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Comment by TrayKnots | Hacker News Reader

Yea, I hate that. Words are pronounced differently in foreign languages. Do we say Moscow or Moskwa? Do we say ka-tana or ka-ta-na? If Freud is not spoken with the typical Gemran diphthong, then suddenly someone comes along and corrects you. I do speak German, I know how Freud is pronounced and I will pronounce it as it should be pronounced when speaking German, but when speaking English, it is Frood for me.

So, I am with you. We shouldn't learn the pronunciation of 200 different languages. If Kirchhoff's laws sound like Captain Kirk, who the fuck cares. Different languages pronounce stuff differently.

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> I do speak German, I know how Freud is pronounced and I will pronounce it as it should be pronounced when speaking German, but when speaking English, it is Frood for me.

That... isn't the normal English pronunciation. The English pronunciation would rhyme with "joyed", if "joy" were a verb.

/'sɪg.mənd fɹɔɪd/

There are some other big names where the same vowel sequence isn't recognized: Euler (usually pronounced with /ɔɪ/) and von Neumann (not so much).

Euler suffers from beginning with the "eu", which makes it look more Greek.

> There are some other big names where the same vowel sequence isn't recognized: Euler (usually pronounced with /ɔɪ/) and von Neumann (not so much).

I always have trouble finding a reference for the sounds corresponding to IPA symbols, so I'm not sure what you're claiming for the pronunciation of either of those. But, at least among the mostly American mathematicians I know, the 'eu' in 'Euler' and 'von Neumann' are usually pronounced the same way we pronounce the same way we pronounce the 'eu' in 'Freud' (which I agree is essentially how I'd pronounce the 'oy' in 'joyed').

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/von-neu...

OK, thanks; that does make the claimed pronunciation clear. Still, I have literally never heard a mathematician pronounce the name that way (or Euler's in the analogous way).

i agree with you in spirit (I pronounce Paris as Paris).

however I have never heard of someone pronouncing Freud as Frood, outside of "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sobc2WhL16c

Fair enough. Video doesn't play, but I believe you. I don't know where I heard froodian slip and frood, but I checked a few places where they pronounce it and all agree with you. Bet I will find more example as soon as enough time has passed so it would be weird to post it here. Damn you, Murphy.

I do agree with you in that I say "shampain" instead of "champann" (champagne) when I'm speaking English instead of French. Language is a tool for communication first and foremost.

[Hi from Argentina!] For 'Euler", I keep switching randomly betwen

Eh-oo-leh-r that is how it should be read if it were an Spanish word.

Oh-ee-leh-r that is the proper German pronunciation

And here I felt he added lubrication to machinery = Oiler and my friend Eugene who's mother called him Oygen does the same. Being from the UK, came to Canada in 1948, I spoke colloquial English in school, but correct London Cockney slang at home to family - on phone calls to friends, if I responded to family mid dialog, my friends would always ask who was that when my slang was over heard.

>I pronounce Paris as Paris

there is an S in Paris because the French used to pronounce it that way and it got written down that way in French... and that is also when that word got added to the English lexicon. Paris is a word in English that is pronounced as it is spelled. There is a French word spelled the same way that is pronounced differently. Something similar is true with Moskva/Moscow (btw, people in Moscow, Idaho pronounce it "mosko")

these type of historical borrowings don't offer useful guidance to how Freud should be pronounced in English.

I agree with this way of thinking about it, but the problem is “added to the lexicon” is ill-defined.

There is no official lexicon. When speaking English, the pronunciation of “Paris” has become well-established, but for countless other words, it has not.

linguists use the word lexicon (as opposed to dictionary) to mean those words which are spoken as prevalently, let's say, "as the syntax in which they are agreed and declined". (I just came up with that and think it's quite clever)

it has become over common to over point out that linguistics is descriptive, as if anything goes; anything does not go, and that is what linguists study. Stray from the lexicon, and people will ask what you are talking about. When they stop asking, it's in the lexicon.

> Do we say Moscow or Moskwa?

Russian friends taught me that there is no "o" (as the letter is pronounced in Spanish or German) to pronounce in Москва since the о is unstressed. Rather pronounce it as "Maskwa" ("a" letter as in Spanish or German). :-)

True to a first approximation. A good second one is that a carefully enunciated [ɑ] isn’t correct, either; a schwa [ə] will sound better, so the vowels and the overall rhythm will be similar to the English word bazaar in a non-rhotic accent. Finally, the hard reality[1] is that all of this is heavily accent-dependent: in Vologda (500km from Moscow) you will hear [o] for the first vowel; in Ryazan (200km from Moscow) you can hear [a] ~ [æ]; even in Moscow itself, a radio announcer will say a fairly careful [ɐ] while someone who grew up in the poorer suburbs will have an almost-inaudible [ə] (this is a strong class marker).

The English word Moscow, meanwhile, is itself very interesting: it’s not actually a derivative of the Russian Москва, but rather a cognate, as both of them are derived[2] from different cases (accusative vs. locative or genitive) of the original Old East Slavic (aka Old Russian, aka Old Ukrainian, etc.) name.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akanye

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow#Etymology

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