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There was a young fella from Worcester
Who once had a very fine rorcester.
But he cut off its head
And so it was dead
And now it don’t crow like it ucester.
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Someone tell me how you get “Winn” out of Nguyen.
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Pretty much every Chinese name you see is pronounced differently from what you think it should. (I know Nguyen is Vietnamese).
Now with other languages that use the Latin alphabet, it makes sense for various letters to make different sounds for different languages. They co-opted the alphabet to fit their language.
But for the various Asian languages who had their own forms of writing and have to be translated to English and the like, it makes no sense that they don’t spell them the way they sound.
IIRC the reason for this is because there are so many different sounds in the languages, that they have to come up with new letter combos to come up with those new sounds. Even though maybe it seems like it would make more sense to have things spelled differently the current system is actually more consistent.
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Eh, I would argue that etymology. “Good bye” originating as a contraction “God b’ye,” as a reasonble explaination of the modern pronunciation, as well as spelling.
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Let’s not forget Menzies… pronounced minghis.
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Slob-Hand! Slob-Hand! Slob-Hand!
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Spoken like someone without a dear friend named Siobhan + a penchant for creative mangling of names!
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Of course. Gaelic is pronounced exactly as it is spelt. Its spelling rules are not those of English.
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An older version, quoted in A.O.Legman’s “The Anatomy of the Dirty Joke”…
Two old men sitting in a hotel reception. A pageboy comes through crying “Telegram for Mister Glasscock! Telegram for Mister Glasscock!”. One old man turns to the other, nods, and says “I once knew a man with a wooden leg. He could dance as well as you or I…”
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Your “there are no silent letters in Worcester/Gloucester/Leicester” rule doesn’t work with Cirencester though.
Irish Gaelic is pronounced as it’s spelled, but that’s on account of a spelling reform. Gaelic (or Scottish Gaelic or Canadian Gaelic) isn’t.
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True. But we were talking about Irish. It’s unsurprising in Irish that Naomh is [n̪ˠiːvˠ] (or [n̪ˠiːβˠ] in some accents).
From my very small contact with it I think Catalan is a bit more like Spanish with a French accent. The vowels can elide like French rather than being always separate syllables.
Portuguese is nuts and sounds kind of like it could be Russian or something compared to all the languages around it.
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You don’t. It’s not quite that at all though Americans usually just pronounce “win” the glottal bit at the beginning is there. I’ve spent some time trying to get it right with Vietnamese people (I meet people from all over all the time and pronouncing people’s names the way they like it is kind of a thing with me, it’s a discipline in listening to people and not assuming the spelling works the way I think it does and learning to be wrong).
Catalan and Occitan are closer to each other than either is to its supposed parent language.
Portuguese is no worse than Galego (which is supposedly Spanish).
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