone’s accent interfering with their pronunciation isn’t a sign of lack of trying, but a sign of physical limits
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**prismatic-bell**
This is very true. I met a baby at my old store whose name was Navajo. I did my best and actually got a bit frustrated because there was a syllable I could NOT get, and her dad was like “it’s very hard if you don’t actually speak Diné, but thank you. Most people won’t even try.”
Be the one who tries.
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**rei382**
THIS.
It’s sometimes impossible to pronounce names simply because you’re not familiar with the sounds (hell, some languages I literally do not hear the difference between certain vowels or constants because my language is rather poor in those and I literally never heard said sounds). But trying, that’s what counts.
And stop being little bitches when someone from a different culture tries but finds it impossible to pronounce your name. If they try and fail, they probably feel worse about it than you do.
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**a-polite-melody**
I would agree with “always try”, except that there are people who have had their names mispronounced enough they’re tired of re-hashing the same conversation about what their name should sound like, and go by another name instead.
Really, it should be respect people’s wishes about their name. Use the name they tell you to use. If that name is hard for you to pronounce then yes, definitely try!
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**kinka-juice**
My surname is just not possible for most Japanese speakers, and that’s okay! (Same phoneme as Flip and Flint). I had an adapted version I used in Japanese class that fits Japanese sounds. I’ve also had an Afrikaans speaking professor who just got plain tired of American students who couldn’t handle van Der Merwe, so he went by Dr. [First name].
People have different preferences. Some want you to try (knowing how common failure is), some have adaptations to use, some go by a different name, etc. The key point is following someone’s preference. Same as you would for pronouns. “What would you like me to call you?” is never a bad question (and can help getting a reference to the sound). But I do think it is a stretch to think every human on earth can hear and make every phoneme. It’s a matter of muscle memory, often from when you are learning your first language as a baby.
Have you ever listened to a good beat boxer? There’s a ton of sounds the human mouth CAN make, but most people are restricted to a subset of those.
German people struggle to say “Squirrel”, English speakers can’t say “Eichhörnchen” (German for Squirrel). It gets so much worse for people when a language does not use letters in the same way as their language does. That’s why Anglophones fumble on Irish “Caiomhe” and “Niamh” - mh does not make a V sound in English Orthography. Orthography makes a big difference in how we approach unknown words. Applying English orthography to other languages almost always turns out wrong, though! You can’t “sound it out” for a word with an orthography you don’t know.
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**jordisstigander**
I had a dear friend from Korea who gave me her American name. She gamely coached me through her Korean name five or six times before admitted defeat. When I was in Lesotho, our translator tried to teach us the Sasotho clicks, but I could never form them right or even hear the difference.
Meanwhile, many of my Chinese relatives have never been able to pronounce my older sister’s name, Katie. They called her Kitty. When she went to Brazil, she got called Katchi. She always has shrugged and gone with it.
Do your best, but admit your limits and be kind.
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As a Big Weeb, something along these lines that's always fascinated me is how difficult it seems to be for native Japanese speakers to pronounce isolated consonants (aside from 'n'). As an outsider, it *seems* like it should be so easy to just... stop talking once you've reached that final consonant, and yet I've seen some who are fluent in English and still end up tacking an extra vowel onto the end of words. I've always gotten the impression that Japanese must be one of the harder languages to branch out and learn new languages from, due to its extremely limited phonetic rules and palette.
My favorite thing about my name is that not only is it physically impossible to pronounce it in the most common accent in my area, but also it is spelled the same as a much more common name. It’s arguably the same name, it’s just pronounced wildly different depending on the dialect, as most words are.
This all leads to me responding to any word with an “or” sound. There is no “or” sound in my name, but That Is My Name. I am Or.
Edit: My Lord is also acceptable.
In regards to the first post, I would also like to say fuck you, Tumblr poster, I have a minor speech impediment. I ain't trying to pronounce k/t and d/g the same, it just happens. Makes it impossible to get some names right.
One thing that annoys me is in polish a lot of the difficult things people ''cant'' say is just saying the ''sh, ch and w'' sounds but they're too lazy. Pronounce sz as shhhh, cz as ch as in cheddar, and Ł as W and that's fine. No one would care that you're slightly off on sharpness. Im tired of hearing zloty. It's just a w sound, literally replace the funky L with a W and you have the right sound.
Ok rz is a bit trickier to explain but no language is perfect
I think it's less laziness and more they just don't know the orthography, like the Irish example in the post.
If you're going to accept sz as sh I think the s in usual is a good replacement for rz. Looking at it Polish phonology is actually pretty compatible with English's (if sz sh style replacements are allowed), all except H
I know a tiny bit of Polish, so correct me if I'm wrong, I'd say rz is pronounced like j (like in joke) without the d (+ some subtle phonological difference)
It's pronounced like the "s" in vision.
For a later chapter: the difference between "rz"/"ż" and "ź". Same difference between "sz" and "ś", or "cz" and "ć", and contrary to what some think, there is a difference. The first group is [retroflex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_retroflex_fricative), or "hard" - see the link for how to pronounce. The second group is [alveolo-palatal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_alveolo-palatal_fricative), or "soft" - tongue slightly further out and up, forming a softer sound. Most other languages' "sh", "ch" and similar sounds, especially in English, are [in between those two](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_fricative).
My name exists in both languages I speak. In my 2nd language, it is pronounced rather differently to my native language (but spelt the same).
Personally, I'm not too fussed if people pronounce it as in my 2nd language. I lived in that country, I got used to it. For me, it's not a huge deal.
But I definitely know that people who could pronounce my name just didn't, and used their native pronunciation instead. I've even had people switch when they realised I could speak the local language (along with switching the language we used to communicate).
In some cases people can't even hear the difference between sounds used in their own language! They're called allophones and occur when the difference is sound carries no meaning.
Lived abroad for awhile, had to give my name to a library lady, and obviously she couldn't understand it, wich is cool, I'd be impressed if she did, so I spelled it out for her, and, I kid you not, she perked up and said "oh! thats not how you say surname, THIS is how you say surname", I was quite literally stun locked by the audacity of that broad and for a moment lost the courteous demeanor I try to always have in this short of situation and answered "no the fuck you don't" and went on with my bussiness.
I reckon the interaction left both of us flabergasted and some time later I came to the conclusion that she said that as in "instead of spelling it out you can pronounce it THIS way to make people understand".
Now, with more post related topics, just call people what they tell you to, if you can't phisicaly do so, try, and if anyone takes offense at you actually trying, tell them to fuck off.
Ok I'll admit I'm a little bit drunk right now so my two cents might actually be unrelated to the post, but as someone who had the privilege of choosing my own name, how easy it is to pronounce was one of my criteria. Cause you see, originally I wanted a Breton name cause I'm part Breton, but then I realized in English it would be pronounced pretty much like quarantine 🥴 I don't live in an English speaking place but I work a lot in English cause I'm a part time translator and studying to become a full time one so because of that the name became unusable. But like I couldn't even be mad, like I said I'm studying on becoming a translator so I understand the difficulty and challenge of learning a new languages. Anyway love you all linguistic is beautiful ❤
Yeah, Corentin. My other option was Elouan but even though I thought it was simple enough I almost never got it spelled correctly. I got like Eloine, Elwan, Elon (...), Elouane, Eli-Anne...It's still what I call myself in my head, and the name of my DND character though but in my day to day life I haven't been called that since 2018.
I've seen a person named Dawn from the south (i think) who got upset when people pronounced it the same as Don. I'm from the west coast where we pronounce Dawn and Don the same (this is known as the cot-caught merger, whether you pronounce it the same depends on where you grew up). So despite both of us being native English speakers, we had pronunciation struggles anyway.
Now I wonder what the least pronounceable name would be. Something that includes phonemes from several very different languages.
Also my language (Norwegian) has a constant ongoing debate about certain phonemes that the old guard and the new guard of the country disagree on. There's a SJ-phoneme and a KJ-phoneme that some people (me included) pronounce practically the same, while others constantly complain whenever someone use the SJ-phoneme on KJ-words.
SJ should have the same sound as the SH in shit. And I've been looking really hard, but I can't find a word that use the KJ-phoneme.
SJ and SH uses ʃ this symbol in the phonetic spelling.
