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Comment by paozac | Hacker News Reader

With most languages the spelling gives you enough information to figure out how to pronounce a word you've never heard before. Not with english. My last wrong guess: the writer Malcolm Lowry (/lauri/ instead of /louri/). Danish, same problem.

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I've known multiple people with the last name spelled Koch. One pronounced it "Coke", one "Cook", one "Cock", and one "Cahch".

Dialects and accents really make this kind of difference very pronounced.

In Edinburgh, Scotland, there is "Cockburn Street". Which is pronounced co-burn. Other good examples trip up tourists, such as Buccleuch Street which is pronounced "Buck-Loo".

My favourite street name in Edinburgh is "Horse Wynd", unfortunately not pronounced the comical way.

I also knew a Kock who pronounced it "Cuck", just to add to the list of pronunciations.

The BBC used to (maybe still does) have a Pronunciation Unit which dictated how proper names must be spoken on TV and radio. They were always getting things wrong. My family's bete noir was the pronunciation of "Sowerby Bridge", the small town in West Yorkshire where my dad's parents lived.

Everyone for about 50 miles around: "Sorbey Bridge"

BBC: "Sourby Bridge"

My dad used to get quite irate about this.

As someone who is clearly interested in words, I hope you will take this comment in the "let's share some interesting knowledge!" sense in which it is intended, rather than a nit-picky correction...

It's actually "bête noir" - which is interesting because, commonly, ê signifies a replacement/contraction of the "es" sound. So the original phrase would have been "beste noir", which makes it easier to see the English meaning of "black beast" - an evocative phrase!

I know - I can actually speak a bit of French, but I could not work out how to type the e-circumflex. Perhaps you can inform me?

On Windows, you can open Character Map, find the character you want, click, copy, and paste.

For characters you enter frequently, if your keyboard has a numeric pad, then you can use the Alt key and a numeric code as described here:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/insert-ascii-or-un...

Unfortunately that doesn't work with the number row, only the numeric keypad.

On any OS, you can find several similar character tables online:

https://www.google.com/search?q=unicode+character+map

On macOS you can either hold the e or option I + e. Iirc

On Windows, there's a program Win Compose[1], letting you press Compose e ^ to get ê. On Linux (Xorg/xcompose), that's built in but you may need to map a key to Compose. I use right control.

[1]https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose

If you are on a windows machine with a numpad, hold alt+ 0234 for lowercase or 0202 for capital. Within the Microsoft office suite you can press ctrl +shift+6, release press e. And there are similar shortcuts. You could also use the character map program included with windows to copy it to the clipboard.

In addition to the Character Map and other tips, you could also try just pressing the circumflex character[1] and then 'e' (or some other letter). Works for me without running any special utilities like mentioned in a sibling comment, but Idunno if that's down to something similar built into the non-English keyboard driver or something. You can but try.

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[1]: On my Nordic keyboard it's somewhere to the right of P or L, but on an English one it should be Shift-6 (or AltGr-6?) in the top row, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout

I would guess the BBC would have/will argue(d) that the locals speak with an accent, and that their way to say it is received pronunciation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation)

This might be so, but the way that the BBC operates is pretty incomprehensible in many cases. I worked for them for several years and know of what I speak.

> With most languages the spelling gives you enough information to figure out how to pronounce a word you've never heard before. Not with english. My last wrong guess: the writer Malcolm Lowry (/lauri/ instead of /louri/). Danish, same problem.

I think names are always going to be a source of orthographic irregularity. Even if English were an orthographically perfect language—which of course it isn't—it would still have to be able to deal with people whose names derive from any other language.

I don't know if it's necessarily the English language to blame here, but this reminds me of an experience I had while talking with one of the Chinese international students in college. He pronounced the first few syllables of the word "amazing" and "Amazon" the same as there aren't really any obvious pronunciation hints. It took a few minutes to sort out what he was actually trying to say and figure out where the confusion came from, even with the -ing suffix.

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