"Now, why do they spell it that way?" Topic

I am getting royally tanked off at foreigners, or at least those ninnies who transcribe Johnnie Foreigner names into English letters. (Yes, I consciously said "English")

"Peking" suddenly becoming "Beijing" was irritating.
"Pathans" suddenly becoming "Pashtuns" meritted barely a shrug.
"Burma" REALLY being spelled "Myannmar", or something like that…

But, how the heck can you hear a name that everyone insists now on pronouncing "Weegers" (hard "G"), and spell it "Uighurs"?
Come on… Was some Back of Beyond explorer deaf? If you spell it "Uighurs", one should expect to pronounce it, at the very least, "UY (guttural g..something"… Oh, heck, pronounce like it's spelled.

Shrug…..

One that amuses me is the evolution of 'Boudicea' from being pronounced: 'Bow (rhymes with go) diss – eee-a (with a long 'e' and the a pronounced seperately, to 'Bow-diss- ea (short e running into the a), to something closer to Boo-dick-a'.

As if anyone knows how it was pronounced in 60 AD anyway.

I do call it Beijing because all the Chinese people I know call it that. I think the change came with the adoption of pinyin as the official romanised phonetic script of Chinese. Before that any character could be transcribed in any number of ways which would have been even more confusing than it is now.

The only 2 Burmese people I know do not like the name Myanmar as they feel it was imposed by the military government. Like everything else.

Don't you love Beijing Duck? Ever get caught in the grips of a Myanmar Python? How about a cup of Sri Lankan tea? Spent the night with a pair of Thai twins?
Holy Roman Empire, Bart.

'Spent the night with a pair of Thai twins?'

No. they weren't related.

"I am getting royally tanked off at foreigners, or at least those ninnies who transcribe Johnnie Foreigner names into English letters."

Reserve your righteous indignation for those English speakers (and I use that in the broadest possible sense) who make no effort to learn how Johnny Foreigner pronounces and spells his own damn names.

You don't need to get too exotic, either. Right now I'm reeling from the daily horrors inflicted by FoW players, whose Fallscrimjagers and Strum troops have now been joined by supporting Stuge batteries., while their Polizia keep the populace in check.

I know in my heart that one day, the 21st Century will be numbered among the Dark Ages…

Allen

LOL !!!

I feel your pain, allan, its enough to make one go Rouge…

Don't you love Beijing Duck? Ever get caught in the grips of a Myanmar Python? How about a cup of Sri Lankan tea? Spent the night with a pair of Thai twins?
Holy Roman Empire, Bart.

A dish of Mumbai aloo with that?

I tend to agree that words should be transcribed phonetically.

Thus, Welsh has to be thrown out entirely, and we can start over.
-Kle.

How the hell do you get Sri Lanka from Ceylon?

I was recently listening to an interesting discussion on a contemporary ot Thomas Tallis, who wrote an Opera.

This was in 1580's, and the Opera , about Britain's Warrior Queen, was pronounced 'Bonduka '

Pat

From a man who lives near Wilkes-Barre, this is priceless

It's simple really. U-i-ghur. Oo-ee-ghur. Strictly speaking, it should be oo-y-ghur, but that's not gonna happen. All languages have rules, and foreign words are typically forced to conform. Weegurs is probably the closest you'll get with native English speakers.

Oh, and the "gh" represents a voiced velar fricative, something else you're not going to hear from English speakers.

OK, how do you pronounce "Ljubljana"?

Just askin'…

Exactly as it's spelled. The "j" is like a "y", as in jäger. Of course, English lacks the /lj/ consonant cluster but it's not too difficult. As a native speaker, you should be proud that you have mastered some pretty tough sounds without realizing it. Three of my German profs had never mastered /∂/ as in "this", and two couldn't manage /θ/ as in "thick", this despite all having spoken English since primary school and having taught at university level for 20+ years. Our wacky "r" sounds also throw people into utter disarray.

As a native speaker, you should be proud that you have mastered some pretty tough sounds without realizing it.

Oh, really? I'll snap at any reason to be proud.

As Lieutenant Stan Wojciehowicz said on "Barney Miller", "…the way it's spelled!" And, in Polish, I am sure he was right.

How about some good "British/Scottish" surnames to show how perfect English is,
Beauchamp, Dalziel, St.Jean-Smythe, McMahon,

or some good old homonyms

Did you polish the Polish silver ?,
The Pilgrims used the pronoun 'Thee'.
Have you read the red book or will you read it tomorrow ?

Beijing = Peking? I never noticed; I thot Peking was still over there, just not in the News.

The one that currently annoys the heck out of me is Laotian: my son is on an LDS mission in Alaska, where there is a Laotian enclave, so my son has to learn Hmong: right there is an example of what annoys: you don't hear or pronounce the "H". A whole raft of unpronounced letters, and Latin letters used to pronounce a sound that has nothing to do with the Latin!? What Ommadawn created that translation into English? He should be shot or banished to a special level of hell (yes, the same one with child molesters and people who talk in the theatre)….

