http://www.englishforums.com/search/pro.htm?q=tag%3aFootball+tag%3aPronunciation+tag%3aSpellingSearch results for 'tag:Football tag:Pronunciation tag:Spelling' matching tags 'Football', 'Pronunciation', and 'Spelling'en-USCSMOD (Build: 3273.32735)http://www.englishforums.com/English/NonNativeAccents/2/dmbdk/Post.htm#309869Wed, 03 Jan 2007 03:40:21 GMT946f00bb-57d3-4b7b-a9a2-059b5341af52:309869marvin a.This is really badly off topic but I couldn t resist the temptation to comment on your correct observation I understand very well that native speakers of English mispronounce foreign words because foreign languages are not studied much in English speaking countries Well can you really blame us In order to pronounce all of the foreign names we re faced with we would have to know hundreds of different languages which not many of us do Also we would have to know how certain names are Anglicized that were written in different scripts such as Cyrillic or Greek We d also have to know the nationality of the name as well Also some spellings are altered when written in English We d also have to adapt the name to fit English rules anyway For example is a word ended with an E in English it would be pronounced as eI because E is not acceptable at the end of a word Also some languages have diacritic marks that don t exist in English This can change the pronunciation quite a bit Let s suppose someone had the name Analaupe In English this would probably be read as æn lAp or æn loUp Let s pretend that the name is Italian then we would approximate it by pronouncing it as An laUpeI But maybe the name s Hawaiian or Inuk perhaps Maybe it s Ethiopian or Greek We don t know What if it s French and the e is supposed to have an accent mark on it Also there are some sounds that we just can t prononounce and that we wouldn t use when speaking English For example many people pronounce Bach not as bax but as bAk_ We simply don t have the x sound in English Beethoven pronounced in English even by people who know how it ought to be pronounced is not betof n but rather betoUv n simply because it s spelt Beethoven People who have no idea how it s pronounced would say biToUv n But notice that even the people who know how it s pronounced in the original language don t even pronounce it correctly I suppose we should start criticizing the Japanese for pronouncing the name Smith as Sumisu san or Ryan as Laian san It took me a few seconds in the 1980s to realise an Englishman and I were talking about the same Swedish tennis player Björn BorgWell the average Anglophone does not know Swedish for one thing let alone even being able to identify that that name is Swedish I would say that most would pronounce it as b dZOr n as that s how it looks in English If they knew that in many languages j is pronounced as j rather than dZ they might say bjOr n The closest approximation in English of the name would be bjr n but notice that both the vowel and the r are still mispronounced English lacks that vowel sound as well as lacking that particular kind of r Yes the things you comment on are terrible but they are the result of pure ignorance Yeah they are But let s be reasonable Do you really expect English speakers to learn the orthography of every language on earth Let alone to be able to guess which language a particular name is from And to be able to guess how a particular name was altered to fit English orthography Or to say unusual sounds that don t exist in English Not to mention some people have altered the spelling and or pronunciation of their name after immigrating Before the formula driver Michael Schumacher whose name is always mispronounced there was another German Schumacher a football goalkeeper and a Eurosports commentator pronounced his name shoemaker Some English speaking people who have that particular German name actually do pronounce it SumeIkr For them SumAk or especially Sumax would be an incorrect pronunciation of their name Not all Anglophones know German And remember unlike in other languages in English one can pronounce ones name however one pleases regardless of how it s spelt Some Schumachers pronounce their name SumAk others Sumax others SumeIkr other s bOb Other Shumachers decide to become Schumakers or Schoemakers or Shoemakers or any number of spelling variants and pronounce it totally differently What I find almost amusing is the tendency to pronounce even foreign proper nouns say people s names as if they were English An Englishman has actually asked me how I would pronounce my name in English Maybe he found your name very difficult to pronounce and wanted to know if there was a shorter easier form of it in English People with the name Aliahiakanamakumachumanakatachita often have an English name of simply Ali Other people take on completely different names when visiting a foreign country In lots of language classes one picks for example a traditional German name or a French name such as Xavier and uses that name in class and uses it when visiting the foreign country instead of their actual name http://www.englishforums.com/English/TheMostCommonSlangWords/zkwx/post.htm#27605Mon, 12 Apr 2004 16:54:44 GMT946f00bb-57d3-4b7b-a9a2-059b5341af52:27605nestorDawg It s a pronunciation spelling of the word dog If someone s my dawg he or she is my friend If someone s a dawg he or she is promiscuous I can also dawg something If I m hungry I ll dawg my food meaning that I ll eat a lot of it in a hurry And in sports you can dawg the other team If you got beat 20 to nothing in a soccer game you got dawged Aiight That s just all right How are you today Aiight It s a Southern American English pronounciation and isn t just limited to rappers or African Americans Dat That African Americans Cajuns Southerners New Yorkers and some others use it The New Orleans Saints an American football team in Cajun country once had a slogan Who dat say dey gone beat dem Saints You see or hear dat in Jamaican English too Holla This comes from holler which is a Southern and Appalachian American word used by both blacks and whites and it means to yell African American and Southern American English are closely related in vocabulary and pronunciation