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Comment by chungleong | Hacker News Reader

It's also the pool with the least pronounceable name. Staring at "Mszczonów", most non-Polish people will just give up, I suspect.

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— Name?

— Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-fcrn1Edik

Polish orthography looks insane to native English eyes, but spending a couple hours studying when I was over there 3 years ago was enough to guess right. More sensible than English orthography I'd say!

There are rules at least :)

For those who are intellectually curious, this site has two recordings of how to say it: https://forvo.com/word/mszczonów/

Sounds like Mush-tah-nov to me.

Odd, I don't speak Polish, but my mom and grandparents did. Even that small exposure was enough for me to get that pronunciation 100% correct. I wonder what the minimum exposure to any given language is to allow someone to correctly guess pronunciation. I speak a little German and French but regularly get the pronunciation incorrect, but I didn’t grow up around native German and French speakers.

It helps a lot to have been exposed to it around 6-12 months. That's apparently when pronunciation subtlety is learnt.

Makes sense. My grandmother would sing polish nursery rhymes to me at that age.

I bet you six meters of kiełbasa that you did not get that pronunciation 100% correct.

I didn't think I would, but I did!

Polish pronunciation is actually incredibly easy, there's a direct mapping (a mathematical function) from a simple partition of letters to phonems. Unlike in English, where we have weirdnesses like "vehicle" or "colonel". There's a price to pay for quick and massive import of words, lack of centralized language development coordination body and conquering the global stage of accents, I reckon.

Example for the town: Mszczonów -> Mshchonooff (Americanized).

It’s not easy, it’s very very hard, even for other slavs, but it’s very predictable based on spelling.

I blame the Poles for the muteness of their non-slav neighbors.

Ah now I finally got it! Nemtsy, makes sense.

Something to know that probably helps:

sz ~= sh in English

cz ~= ch in English

w == v

So Mishchonov, roughly?

Mshchonoov

There's no i after m, and ó makes oo sound.

As a non-Pole, I can't be 100% sure, but isn't it closer to:

Mishchonoof

? Trying to see if I remember my Polish..

No, ajuc is right. I'm not Polish but have been living in Poland for a few years

There's definitely no "i" there.

The "v" at the end can get devoiced to "f" in casual speech, but people don't think of it as "f", because in other forms of the word, where it has postfixes - it still has to be pronounced as "v".

It's a little like "speakin'" vs "speaking".

Got it, good to know! Thanks

And ó ~= oo in English

More like Mshchonoov.

Seems perfectly phonetic to me.

The pool is called Deepspot.

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