>>> Hmong: right there is an example of what annoys: you don' hear or pronounce the "H".

It depends on the dialect; Hmong has two major ones. In one, the "m" is aspirated. In the other, it is not.

Would an English speaker hear the difference, without its being pointed out? As I mentioned above, the fault is seldom that of those whose language it is, but rather of the farang's untrained and undiscriminating ear.

Allen

A whole raft of unpronounced letters, and Latin letters used to pronounce a sound that has nothing to do with the Latin!?

You mean just like in English? In languages like Hmong, where RPA was adapted rather late (1950's) and with a solid linguistic grounding, unpronounced letters often indicate a phonemic contrast. Typical of these is aspiration. In English there is no difference between a plosive and non-plosive /p/, for example, but in many languages these are distinct phonemes. and hence there is a need to distinguish them. Besides aspiration, Hmong also features prenasalisation and lateral release, and without looking into the minutiae of Hmong orthography, I'd bet a shiny nickel that these are denoted by your unpronounced letters.

What Ommadawn created that translation into English?

It was missionaries. Seriously.

Beijing = Peking? I never noticed; I thot Peking was still over there, just not in the News.

Yes, easy mistake to make. China has after all been decreasing in importance and has been rarely mentioned in the news since the 1980s.

Beijing has always been pronounced 'Bei jing' (which just means Northern Capital) by those who live there or thereabouts – well as long as anyone can remember anyway. The (Romanised) spelling system was changed and standardized to pinyin (spell – sound) around 1949, and the Chinese started insisting on the name for international flights and conferences etc in the 1980s.

With the exception of Doug I think everyone is up on Peking / Beijing now. A lot of people still get to the airport and say 'I want to go to Bombay, not Mumbai' though.

OK, how do you pronounce "Ljubljana"?

"Lyoobliana".
-Kle.

Of course, the real question is why the heck we try to transliterate foreign placenames "accurately" instead of just spelling them the way they sound to mist of us, when we won't even call most countries by their actual names…
-Kle.

What Kle just said- why say Beijing, and not what ever the Chinese for China is? Ditto Mumbai/India. Also why do we only do it for such countries- Why not Wein, or Goteburg?

Myanmar is a different kettle of fish. The name was changed by the Junta, and both are used, because of disagreement whether an illegal dictatorship should be dignified with us accepting it.

Exactly, John. How did all those foreigners turn Firenze into Florence? Or Venezia into Venice? Or lose the final syllable of Roma.
Darn those foreigners and their inept pronunciations.

I am constantly correcting my six year old not to "Americanise" her English accent. I cannot bear it when she pronounces "party" as "pardy" or "dog" as "dawg"! What hope has she of pronouncing foreign words correctly when she can't even speak her own language! Frankly, I blame everyone apart from myself.

Pete

It's called ISTANBUL now? When did that happen? I always just called it, "The City", but see Constantinople, still, on most of MY maps….

I tend to agree that words should be transcribed phonetically.

Thus, Welsh has to be thrown out entirely, and we can start over.

Which would be a shame since Welsh is a strictly phonetically pronounced language.

Contrary o popular belief, once you've learned a few basic rules, it's a ridiculously easy language to pronounce.

The grammar on the other hand is a nightmare.

Which would be a shame since Welsh is a strictly phonetically pronounced language.

Contrary o popular belief, once you've learned a few basic rules, it's a ridiculously easy language to pronounce.

At the risk of yet another stifle (keep 'em coming folks), how the fuuu do you get a word without any vowels in it to sound like anything at all, phonetics or not?

Cwm = coum? (the diphthong's to avoid needlessly distressing any of our more sensitive members ), if you're going to shove a random vowel sound in there, you may just as well pronounce it 'quim' (I'm guessing our American viewers won't know, but as we're talking about valleys…)

domeafavour

My old dad used to say that the Welsh accent was perfectly designed for moaning in, because everything they said sounded like a complaint. He was right, try saying 'how's the weather?' with a North Wales accent :)

Right Connard Sage – at least the second most popular language here in Texas (that would be Spanish, though German certainly has a foothold in some parts) fits the Latin alphabet exceedingly well, and (except for LL = Y) is fairly simple to sound out.

Though I know native Spanish speakers laugh at our horrible accents. But then again, most of the world seems to laugh at how Texans pronounce English, so we're kind of used to it.

Someday I'm going to actually figure out the rules for pronouncing Welsh and Irish words, if only so I can speak about the various Dark Ages armies I'm building.

(Note to rules writers – it's not a bad idea to put a phonetic pronunciation guide in your rules when you use words that are not native to the language you have written those rules in!)

I can reduce a French person to tears of helpless laughter by asking for a coffee. I'm not smug about my ability to talk foreign :)