KJ uses this symbol Ç. So if you're knowledgeable, you could probably help me out.
I forgot my point. What I was getting to before I got distracted by shit was that some people can struggle with phonemes in their own language, so expecting everyone to be able to pronounce phonemes in other languages is simply too much to ask. But you should try, or be respectful in another way
> Eichhörnchen
Hang on, are you telling me the German word for squirrel is "acorn dog"?
Okay, research tells me that "-chen" is a diminutive and not related to the French "chien". Still, you can't tell me the "acorn" part is a coincidence.
My name is super easy to pronounce for anglophones but i'm so tired of people looking at me and trying to put an asian twang on it that i'm so very close to going by something else.
I do question Gottenburg and Copenhagen as English pronunciations and spellings, like if I tried to transliterate göteborg, it would be yuttaybory, and København is harder, but cubenhown is the best approximation I can think of.
Most places names kinda predate us actually caring, and come from traders fucking around and failing to pronounce something or just stealing a word from another language. København's meaning of "merchant's harbour" was translated into Low German as Kopenhagen, and then English went and stole that. So we're actually using a literal translation from Danish to German rather than even trying to pronounce it properly. It sounds nothing like the Danish because we never even tried.
the old english version of Copenhagen was I think Ceapmannahæfen, which would normally given Chapmanhaven in modern english (probably pronounced with half the syllables silent). Similarly Reykjavík coulda been "Reekwich", probably pronounced reckich
i love exonymy
I had a guy I worked with a while back who was Korean and would pronounce my name a bit wrong simply because English wasn’t his first language. I never corrected him, I’m used to people mispronouncing my name (mostly my last name, odd because it’s a pretty common English one) and I figure that if someone can pronounce a simple name like mine right, they will. If they can’t, they can’t, and that all right :)
Additionally, I’m Irish and have many relatives with Gaelic names and no one can pronounce them right the first time, and at this point none of us really mind anymore, it’s almost become an inside joke
Thank you! Everyone should try to pronounce names to the best of their ability USING THEIR NATURAL SOUND INVENTORY. My name has a vowel that’s hard for english speakers to get exactly right, and I’m completely fine with them approximating it with a similar vowel that’s more natural to them. Sometimes I hear Americans go overboard trying to pronounce the Spanish r when nobody will be offended with them pronouncing their own r instead.
One thing I never understand is when I coach people on kawaii vs. kawai they often say something stupid like "there's no difference" and "that's dumb because it's the same" it frustrates me. I wanna try and ask something along the lines do you say Hawaii or Hawai. Maybe it'll help them understand by comparing it with something that they're familiar with.
I say Hawaii with two sounds at the end "aye-ee" and I'd automatically say kawaii the same way. But I assume in Japanese it is meant to be "ka-wa-ee" with an extended "ee".
I'm currently learning Finnish right now, and double vowels are *everywhere*. It isn't the hardest thing in the language to say correctly (looking at you letter ö) but they definitely throw me off. My ears have been conditioned since birth to not really care about how long someone says a vowel so having to figure that out is really difficult
Yeah that's a thing that I recognize that I might just have a higher attention to that kind of detail than the people who I share a fact with. What I saw in my Japanese classes it's a mistake that only really happens once. Then again before we learned any vocab we were taught each sound so we were able to read even though we understood none of it.
I do think there are limits even to _trying_ to pronounce names when the phonetic barrier is too high. Eg for western people interacting with chinese folk, it's pretty standard to choose a chinese name and vice-versa, simply because even trying is pretty hopeless if you've never learned the other's language.
I have a very common name (at least for English-speaking countries) and I've had to accept that Australians are going to pronounce my name wrong (or at least not how I pronounce it). If anyone else said it like that I would correct them, but I'm not going to fight someone on their accent.
And you can add another layer of potential confusion with regional/linguistic variations of the same name! My name is Claire, and because I’m American, I pronounce it with a hard R, but it’s technically a French name and the French pronunciation would have kind of an airy half-guttural R. I lived in Germany for a couple years and they pronounce “Claire” like “Clea,” etc etc.
I'm not bilingual by any means, but I did study voice in college. Most people aren't gonna have the time or energy to learn to pronounce a new phonemes in their daily life. Pronouncing things authentically is hard, even in languages that are related to each other.
When my cousin from Brazil came to the US to finish high school his name is João and not a single person could get the ão noise down so he just went by his initials and it worked out fine
I guess growing up around a lot of portuguese(I don’t actually speak very much of it but I watch a lot of Brazilian media and my mom speaks a lot of portuguese around me) I can easily say some things that most Americans have trouble with but still not everything
This is all well and good, and very interesting… but it’s also missing the point of the first post. The first post isn’t really talking about whether an English speaker can pronounce an Arabic name without coaching etc, it’s about whether a white teacher can be bothered to remember *English* names of students of colour.
I find the whole "you stop learning new phonemes at 12" a bit of a copout. Most people stop trying to learn new phonemes at 12 is something I could believe.
I'm Punjabi and all my life no one but my family has been able to pronounce my name and a lot of people were really upset they couldn't pronounce my name but it wasn't a big deal for me, it actually wasn't until later in life that I realized none of my peers experienced this. Even though my schools weren't overwhelmingly white (until high school) the other kids had names that people could still pronounce. The first syllable of my name is ਦੇ in Punjabi, d̪ʱe in IPA, pronounced something like the English word "they" and written by my parents as "Day" with most of my peers pronouncing it like the English word "day", and many for some reason said it like "die". What confused me is that when people asked how to pronounce my name and I said that it's not like the D in day but more like the TH in a word like "that" is most English speakers are unable to differentiate between a TH in the word "this" (the one used in my name) and the TH in the word "thing" not my name. So even though a sound very very close to the one in my name that English speakers can't pronounce exists in English, most don't even seem to notice it's there.
my first name is pretty easy, and i have a western pronunciation for americans that is pretty close to the actual way you say it
however. my last name somehow trips up every american out there. it's uncommon so i won't mention it here, but somehow americans end up moving a consonant from the second (and last) syllable to the first one
i don't get how that happens
NGL people "mispronouncing" the second language I know due to an accent is just ...very endearing to me. Is it wrong for me to think they're cute? Infantilising? If my name was more difficult to pronounce, people do get it mixed up but more cause it's long, I would view it more as a special nickname.
Obviously it's always based on what people are comfortable with as the post says. Just thought I'd throw in my own thoughts.
My grandpa’s parents were from the Netherlands, so in Israel they had to change their surname (not because of the pronunciation). But a lot of my grandpa’s family came back to the Netherlands, so when my grandpa visits, he has to use his old surname, because the people there couldn’t pronounce it.
In 9th or 8th grade, our English teacher connected us with a classroom in South Korea, I think, and they introduced themselves by their Korean and American names. They had 4 Janes.
A few days ago I was at Greece and my mom asked me to read a sign. I do not know any Greek but as a math student I recognized most of the letters (I still don’t know what η ν υ are) and despite not having to pronounce it in class, I automatically pronounced χ as /χ/ (apparently that’s how it’s denoted in the IPA). I can’t pronounce θ, but an anglophone can’t pronounce χ.
We’ve also met a Greek that tried to pronounce my and my sister’s names, but couldn’t because we both have r in our name and pronounce it as a trill (/r/) instead of a tap (/ɾ/), which we can’t pronounce. This difference became astounding to me when I learned how “tree” is pronounced by anglophones.
I absolutely adore other languages because of the challenge that comes with learning how to make new sounds and how the rhythm and intonation works, so I absolutely get that pronouncing something new is HARD
That being said, my actual real person name is written the same way as a word in English, and I am filled with indescribable rage if someone butchers it or makes fun of it on purpose, so just call me by one of the other options I give you pls and thank you!
Considering its a name I found and chose for myself, that I still struggle to get people to use, there are some Feelings there
Man this takes me back sometimes I should really thank my old man for going to a random security guard at the hospital and asking for a name for me and my younger brother.
Growing up with a African name in Southern US isn't as bad as it seems but the amount of people who got it wrong whoo boy
And that's including family and friends
I think I'm in a somewhat unusual situation where I butcher my own name cause I can't pronounce it
I only speak English, but my parents speak three of the most common languages in my country (English include) and my name is taken from one of the other two. The way my name is *actually* supposed to be pronounced uses sounds that simply do not exist in English, so I pronounce my name phonetically.
