Believe it or not it’s usually not that hard to string like 3 unfamiliar syllables together if you take a few seconds to put in literally any effort you fuck
I’m not seeing it explicitly in other comments so as one more point I think it matters the intent and tone. As written by OP the “I’m not even gonna try” sounds like an asshole blaming the person (likely the ethnicity or nationality). However, a good natured, self deprecating admission of an inability to properly pronounce a word and a desire not to embarrass the named person is admirable. “I’m sorry, that one is beyond me. Can you pronounce it for me so I can get it right? Thank you.”
Also: acetaminophen
my favorite solution to this is when they ask a native speaker to pronounce it and then just splice the audio into their own speech in the most obvious way possible.
keeps it real, shows the real pronunciation, and nobody has to hear the speaker struggle.
My sister dated a guy with a slightly hard to pronounce name. Honestly not even hard to pronounce, just not a western hemisphere name. Some of my family made the effort and learned how to say it, some made the effort but still failed. The rest called him Chris, which is the closest western name to his actual name.
Those groups mapped perfectly from least to most racist.
Okay but consider that if you read things phonetically and you know it’s in a language with grammar conventions that are entirely foreign to you and that you know you will fuck up
in contexts like this “I’m not even going to try here” is a sort of coping mechanism because you already know that whatever you attempt is going to be an embarrassing mash up of whatever it was supposed to sound like
I don’t know if I would shame people for social coping mechanisms
but also it depends on how they say it, I guess, and with what intent
Admitting you don’t know how to do something is good and should be encouraged
Admitting you don’t know how to do something
I don’t know how to do this
The first step is admitting you have a problem
I’m not taking responsibility for the Irish getting trolled when introduced to the latin alphabet
Caoimhe is pronounced Keeva, and you expect me to know that without knowing Gaelic?
Depends on the situation. Being jumped with the welsh place name when you’re in a hurry vs in a prepared video trying to pronounce “Venkatesh” or some other easy phonetic spelling. The latter is probably racism
welsh place name
If it’s got more syllables than there are letters in the English alphabet, Im winging it and Im not doing a second take
Counterpoint:
Languages with totally irregular romanization like English are the exception that prove the rule IMO as they show how good you have it
Keep saying “exception that proves the rule” the nerds here have corrected it so many times I’ve begun to see it as a hexbear sore-spot and i laugh every time i see it now
I think using it in the sense of the rule of “words in other languages are fairly easy to pronounce due to consistent romanization” should be applied broadly to all other cases (e.g. even to South Korea’s cursed romanization system) because special cases have been considered would be the original sense of the phrase.
Was the above usage incorrect?
hexbearisms
or uk-flag-burning-emoji
This is the same Guy-o-type that can perfectly recite the German name for the Mordtodesmaschineumjudenzubreizumachen, but hears a word in Spanish and is like, “What am I, Mexican or something??”
German
Mordtodesmaschineumjudenzubreizumachen
I’m just a big World War 2 machinery aficionado! Nothing to see here!
exactly
Mordtodesmaschineumjudenzubreizumachen
I started with Mordto, saw the word kept going and was like nope
Okay but I do it for german. Every time there’s a german word with more than like 5 syllables i just say herpderpderp
I’m sorry but I am not learning welsh
I take pleasure in butchering welsh
I would too but those guys can run like mad
Some of us grew up in extremely Anglo families and it’s not our fault. I mean, I can try to pronounce but I’m 100% getting it wrong.
to me it’s not that big of a deal when people are like that in an apologetic or matter of fact way, it’s obnoxious when people are like that in a “we speak english here
” way
How do you feel about “sorry if I mispronounce this” guys?
Best option. Admitting fault but giving genuine effort at pronunciation.
If you ask me to say anything in icelandic besides Reykavik im shooting you
You’re for sure saying that wrong too
the goal should be to get it right enough that a native speaker can recognise it without it hurting their brain. this is only easy if the orthography hasnt drifted too too far from the “consensus” on what values the letters hold.
so obviously you’re fucked with english, french, irish for example. german, polish, croatian, hungarian, spanish, italian, these shouldnt be that hard.
outside europe, i dunno, you’re probably fucked anyway :D
edit: thought about it a bit, and you’re not always fucked. indonesian for example feels like it was made to be pronounced easily by everyone, including foreigners.
This is such a big pet peeve of mine. Like fuck me dude sound it out. It’s not that hard.
you’re putting a lot of undue trust in orthography and expecting people to know all the vowel sounds from languages they don’t speak
Celtic languages have an entirely different tradition with regards to consonants too. Without looking it up or having prior knowledge of gaelic there is literally no way to arrive at the correct pronunciation of Caoimhe. This doesn’t make their orthography less valid or less rational, it just means that there is a lack of overlap between the english use of certain letters and theirs.
And my own native language of Danish has 3 ways to use the letter D, and I fucking dare any of you to guess what the letter D does in “Mand” or “Mads”.
I fucking dare any of you to guess what the letter D does in “Mand” or “Mads”.
Standard voicing/nasalizing harmonization?
/mand/ -> [mann], /mads/ -> [mats] ?
That is a very good guess, but not accurate. It indicates the presence of stød and is itself not pronounced. (So no t sounds in Mads, Mads is just “Mass”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stød
It is a form of putting emphasis on a syllable by way of a “glottal stop” (It’s not always quite a glottal stop).
Even within English, “a” can denote about ten different sounds
shi-oh-ban
Key-va (although the exact pronunciation depends on where you are). As beautiful of a language Irish is, it is impossible to pronounce. Even something simple like Dún Laoghaire (done-leary) is inevitably going to be butchered on the first attempt by people who don’t speak the language.
Okay dude you sound out Speciallægepraksisplanlægningsstabiliseringsperiode
I’m talking about people who see any slightly “ethnic” name like Rodriguez or some shit and won’t pronounce it
sound it out
Eysaigher sayid than dougne inne a naan-phoughneightic languishe
In all seriousness, English romanization is terrible and a lot of words are almost impossible to pronounce correctly if you haven’t heard them pronounced before. Knowing your limits is a good thing and I’d rather be around a person who knows they can’t do something then someone who insists they can do something they can’t.
nah i’m not learning polish
Oh come on it’s not that hard to pronounce Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz
Brzęczyszczykiewicz
Looney tunes falling down the stairs sound effect sounding name
i’m pretty sure that with 30 minutes of “work” (reading the wiki page on polish orthography + watching 2 videos on basic polish spelling/pronunciation on youtube) you can get to a point where you can slowly work out polish words well enough that someone who actually speaks polish will know what you mean. it’s not that hard.
idk i do extremely poorly with arbitrary contextless information
yeah but it’s not contextless, it’s uh, most letters are pronounced how you’d expect (you have to expect the correct things) except these: <list of weird shit>
like, you never have to explain that k means k in polish, german, english, … this is just expected.
b is likewise pretty stable, and so are d, t, f, g, h, j, l, m, n, p, r, s, x, z, v. people also tend to have an idea of a e i o u that is good enough to start with.and so you only really have to learn the specifics, like what c, w, y mean and are there any extremely weird choices? (there usually are a few in every language)
of course, this gets worse when the other language has sounds you’re entirely unfamiliar with and dont know how to approximate
