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Comment by pretendscholar | Hacker News Reader

One of the most annoying things about speaking the dominant world language (obviously it is also great in many respects) is that there is some pressure to change your language rather than just adjusting the sounds and spelling to the pre-existing phonetics. Erdogan is pronounced closer to erdoyan and Türkiye insisting on the umlaut. Nguyen and Pho rather than wynn and pha. Gyro instead of hyro. Blonde vs blond (WHY would we just have adjective modification for that word and none other) and colonel. You have to know a lot about so many different culture when a language should be self contained. I don't tell the Chinese what name to use for my country (I think they call USA something like Beautiful Land) in their language or the Spanish or another group for any word.

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Dang, never thought about that. Must be really hard.

That joke out of the way, as a dual-citizen and polyglot my observation is that it is usually Americans giving other Americans shit about pronunciation. It’s perhaps (like you say) a form of jostling around how virtuous you are. Perhaps layered on top of some insecurity around how much of the world you got to see.

It's the same in every language. When you take words and particularly names from another language, you have to make choices. Do you borrow the spelling or the pronunciation? Do you use a local version of the name? Or do you translate it?

Suppose an American guy named John comes to Finland. Should he still continue spelling his name as "John"? Or should he take the pronunciation as given and start spelling his name as "Dzon"? Or should he adopt an equivalent local name, such as Juha, Janne, or Jani? Or should he go with a traditional version, such as Johannes or Juhana? And what happens if he changes the spelling but his American passport still uses "John"?

It's less about being the dominant language and more about sharing the same writing system (the Latin alphabet) with most of the world. So, however a Vietnamese name is written, since it's already in Latin characters, the characters are imported verbatim (well, usually diacritics don't survive, but what can you do).

The opposite extreme would be cases like Korean, with its own writing system not used anywhere else. Therefore, once an American name is written in Korean letters, there's no ambiguity in how to read it. So Los Angeles is 로스앤젤레스 ro-seu-aen-jel-le-seu, and everyone who can read Korean knows exactly how to read it.

Except... how do you determine which spelling to use? The sound systems are so different that there are usually no clearly correct matches. Also, how do you really know how these names originally sounds? Should Nevada be read with a long "a" or short "a" in the middle? You see a name Charles in an article, is he an Englishman or Frenchman (with different ch sounds)? Should we consider Einstein a German physicist, or an American one?

Two book publishers make two different choices, and you end up with the same people's name written in two different ways.

So, basically, there's no easy solution. You either pay the cost when you're reading (as in English) or when you're doing the transliteration (as in Korean).

I mean part of it is we don't really have a central language authority so when immigrants try to transliterate a word from their language, they go with their best guess based on what letters they understand to be equivalent, and sometimes they get it a little wrong, but by the time anyone realizes a convention has been set and it's incredibly hard to shift conventions.

It also feels very silly to change the spelling of a word or name when two languages share an alphabet, even if it makes it a little less phonetic.

They don’t actually share an alphabet if the letters don’t correspond to the same sounds.

You might find Japanese interesting, they invented a whole alphabet for loan words, and Japanese doesn't always have the phonetic range to pronounce things as it would sound in the language it was loaned from, and they also make certain aesthetic decisions when loaning it. You COULD say Smart Phone as Sumarto Fuon or a few different ways, but it is Sma Ho in Japan, because that's just ehat caught on when it was introduced. Probably by a marketing campaign for that word in particular.

I should say a lot of this is internal as a form of social signaling about worldliness. Also not against loan words its just that you should adjust loan words and concepts to fit the phonetics and grammar of the language.

Pho is funny because it’s Vietnamese trying to say “feu” as in “pot au feu”.

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