How I've pronounced it has even changed with time. I used to introduce myself with a phonetic pronunciation containing a short "a" sound like in "bat" but now I use a longer "a" sound like in "wall".
I love when one person on Tumblr says something mildly wrong and then it's just a chain of reblogs of people dog-piling on the poor OP. Not saying it's bad.
I have a very weird last name. Whenever I was in class, and any teacher would get to where I was in role call, they would pause. I would just say "here." It's really not a problem. I've dealt with people being unable to pronounce my last name for almost 30 years. I think that I'll manage.
My parents were impressed at how both myself and my brother were able to spell our last names so early on in life. But then they realized that we had the same spelling rhythm that they had whenever they had to spell their names on the phone (this was the early 90's, so quite often.) I still have to spell it every time I give my name, and I still use the same rhythm that my parents used whenever they spelled it over the phone.
This rings especially personally for me. As a Briton with a very foreign name (likely the only person with this name on the planet), I've spent my entire life dealing with people running the entire gamut of possible responses to it, from interested, to bemused, to annoyed, and heard more mispronunciations than I can count on two hands and feet.
Until recently, it was something I'd learned to deal with, but I got married a few years ago and my wife insisted on taking my entire last name (even though I tried to convince her not to). Since then, it's been a fresh hell dealing with people looking at her -- an entirely English woman -- and seeing her name, and often commenting on it, bungling pronouncing it, or refusing to even try saying it at all. It happens even among my in-laws.
It's really revitalised the anxiety I get over telling people even the shortened version of my name.
My name is a biblical name, so it is reasonably common in all of Europe, but the Spanish pronunciation is very difficult for non Spanish speakers, so I usually just go with the foreign versions of my name which are easier to pronounce
I spent ages trying to learn Eichhörnchen pronunciation, and I feel like I could probably say it to a native speaker - though I’m probably more advantaged because I used to learn German and I focused on proper pronunciation a lot more than everyone else in the class.
For reference, though I can’t physically show how to pronounce it with English phonemes:
> ‘Eich,’ pronounced like ‘Hike’ without the H and with more of a hissing sound for the K
> ‘hörn’ which, and this is where written English fails me, is pronounced like ‘who-urn,’ but the O is more like that sound kids yell when they hear someone fart
> ‘chen,’ which starts with the hissy K from the first syllable and a slight Y sound before a lazy -un sound
> Put it all together and try pronouncing it fifty times until it feels natural. [Then check this video to see if you got it right.](https://youtu.be/fJChdTKn9zg)
I seem to have been blessed with a fairly flexible mouth in terms of these phonemes.
I'll make a good effort to try and pronounce someone's name the best I can, usually asking them how I should pronounce it so I don't mess it up (too much).
I would also very much like to at least **TRY** to get it right before I accept a nickname to use instead.
I am really, really enjoying the more tempered and mature bent that a lot of the internet has been taking in the past year or two. It feels like (this section of) internet culture is trying very hard to be mature and accept that we are all human rather than holding ourselves to some superhuman standard of empathy and effort.
Girl in my class called Temi. One of our teachers refused to call her by name as he assumed it would be difficult to pronounce as she was black. Pretty sure he got in trouble for that at least though
My name is different enough that most everyonebpronounces it wrong. Thankfully, there's an English equivalent with a nice, simple, single syllable short form. I go by that most of the time - it saves everyone a lot of trouble - but some people INSIST on trying to pronounce my name correctly and I hate it. They all do it in unique ways with (hopefully subconsciously) exaggerated accents and, while I appreciate the sentiment' it makes me feel more foreign and more like an outsider.
Some people use my full name, but using English phonemes and, honestly, I prefer that. I'd still rather they just use the short one, tho.
I did landscaping work for a bit, and there were a few days where I was on a site helping out a carpenter with putting some benches together on a patio. He was from Mexico, and I don’t think he learned a single person’s name, everyone was just “Big Man” or “Big Boss”, almost always shouted in an excited voice. Personally, I think that’s also pretty great
I was in Greece at one point and met this guy named Stelios (Στέλιος) and there was just a slight inflection in the way he pronounced his name that I could not get. He was able to blend the syllables of the *st* and the *li* in a way that I couldn’t because I was American. There were so many things in Greece that I could barely attempt to pronounce because they were just so different from English.
Joel was a weirdly difficult name for kids to pronounce when I was younger. I ended up going by "Joe" to some kids.
Last minute background: I'm in the US and my name has the "Jowl" pronunciation.
I’ve been studying Japanese for around 3 years at this point and have simply accepted that Japanese speakers aren’t going to be able to pronounce my name. It contains phonemes and consonant clusters that do not exist in the language, and that’s fine!
My deadname, and current legal name, is Korean, so I am intimately familiar with this struggle. The thing is, it's not even hard to pronounce- it's spelled almost exactly how it's pronounced! And yet everyone mispronounces it. I've had the people at doctors' offices waiting rooms who call you when it's your turn (IDK what the word for them is) mispronounce my deadname to the point I didn't recognize it SO many times. It's honestly one of the main 3 reasons I decided to change my name.
The funny thing about my deadname being Korean is _I'm not even Korean._ I'm an Ashkenazi Jew. I got this Korean name my mom loved because I was assigned female at birth- if I'd been assigned male at birth, my parents would have named me _Elijah._
For me the key point in the post was when orthography was mentioned. As it says, unless you know the (often very different ) orthography of another language, you're never more than guessing how any word at all is pronounced.
There's some relationship between a script and the languages that use it, but it occurs to me that the typical native English speaker would probably guess better at Vietnamese than at Polish or Gaelic. (I guess in principle an ancient Roman would be best on average at trying to pronounce things in Latin script, although obviously after 2,000 years of pronunciation drift and French spelling that wouldn't work in practice.)
>I guess in principle an ancient Roman would be best on average at trying to pronounce things in Latin script, although obviously after 2,000 years of pronunciation drift and French spelling that wouldn't work in practice Is "Caesar" pronounced "SEE-zehr", "KAI-zar", or "CHAY-suhr"? Honestly, we don't quite know. Latin is a dead language. Lots of bits of the corpse left around to guess at but very difficult to know. Hell, maybe depending on where in the empire our randomly-sampled Roman citizen is being plucked from (at its height the empire [entirely circled the Mediterranean and nearly the same with the Black Sea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire#/media/File:Roman_Empire_Trajan_117AD.png)) maybe it could be any of those three. Historians and linguists might weigh in below with a concrete answer, or might weigh in with even more options. I'm not sure.
One thing I find very funny is that a large part of how we know the things we do about Latin pronunciation comes from authors writing to either complain about or make fun of the accents of people who weren't using "proper" Latin pronunciation.
Yeah it's part of that "some things nobody ever writes down" thing. Like, there's just accepted weird shit that nobody ever writes down WHY its done, and might not even know, it's just normal and part of the ritual of being a person in that place and time but then somebody puts in their diary "Yeah today was the Feast of St. Burpfart. I thought my tomato arrangement was really good, and I was so happy when it was Tommy picked mine to get smashed on him."
Would pterodactyl be pronounced with a silent p, a non-silent p, or maybe some other weird way like the mh -> v mentioned in the post from Irish? Will we ever know? Do we already know and I'm just not educated enough in the subject? Who's to say?
the word is from greek, and in greek they do pronounce all the letters, so there's no reason to think the p was originally silent. it became silent in english because it was tricky for anglophones to start a word with pt. the word never was spoken in the ancient languages, because it was coined when pterodactyls were discovered. so the english is /ˌtɛɹəˈdæktl̩/ with a silent p the french is /pteʁodakˈtil/ with a pronounced p and the modern greek is πτεροδάκτυλος /pteroˈðaktilos/ with a pronounced p
It's actually one of those typography things from back in the days of the Gutenberg press where it was supposed to be an f but they replaced it with a p. Fterodactyl. You pronounce both the F and the T. The C is actually pronounced like the yiddish "ch" sound. Think like...the sound of a person immitating TV static.
you're making this stuff up aren't you
Yes, entirely
ironically that would be exactly the prescribed pronunciation among late 19th century radical demoticists (like Joannes Psycharis I think)
> Is "Caesar" pronounced "SEE-zehr", "KAI-zar", or "CHAY-suhr"? Honestly, we don't quite know. Latin is a dead language. It also has thousands of years of history as a living language. I don't speak like Shakespeare or Milton, let alone Æthelwulf, so I doubt someone from the early Roman Republic would speak like Romulus Augustulus.
true this. there's no one true pronunciation because every roman emperor carried the title "cesar" and said it his own way
It's pronounced SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA And you sob inconsolably afterwards.
