Re: non-native accents

Marvin A. — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 03:40:21 GMT

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 [ Ã¦n@lAp ] or [ Ã¦n@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, BjÃ¶rn Borg

Well, 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.

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Re: non-native accents