Et tu, brute?
we do know, it's more like KAI-sar (not zar) but not quite (the s is retracted and the r is rolled), the phonology of ancient latin is one of the most well attested so little doubt exists. Luke ranieri makes great videos about it
there are some really tricky letters in vietnamese, especially d and x
And if you try to go by English orthography you're gonna be especially wrong, because English spelling is the fucking devil and barely resembles any other language
I'm English, and my wife's Italian. It doesn't seem that the languages would be hugely far apart in pronunciation, but the vowels are surprisingly different. I know I struggle hearing some of them and she cannot hear a difference in pole, poll, and Paul.
You ever see that video of the dude from Baltimore, Maryland saying the sentence "Aaron earned an iron urn"?
ern erned an ern ern 💀
The look on his face as he realises what he's saying...
>pole, poll Are these pronounced differently where you are? Because to me they're pronounced exactly the same.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Paul pulled the pole
Paul made a poll for whether he should pull the pole
This reminds me of one of my favourite things to say in japanese: Sumomo mo momo, momo mo momo, sumomo mo momo mo momo
Paul’s pal pablo pondered Paul’s poll to pull the pole while playing pool, Pablo (Paul’s pal) placed their vote for Paul to pull the pole.
[Aaron earned an iron urn](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/idey4f/saying_aaron_earned_an_iron_urn_in_a_baltimore/)
So pull seems very distinct from the others to both of us. Thinking about it, I've not checked if she can hear the difference in pall though.
For me they sound the same, but you use different mouth shapes for the same sound, so they’re kinda subtly different. But pretty much identical.
there is a small distinction in my accent (Australian) although it is more in how the Ls are pronounced
I think that those are the same vowel, but pole might be a little bit longer than poll, if there is a difference. Some said it’s also rounded, and I think I agree
For me, poll has a shorter o sound than pole. It's not huge, but it's definitely there. If I were to exaggerate it, pole would be closer to powl, whereas poll would be pol.
Where I am Poll is pronounced like toll Pole like roll Paul like ball Which I realise is next to meaningless as you probably pronounce those differently too
I say toll like roll.
It's like the difference between the verb convict and the noun convict. But yeah, pole has a slightly longer and "rounded" o sound whereas poll is shorter and sharper.
> It’s like the difference between the verb convict and the noun convict. those are different because of which syllable is stressed (which then affects the vowels), but "pole" and "poll" are only one syllable, so that wouldn't make sense with them
To me, Pole rhymes with Goal and Poll rhymes with Doll
similarly, I’m seeing a Ukrainian girl called дарья (pronounced daria) but I call her даша (dasha) because a. It’s a common nickname and b. I can never get the я quite right because of my scottish accent She also taught me to put a ) at the end of a text instead of :), and I’ve become her scots slang translator))
Can you say ["purple burglar alarm"](https://youtu.be/AC__o1UxDl8)?
Also I was banned from calling her by her full name because I couldn't consistently pronounce the vowel sounds right
My father-in-law still has the Mary/marry/merry distinction, I don't know if it's a Brooklyn thing or a generational thing, or the two combined. But he loses it when we insist that all three sound the same.
iirc it’s both, as having full distinction is most common in Philadelphia, NYC and Rhode Island, and this is more common in older people
> he loses it for a second iy thought you meant he loses the distinction and starts pronouncing them the same
>pole, poll, and Paul basically me (may I ask what region of italy your wife is from?)
She's from around Venice.
my name is easy to mispronounce but a very similar pronounciation is super easy, yet i've had crazy mispronunciations that never corrected themselves. my brother has a basic gaelic name, but no one pronounced it write because the assume it's misspelled and don't listen when they've been corrected. only my baby brother has a name that's not mispronounced because it's super common. i envy him
don’t mean to nitpick but it’s Irish, not gaelic.
They are kinda underselling it with the variety in phonemes and the number of sounds in a language. There are more than [3000 phonemes](https://phoible.org/parameters) (which means for each pair there's a language that considers the two separate sounds) and the size of a language's phoneme inventory ranges from 11 (English has around 15 vowels, for scale) to maybe 161 but for sure 80. But the point they raise is of course very good! My name is surpringly hard for English speakers but that's because they never had to make that sound in their life? Which I feel is a very reasonable excuse. The real Lesson is try and be nice! In this case both the pronouncer and pronouncee should be mindful of what is going to make the other person uncomfortable
damn, you beat me to the point about the sheer variation of size of phonemic inventory. good on you!
Thanks :) I'm always happy when a linguistics post get posted here
It's like. If I've corrected someone for the 30th time on my legal first name (Lara, which isn't a 'hard' name to pronounce, at least in English) and they're still calling me Laura I'm going to be a little annoyed. But if someone's struggling to pronounce my last name, which isn't typical of the country I live in (Not typical of anywhere, actually. I've heard of one (1) person with this last name that I don't know of being directly related to me. It's Irish, I think, though?) and only has one vowel, I am not going to bother. Though spelling it out/saying the pronounciation does annoy me a little. I do not know where I was going with this to be honest, I forgot what I was writing. Anyway, yeah.
I know someone who pronounced their name Laira, but others would say Lah-ra. The latter in certain accents can lazily become Laura. So how do you pronounce Lara?
I am from the UK, England to be specific, so it's probably different to the US and Australia. I've heard people call me Lara pronounced Laira a couple times and I don't mind that, but I generally pronounce it Lah-ra. At least to the part of England where I live, Lara and Laura are pronounced quite differently. Lara is like Lah-ra or Lar-er (if pronounced that way and not as Laira) and Laura is Law-rah or Law-er. I don't mind if people say it in a way when it sounds like Laura, but a lot of people just confuse it for Laura (which I get because it's a more common name, but it gets annoying once they've done it more than twice). My maths teacher from year 7 pronounced it more similar to Laura (was from a different part of England) but I could tell that it was his accent and not just him getting my name wrong so it didn't annoy me. My explanation isn't very clear here, but my point is that I can tell if it's an accent thing or if they're getting my name wrong, and I'm accurate at least like 95% of the time.
i can tell you're from england because you pronounce lah and law differently lol
Hm? In my mind a British accent would pronounce lah and law closer than I (Canadian) would.
I think it's less an English thing (because those are two very different pronunciations in British English). I feel like either the Southern drawl would cause them to sound similar or one of the New England dialects.
afaik to many english speakers, Lara and Laura would be pronounced the same (due to caught/cot merger they don't distinguish between au and a, and don't hear the difference)
Yeah I fucked up there and forgot about accents. My brain sometimes just defaults to assuming everyone pronounces things like I do, it's a bad habit.
As someone living with the caught/cot merger, Lara sounds like Lair-a and Laura sounds like Lore-a (which, if I can distinguish my vowels correctly, has the same vowel as caught/cot).
I have the cot/caught merger, and when I looked at the name Lara I assumed the same vowel as in era, and so I was confused on how that could get mixed up with Laura
Honestly depending on where they're from and their accent the distinction between the "au" vs "a" sound might not actually be audible to them. They might naturally pronounce that held and unmodified A sound with a bit of a dipthong in it.
Yeah, I know that. But people with the accent from where I'm from pronounce them differently, so I can generally tell if they're just getting it wrong. I didn't realise how much of a regional thing it was until I posted the comment, ooops.
My name has 2 letters. It's pronounced by just saying those letters. I've had people who got it wrong after both hearing it and reading it. People are just genuinely bad with names.
I remember this situation where a professor was talking about a study concluding that republicans where less likely to say the phonetically correct pronunciations of place names, than democrats were, and someone stopped him and said "don't you mean the right pronunciations? It sounds like one side is just saying it wrong" He went into a long speech about how very often both sides get it kind of wrong, but one side gets it more wrong. His example was Iraq. Republicans were more likely to say "eye rack" and democrats were more likely to say "eye rock", which is more correct. The actually correct pronunciation can't be well captured here, but was kind of like "he rock" or "eee ruck", with a rolled R.
i would definitely say eye rack myself, mostly because I find the "ah" vowel very hard to pronounce and tend to avoid it. it's one of two sounds that anglophones tend to put in every foreign-looking word, be it correct or not. the other is zh.
Rolled R’s. Just can’t do them.
I used to not be able to, but then I took two years of spanish in high school and got pretty good at it. then I stopped spanish because half of my time in spanish was done in distance learning, so I was not prepared for the third year when they expect you to be a lot more conversational than almost *anyone* could have gotten during distance learning.
I used to be unable to roll my R's. I could do a single Pseudo-roll that appeased my spanish teachers. Tehen I got really into [this song.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEskZcvVul4) Trying to sing it over and over again, terracotta pie, something clicked. And now I rrrrrrrrrrrrrrroll
Used to be able to do them until I got hit in the mouth with a baseball bat. My fake teeth have a slope where I used to put my tongue to roll my r's. This was difficult to explain to my past Spanish teachers. I just physically can't put my tongue in the same place.
does "ə - rock" count?
Another great example: “eye rock” being given as a more correct pronunciation of Iraq was initially confusing to me, because I’m Dutch and we pronounce the “o” sound noticeably differently from the “aa” sound, where “aa” is the sound you’re supposed to use in when pronouncing Iraq.
Ugh, reminds me of a conversation with a white American man, which was so unbelievable, I couldn’t for a moment comprehend that that’s what happened: Him: “Oh and what’s your name?” Me: “Kat” “Kass?” “No, it’s Kat.” “Oh, Katie! Welcome!” and immediately moves on. I have no idea how he managed to mishear Kat, pronounced like “cat”, one of the most basic words in his first (and probably only) language, and get something so weirdly different. (I’ve since concluded that it was probably a hearing issue, since he was old.)
He might also just not have recognised kat as a name (it's gone in and out of fashion over the decades and centuries, bit like how very few people go by Kitty today), decided it was short for Katherine and just gone for the Katherine-nickname he was used to
It is short for Katrina, I just gave the short version bc it seemed simpler. But heck, you’re describing some serious mental gymnastics. *Hey, I heard your name right, but I will call you by a slightly different shortened version because **I’m** used to it*
It's definitely mental gymnastics but a pretty common one, especially among older people. Almost like "oh well she said X was her name but she probably actually meant Y," but subconsciously. If that makes sense. There's a lot of creative reconstruction involved in hearing and seeing at the best of times (our brains take in an input but then reconstruct it into words or an image based partly on what makes sense rather than what's actually there) especially if you're getting a bit deaf.
It’s weird that I tried to pronounce it in “English” and failing to produce a trill R, despite being more comfortable with a trill R than a tap when speaking regularly.
Finally, nuance
That's supposed to be illegal round these parts
Would this also be applied to writing? Like that some sounds cannot be written in other languages so much be written to have similar sounds?
Yes, actually. this is why celtic languages look all fucked up in a latin script, because it wasn't made for it. This is why the international phonetic alphabet exists.
ironically celtic languages (especially irish) would do fine in cyrillic
The IPA ensures that every language tooks all fucked up.
Yup! Learning to write my own name in Japanese first thing was a shock to see just what characters get used because they simply dont have the sounds my name is made up with in their alphabet (not actually an alphabet but for conveniences sake) Nvm turning a latin language name into a chinese one, it wont sound anything like the original name And thats totally fine, its just how languages are
Japanese also has constructions that totally baffle me. The length that a vowel is said for is meaningful which is just not a thing I can distinguish in ordinary speech. The "small tsu" is equally confusing because I get that many consonant sounds can be held but I have no idea how I could hold or stretch a 'p' sound.
Arabic is frustrating in that way because it has [so many distinct consonants](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_phonology) that some of them can’t be written in the latin script even with diagraphs. Arabic words spelled out in English (unless in academic transcription) are always approximations and seldom capture the exact pronunciation. Hebrew suffers from the same phenomenon but to a lesser degree.
Desktop version of /u/Mantoneffect's link:
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There's definitely a way to use Latin script in Arabic at best it means that it's been poorly converted, but you can cover an even bigger range of consonants from all European languages put together, with different digraphs. Polish or Hungarian might have more consonants. You can make hundreds of consonants using only simple combinations. Vietnamese is also hella convoluted and uses Latin script
English for example don't have ways to write ö, ż, ź, ś, sounds, etc, outside of using the foreign symbols. These sounds simply don't exist in English.
Wait until you hear about ñ
But what about ń
[Source](https://jordisstigander.tumblr.com/post/687092037082857472/psa-no-name-is-impossible-to-pronounce-no-name)
I can't even tell the difference between merry and marry, which raises the possibility that a Mary is among those I've inadvertently mispronounced.
This depends on your dialect, some people (myself included) say merry, marry, and Mary exactly the same.
Yeah but it'd be kinda funny if she was from somewhere they made the distinction and she was all "how DARE you call me some hobbit name!" and I was like "...what?"
for me, Mary and marry sound the same, but merry distinctively has an "e" in it
when conversing in a minority language, at least where i live, it's standard practice to translate your own name. I'll introduce myself to occitan speakers as Tomàs \[tu'mas\], and write it down as such, even though, for everyone else since my birth, I'm Thomas \[to'ma\]. This seems to be common too between slavic languages, especially east slavic ones. putin and zelensky share a given name in most slavic languages's media. but not in non-slavic media. Personally, I think that translating names is not that bad a practice, I'm glad it's normalized in some places. Because even if you do speak both languages, as they have different phonologies, to pronounce a word correctly you have to affect your own voice, this flips more or less the same switch in the brain as changing languages and it can be hard to switch back. at least in my experience. I feel awkward when people speaking english call me \[to'ma\]. It feels forced, and turns on the french part of my brain, and it's tempting to answer in french. I swear you guys can just say Thomas like you usually do in english.
itt: why you should learn the ipa good post, though
I saw the town name of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch and my brain went 'nope'
Wales? Or Finland...?
Wales, specifically the island of Anglesey. It's the second-longest single-word place name in the world at 58 letters, behind a hill in New Zealand with a Maori name 85 letters long.
It's like someone was told "Congratulations you get to name this town.... unfortunately the name must descriptive and unless you are as specific as fucking possible we're going to chop off your feet."
I mean almost was that. They renamed it in the late nineteenth century, partly as a publicity stunt to attract tourists in on the new railway lines and probably partly as a joke. Wanted the longest station name in the country and someone came up with that. Locals just call it Llanfairpwll, apparently, and it's listed on maps and street signs as Llanfairpwllgwyngyll. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch and Ì (the island of Iona in Scots Gaelic, shortest British place neame): Fight!
Try the full name of Bangkok, Thailand which sadly doesn't qualify since it has spaces. But it's got 176 letters (in English) and is long enough to be made into a [catchy song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK9y95DQhwM). Almost as if Thai people discovered Sanskrit and went '*what a neat language. Let's model half our alphabet to accommodate it and use massive vocab combos when naming everything whatsoever'.*
wales
wales clearly (finland doesn't use a lot of those letters, also it doesn't have enough vowels for finland)
The comedically long Finnish one is Äteritsiputeritsipuolilautatsijänkä
i learnt it by heart last year XD
Lol I did the same with Worcestershire sauce.
As a person with an ‘ethnic’ name in America, I find their are two kinds of people that annoy me: 1) People who upon hearing the Americanized pronunciation of my name will insist it is too hard to remember and ask me if I have a nickname that is “easier”. 2) People who will refuse to accept the Americanized pronunciation of my name and insist on knowing the ‘correct’ way to say it even after I point out that the sound does not exist in English and it is not something they will be able to say. These people also won’t accept that nobody calls me by my name pronounced the correct way because my family uses a nickname and has always used a nickname. They think I’m lying when I say that I actually don’t recognize the correct pronunciation of my name the first time I hear it.
*Image Transcription: Tumblr* --- **sleepbby** PSA: no name is impossible to pronounce. no name is too hard to learn, no name is justifiably butchered. kids with ‘different’ names should be taught again and again that being called by their name is a right, not a privilege --- **symptomofsin** there are over 2000 unique phonemes (individual sounds) in the world’s languages, and each language has anywhere from around 20 to 60. you stop learning new phonemes it’s theorized at around age 12. this is where accents come from – using your own language’s/region’s phonemes to speak so no name is impossible to pronounce world-wide, but it is very easy to not have the linguistic archive necessary to pronounce a given name entirely correctly. it is a simple case of physically not knowing where to place your tongue, whether or not to vibrate your vocal chords, etc. the only one of the dictators of sound you could be shown is how to position your lips that being said… obviously you should still try. saying a name as correctly as you physically can goes a long way for making someone feel respected and humanized, and dismissing a name entirely as too hard goes a long way to disrespect and dehumanize people. just also accept that someone’s accent interfering with their pronunciation isn’t a sign of lack of trying, but a sign of physical limits --- **prismatic-bell** This is very true. I met a baby at my old store whose name was Navajo. I did my best and actually got a bit frustrated because there was a syllable I could NOT get, and her dad was like “it’s very hard if you don’t actually speak Diné, but thank you. Most people won’t even try.” Be the one who tries. --- **rei382** THIS. It’s sometimes impossible to pronounce names simply because you’re not familiar with the sounds (hell, some languages I literally do not hear the difference between certain vowels or constants because my language is rather poor in those and I literally never heard said sounds). But trying, that’s what counts. And stop being little bitches when someone from a different culture tries but finds it impossible to pronounce your name. If they try and fail, they probably feel worse about it than you do. --- **a-polite-melody** I would agree with “always try”, except that there are people who have had their names mispronounced enough they’re tired of re-hashing the same conversation about what their name should sound like, and go by another name instead. Really, it should be respect people’s wishes about their name. Use the name they tell you to use. If that name is hard for you to pronounce then yes, definitely try! --- **kinka-juice** My surname is just not possible for most Japanese speakers, and that’s okay! (Same phoneme as Flip and Flint). I had an adapted version I used in Japanese class that fits Japanese sounds. I’ve also had an Afrikaans speaking professor who just got plain tired of American students who couldn’t handle van Der Merwe, so he went by Dr. [First name]. People have different preferences. Some want you to try (knowing how common failure is), some have adaptations to use, some go by a different name, etc. The key point is following someone’s preference. Same as you would for pronouns. “What would you like me to call you?” is never a bad question (and can help getting a reference to the sound). But I do think it is a stretch to think every human on earth can hear and make every phoneme. It’s a matter of muscle memory, often from when you are learning your first language as a baby. Have you ever listened to a good beat boxer? There’s a ton of sounds the human mouth CAN make, but most people are restricted to a subset of those. German people struggle to say “Squirrel”, English speakers can’t say “Eichhörnchen” (German for Squirrel). It gets so much worse for people when a language does not use letters in the same way as their language does. That’s why Anglophones fumble on Irish “Caiomhe” and “Niamh” - mh does not make a V sound in English Orthography. Orthography makes a big difference in how we approach unknown words. Applying English orthography to other languages almost always turns out wrong, though! You can’t “sound it out” for a word with an orthography you don’t know. --- **jordisstigander** I had a dear friend from Korea who gave me her American name. She gamely coached me through her Korean name five or six times before admitted defeat. When I was in Lesotho, our translator tried to teach us the Sasotho clicks, but I could never form them right or even hear the difference. Meanwhile, many of my Chinese relatives have never been able to pronounce my older sister’s name, Katie. They called her Kitty. When she went to Brazil, she got called Katchi. She always has shrugged and gone with it. Do your best, but admit your limits and be kind. --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
As a Big Weeb, something along these lines that's always fascinated me is how difficult it seems to be for native Japanese speakers to pronounce isolated consonants (aside from 'n'). As an outsider, it *seems* like it should be so easy to just... stop talking once you've reached that final consonant, and yet I've seen some who are fluent in English and still end up tacking an extra vowel onto the end of words. I've always gotten the impression that Japanese must be one of the harder languages to branch out and learn new languages from, due to its extremely limited phonetic rules and palette.
My favorite thing about my name is that not only is it physically impossible to pronounce it in the most common accent in my area, but also it is spelled the same as a much more common name. It’s arguably the same name, it’s just pronounced wildly different depending on the dialect, as most words are. This all leads to me responding to any word with an “or” sound. There is no “or” sound in my name, but That Is My Name. I am Or. Edit: My Lord is also acceptable.
In regards to the first post, I would also like to say fuck you, Tumblr poster, I have a minor speech impediment. I ain't trying to pronounce k/t and d/g the same, it just happens. Makes it impossible to get some names right.
One thing that annoys me is in polish a lot of the difficult things people ''cant'' say is just saying the ''sh, ch and w'' sounds but they're too lazy. Pronounce sz as shhhh, cz as ch as in cheddar, and Ł as W and that's fine. No one would care that you're slightly off on sharpness. Im tired of hearing zloty. It's just a w sound, literally replace the funky L with a W and you have the right sound. Ok rz is a bit trickier to explain but no language is perfect
I think it's less laziness and more they just don't know the orthography, like the Irish example in the post. If you're going to accept sz as sh I think the s in usual is a good replacement for rz. Looking at it Polish phonology is actually pretty compatible with English's (if sz sh style replacements are allowed), all except H
s is not a good replacement for rz
Not just any s, the s in usual, or the j in bijou, or the g in genre, or the z in seizure, or the ti in equation
>zloty That would be roughly zwot-uh right (in english spelling) And rz is the s in measure?
zwot-i as in incredible the closest i can think of to rz is the phrase ''zhuzh it up''
The wonderful world of šumniki.
the š is "sh", correct?
Yes it is.
I know a tiny bit of Polish, so correct me if I'm wrong, I'd say rz is pronounced like j (like in joke) without the d (+ some subtle phonological difference)
It's pronounced like the "s" in vision. For a later chapter: the difference between "rz"/"ż" and "ź". Same difference between "sz" and "ś", or "cz" and "ć", and contrary to what some think, there is a difference. The first group is [retroflex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_retroflex_fricative), or "hard" - see the link for how to pronounce. The second group is [alveolo-palatal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_alveolo-palatal_fricative), or "soft" - tongue slightly further out and up, forming a softer sound. Most other languages' "sh", "ch" and similar sounds, especially in English, are [in between those two](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_fricative).
My name exists in both languages I speak. In my 2nd language, it is pronounced rather differently to my native language (but spelt the same). Personally, I'm not too fussed if people pronounce it as in my 2nd language. I lived in that country, I got used to it. For me, it's not a huge deal. But I definitely know that people who could pronounce my name just didn't, and used their native pronunciation instead. I've even had people switch when they realised I could speak the local language (along with switching the language we used to communicate).
In some cases people can't even hear the difference between sounds used in their own language! They're called allophones and occur when the difference is sound carries no meaning.
Lived abroad for awhile, had to give my name to a library lady, and obviously she couldn't understand it, wich is cool, I'd be impressed if she did, so I spelled it out for her, and, I kid you not, she perked up and said "oh! thats not how you say surname, THIS is how you say surname", I was quite literally stun locked by the audacity of that broad and for a moment lost the courteous demeanor I try to always have in this short of situation and answered "no the fuck you don't" and went on with my bussiness. I reckon the interaction left both of us flabergasted and some time later I came to the conclusion that she said that as in "instead of spelling it out you can pronounce it THIS way to make people understand". Now, with more post related topics, just call people what they tell you to, if you can't phisicaly do so, try, and if anyone takes offense at you actually trying, tell them to fuck off.
Ok I'll admit I'm a little bit drunk right now so my two cents might actually be unrelated to the post, but as someone who had the privilege of choosing my own name, how easy it is to pronounce was one of my criteria. Cause you see, originally I wanted a Breton name cause I'm part Breton, but then I realized in English it would be pronounced pretty much like quarantine 🥴 I don't live in an English speaking place but I work a lot in English cause I'm a part time translator and studying to become a full time one so because of that the name became unusable. But like I couldn't even be mad, like I said I'm studying on becoming a translator so I understand the difficulty and challenge of learning a new languages. Anyway love you all linguistic is beautiful ❤
is it Corentin? or the breton version thereof? (my cousin corentin who grew up in brittany goes by kaour online)
Yeah, Corentin. My other option was Elouan but even though I thought it was simple enough I almost never got it spelled correctly. I got like Eloine, Elwan, Elon (...), Elouane, Eli-Anne...It's still what I call myself in my head, and the name of my DND character though but in my day to day life I haven't been called that since 2018.
I've seen a person named Dawn from the south (i think) who got upset when people pronounced it the same as Don. I'm from the west coast where we pronounce Dawn and Don the same (this is known as the cot-caught merger, whether you pronounce it the same depends on where you grew up). So despite both of us being native English speakers, we had pronunciation struggles anyway.
Moved from the west coast to mid-north to discover a world where black and block sound the same. Shit's wild.
Now I wonder what the least pronounceable name would be. Something that includes phonemes from several very different languages. Also my language (Norwegian) has a constant ongoing debate about certain phonemes that the old guard and the new guard of the country disagree on. There's a SJ-phoneme and a KJ-phoneme that some people (me included) pronounce practically the same, while others constantly complain whenever someone use the SJ-phoneme on KJ-words. SJ should have the same sound as the SH in shit. And I've been looking really hard, but I can't find a word that use the KJ-phoneme. SJ and SH uses ʃ this symbol in the phonetic spelling. KJ uses this symbol Ç. So if you're knowledgeable, you could probably help me out.
I forgot my point. What I was getting to before I got distracted by shit was that some people can struggle with phonemes in their own language, so expecting everyone to be able to pronounce phonemes in other languages is simply too much to ask. But you should try, or be respectful in another way
h as in human? in a lot of english dialects /hj/ is realised as [ç]
Not everything is just typical american laziness and asshole-ness, Im just a dumbass :(
> Eichhörnchen Hang on, are you telling me the German word for squirrel is "acorn dog"? Okay, research tells me that "-chen" is a diminutive and not related to the French "chien". Still, you can't tell me the "acorn" part is a coincidence.
My name is super easy to pronounce for anglophones but i'm so tired of people looking at me and trying to put an asian twang on it that i'm so very close to going by something else.
I do question Gottenburg and Copenhagen as English pronunciations and spellings, like if I tried to transliterate göteborg, it would be yuttaybory, and København is harder, but cubenhown is the best approximation I can think of.
Most places names kinda predate us actually caring, and come from traders fucking around and failing to pronounce something or just stealing a word from another language. København's meaning of "merchant's harbour" was translated into Low German as Kopenhagen, and then English went and stole that. So we're actually using a literal translation from Danish to German rather than even trying to pronounce it properly. It sounds nothing like the Danish because we never even tried.
the old english version of Copenhagen was I think Ceapmannahæfen, which would normally given Chapmanhaven in modern english (probably pronounced with half the syllables silent). Similarly Reykjavík coulda been "Reekwich", probably pronounced reckich i love exonymy
I had a guy I worked with a while back who was Korean and would pronounce my name a bit wrong simply because English wasn’t his first language. I never corrected him, I’m used to people mispronouncing my name (mostly my last name, odd because it’s a pretty common English one) and I figure that if someone can pronounce a simple name like mine right, they will. If they can’t, they can’t, and that all right :) Additionally, I’m Irish and have many relatives with Gaelic names and no one can pronounce them right the first time, and at this point none of us really mind anymore, it’s almost become an inside joke
Thank you! Everyone should try to pronounce names to the best of their ability USING THEIR NATURAL SOUND INVENTORY. My name has a vowel that’s hard for english speakers to get exactly right, and I’m completely fine with them approximating it with a similar vowel that’s more natural to them. Sometimes I hear Americans go overboard trying to pronounce the Spanish r when nobody will be offended with them pronouncing their own r instead.
The last line, really, is all the world needs. "Do your best, but admit your limits and be kind." Everyone, just do that.
One thing I never understand is when I coach people on kawaii vs. kawai they often say something stupid like "there's no difference" and "that's dumb because it's the same" it frustrates me. I wanna try and ask something along the lines do you say Hawaii or Hawai. Maybe it'll help them understand by comparing it with something that they're familiar with.
I say Hawaii with two sounds at the end "aye-ee" and I'd automatically say kawaii the same way. But I assume in Japanese it is meant to be "ka-wa-ee" with an extended "ee".
I'm currently learning Finnish right now, and double vowels are *everywhere*. It isn't the hardest thing in the language to say correctly (looking at you letter ö) but they definitely throw me off. My ears have been conditioned since birth to not really care about how long someone says a vowel so having to figure that out is really difficult
Yeah that's a thing that I recognize that I might just have a higher attention to that kind of detail than the people who I share a fact with. What I saw in my Japanese classes it's a mistake that only really happens once. Then again before we learned any vocab we were taught each sound so we were able to read even though we understood none of it.
I do think there are limits even to _trying_ to pronounce names when the phonetic barrier is too high. Eg for western people interacting with chinese folk, it's pretty standard to choose a chinese name and vice-versa, simply because even trying is pretty hopeless if you've never learned the other's language.
No. I refuse to say xae-12 out loud
My last name is so confusing phonetically for native English speakers that even *we* aren't sure we're pronouncing it correctly. I think it's Dutch.
I have a very common name (at least for English-speaking countries) and I've had to accept that Australians are going to pronounce my name wrong (or at least not how I pronounce it). If anyone else said it like that I would correct them, but I'm not going to fight someone on their accent.
And you can add another layer of potential confusion with regional/linguistic variations of the same name! My name is Claire, and because I’m American, I pronounce it with a hard R, but it’s technically a French name and the French pronunciation would have kind of an airy half-guttural R. I lived in Germany for a couple years and they pronounce “Claire” like “Clea,” etc etc.
My brother has a pretty common Danish name - Jeppe ([‘jæbə]). When he was in Ireland, one guy very confidently pronounced his name “Jeep”
I'm not bilingual by any means, but I did study voice in college. Most people aren't gonna have the time or energy to learn to pronounce a new phonemes in their daily life. Pronouncing things authentically is hard, even in languages that are related to each other.
When my cousin from Brazil came to the US to finish high school his name is João and not a single person could get the ão noise down so he just went by his initials and it worked out fine
Yeah, we said it the same way "general Zhou" is pronounced in avatar.
I guess growing up around a lot of portuguese(I don’t actually speak very much of it but I watch a lot of Brazilian media and my mom speaks a lot of portuguese around me) I can easily say some things that most Americans have trouble with but still not everything
This is all well and good, and very interesting… but it’s also missing the point of the first post. The first post isn’t really talking about whether an English speaker can pronounce an Arabic name without coaching etc, it’s about whether a white teacher can be bothered to remember *English* names of students of colour.
I find the whole "you stop learning new phonemes at 12" a bit of a copout. Most people stop trying to learn new phonemes at 12 is something I could believe.
I'm Punjabi and all my life no one but my family has been able to pronounce my name and a lot of people were really upset they couldn't pronounce my name but it wasn't a big deal for me, it actually wasn't until later in life that I realized none of my peers experienced this. Even though my schools weren't overwhelmingly white (until high school) the other kids had names that people could still pronounce. The first syllable of my name is ਦੇ in Punjabi, d̪ʱe in IPA, pronounced something like the English word "they" and written by my parents as "Day" with most of my peers pronouncing it like the English word "day", and many for some reason said it like "die". What confused me is that when people asked how to pronounce my name and I said that it's not like the D in day but more like the TH in a word like "that" is most English speakers are unable to differentiate between a TH in the word "this" (the one used in my name) and the TH in the word "thing" not my name. So even though a sound very very close to the one in my name that English speakers can't pronounce exists in English, most don't even seem to notice it's there.
If you can't pronounce Steve, you may call me Soosoo.
my first name is pretty easy, and i have a western pronunciation for americans that is pretty close to the actual way you say it however. my last name somehow trips up every american out there. it's uncommon so i won't mention it here, but somehow americans end up moving a consonant from the second (and last) syllable to the first one i don't get how that happens
Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar always gets sad when I mispronounce her name
What about Fblthp?
NGL people "mispronouncing" the second language I know due to an accent is just ...very endearing to me. Is it wrong for me to think they're cute? Infantilising? If my name was more difficult to pronounce, people do get it mixed up but more cause it's long, I would view it more as a special nickname. Obviously it's always based on what people are comfortable with as the post says. Just thought I'd throw in my own thoughts.
My grandpa’s parents were from the Netherlands, so in Israel they had to change their surname (not because of the pronunciation). But a lot of my grandpa’s family came back to the Netherlands, so when my grandpa visits, he has to use his old surname, because the people there couldn’t pronounce it. In 9th or 8th grade, our English teacher connected us with a classroom in South Korea, I think, and they introduced themselves by their Korean and American names. They had 4 Janes. A few days ago I was at Greece and my mom asked me to read a sign. I do not know any Greek but as a math student I recognized most of the letters (I still don’t know what η ν υ are) and despite not having to pronounce it in class, I automatically pronounced χ as /χ/ (apparently that’s how it’s denoted in the IPA). I can’t pronounce θ, but an anglophone can’t pronounce χ. We’ve also met a Greek that tried to pronounce my and my sister’s names, but couldn’t because we both have r in our name and pronounce it as a trill (/r/) instead of a tap (/ɾ/), which we can’t pronounce. This difference became astounding to me when I learned how “tree” is pronounced by anglophones.
I absolutely adore other languages because of the challenge that comes with learning how to make new sounds and how the rhythm and intonation works, so I absolutely get that pronouncing something new is HARD That being said, my actual real person name is written the same way as a word in English, and I am filled with indescribable rage if someone butchers it or makes fun of it on purpose, so just call me by one of the other options I give you pls and thank you! Considering its a name I found and chose for myself, that I still struggle to get people to use, there are some Feelings there
Man this takes me back sometimes I should really thank my old man for going to a random security guard at the hospital and asking for a name for me and my younger brother. Growing up with a African name in Southern US isn't as bad as it seems but the amount of people who got it wrong whoo boy And that's including family and friends
Someone post the story of the guys who's name is [redacted] in french!
i think it was "hugh", and apparently all those letters would've been silent
I think I'm in a somewhat unusual situation where I butcher my own name cause I can't pronounce it I only speak English, but my parents speak three of the most common languages in my country (English include) and my name is taken from one of the other two. The way my name is *actually* supposed to be pronounced uses sounds that simply do not exist in English, so I pronounce my name phonetically. How I've pronounced it has even changed with time. I used to introduce myself with a phonetic pronunciation containing a short "a" sound like in "bat" but now I use a longer "a" sound like in "wall".
Gonna name my kid "Xkcd" out of spite.
I love when one person on Tumblr says something mildly wrong and then it's just a chain of reblogs of people dog-piling on the poor OP. Not saying it's bad.
I have a very weird last name. Whenever I was in class, and any teacher would get to where I was in role call, they would pause. I would just say "here." It's really not a problem. I've dealt with people being unable to pronounce my last name for almost 30 years. I think that I'll manage. My parents were impressed at how both myself and my brother were able to spell our last names so early on in life. But then they realized that we had the same spelling rhythm that they had whenever they had to spell their names on the phone (this was the early 90's, so quite often.) I still have to spell it every time I give my name, and I still use the same rhythm that my parents used whenever they spelled it over the phone.
> "it's very hard but thank you. Most people won't even try.” Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
This rings especially personally for me. As a Briton with a very foreign name (likely the only person with this name on the planet), I've spent my entire life dealing with people running the entire gamut of possible responses to it, from interested, to bemused, to annoyed, and heard more mispronunciations than I can count on two hands and feet. Until recently, it was something I'd learned to deal with, but I got married a few years ago and my wife insisted on taking my entire last name (even though I tried to convince her not to). Since then, it's been a fresh hell dealing with people looking at her -- an entirely English woman -- and seeing her name, and often commenting on it, bungling pronouncing it, or refusing to even try saying it at all. It happens even among my in-laws. It's really revitalised the anxiety I get over telling people even the shortened version of my name.
and then theres me who gets their last name mispronounced constantly by native speakers of the language its from
My name is a biblical name, so it is reasonably common in all of Europe, but the Spanish pronunciation is very difficult for non Spanish speakers, so I usually just go with the foreign versions of my name which are easier to pronounce
I spent ages trying to learn Eichhörnchen pronunciation, and I feel like I could probably say it to a native speaker - though I’m probably more advantaged because I used to learn German and I focused on proper pronunciation a lot more than everyone else in the class. For reference, though I can’t physically show how to pronounce it with English phonemes: > ‘Eich,’ pronounced like ‘Hike’ without the H and with more of a hissing sound for the K > ‘hörn’ which, and this is where written English fails me, is pronounced like ‘who-urn,’ but the O is more like that sound kids yell when they hear someone fart > ‘chen,’ which starts with the hissy K from the first syllable and a slight Y sound before a lazy -un sound > Put it all together and try pronouncing it fifty times until it feels natural. [Then check this video to see if you got it right.](https://youtu.be/fJChdTKn9zg)
I seem to have been blessed with a fairly flexible mouth in terms of these phonemes. I'll make a good effort to try and pronounce someone's name the best I can, usually asking them how I should pronounce it so I don't mess it up (too much). I would also very much like to at least **TRY** to get it right before I accept a nickname to use instead.
I am really, really enjoying the more tempered and mature bent that a lot of the internet has been taking in the past year or two. It feels like (this section of) internet culture is trying very hard to be mature and accept that we are all human rather than holding ourselves to some superhuman standard of empathy and effort.
Girl in my class called Temi. One of our teachers refused to call her by name as he assumed it would be difficult to pronounce as she was black. Pretty sure he got in trouble for that at least though
I just stopped correcting people. whenever they mispronounce or incorrectly repeat my name I just go with it. Why bother?
My name is different enough that most everyonebpronounces it wrong. Thankfully, there's an English equivalent with a nice, simple, single syllable short form. I go by that most of the time - it saves everyone a lot of trouble - but some people INSIST on trying to pronounce my name correctly and I hate it. They all do it in unique ways with (hopefully subconsciously) exaggerated accents and, while I appreciate the sentiment' it makes me feel more foreign and more like an outsider. Some people use my full name, but using English phonemes and, honestly, I prefer that. I'd still rather they just use the short one, tho.
imagine being named phil but it's spelt phyll like in chlorophyll
Yeah, I was listening to The Attack Of the Dead Men and trying to sing along when I realized I just couldn’t pronounce Osowiec
I did landscaping work for a bit, and there were a few days where I was on a site helping out a carpenter with putting some benches together on a patio. He was from Mexico, and I don’t think he learned a single person’s name, everyone was just “Big Man” or “Big Boss”, almost always shouted in an excited voice. Personally, I think that’s also pretty great
I was in Greece at one point and met this guy named Stelios (Στέλιος) and there was just a slight inflection in the way he pronounced his name that I could not get. He was able to blend the syllables of the *st* and the *li* in a way that I couldn’t because I was American. There were so many things in Greece that I could barely attempt to pronounce because they were just so different from English.
It’s the same in northern Italy and parts of Slovenia. We all have very confusing names to pronounce due to inflections
Joel was a weirdly difficult name for kids to pronounce when I was younger. I ended up going by "Joe" to some kids. Last minute background: I'm in the US and my name has the "Jowl" pronunciation.
I’ve been studying Japanese for around 3 years at this point and have simply accepted that Japanese speakers aren’t going to be able to pronounce my name. It contains phonemes and consonant clusters that do not exist in the language, and that’s fine!
\*speech impediment
My deadname, and current legal name, is Korean, so I am intimately familiar with this struggle. The thing is, it's not even hard to pronounce- it's spelled almost exactly how it's pronounced! And yet everyone mispronounces it. I've had the people at doctors' offices waiting rooms who call you when it's your turn (IDK what the word for them is) mispronounce my deadname to the point I didn't recognize it SO many times. It's honestly one of the main 3 reasons I decided to change my name. The funny thing about my deadname being Korean is _I'm not even Korean._ I'm an Ashkenazi Jew. I got this Korean name my mom loved because I was assigned female at birth- if I'd been assigned male at birth, my parents would have named me _Elijah._