What Is the Karakoram Anomaly? | Hacker News Reader

What Is the Karakoram Anomaly?

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89 pointsthunderbong39 comments

That place and the Kashmir valley are some of the prettiest landscapes on the planet

Aye, I didn't get as far north as Gilgit, but I've been around the block a few times, and I've never seen anything like NW Pakistan.

Is it safe to visit the region as a mountaineer tourist, these days?

There's a documentary, "The Last Mountain", about the sister and father of Tom Ballard, who died on Nanga Parbat, going out there to see where he did his final climb. It gives an idea of what it is like to visit.

Incidentally, Tom Ballard was the son of Alison Hargreaves, who died on K2.

I think the parent comment was not referring to climbing related safety :)

I knew someone who had visited Kashmir in the sixties and said it was gorgeous.

In principle, this in not surprising. Throw 100 normal-distributed values at the number line with mean 1 and std deviation 2 and some will end up below 0. The higher you make the mean, the fewer will end up negative and eventually it's unlikely (though still possible) one does.

> In the Karakoram (pronounced keh·ruh·kaw·ruhm) Range—a mountainous region straddling the borders of Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and China…

Non-sequitur but no one pronounces it like that in those regions.

On another note katsu (pronounced cat-sue) is a dish you should try in Japan.

I don't know where they even got that pronunciation from. The wikipedia page says "Karakoram (English: /ˌkɑːrəˈkɔːrəm, ˌkær-/, Urdu: [kaːɾaːkoːɾəm])"

none of which is [kerəkɑːrəm] as the author suggests

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakoram

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Karakoram

I would naturally read ⟨aw⟩ as /oː/ (as in e.g. ⟨hawk⟩), rather than /ɑː/. The weird part is the [e] — the only thing I can suggest is that they’re one of those people who raise /æ/ to [e] in some positions.

This whole thread is a comedy of errors stemming from different English pronunciation variants. The author of the original article evidently has the full Mary/marry/merry merger but maintains the cot/caught distinction, so "keh·ruh·kaw·ruhm" seems like a natural way of spelling the pronunciation. GP has the cot/caught merger but does not merge Mary/marry, so they read "keh·ruh·kaw·ruhm" as [kerəkɑːrəm] and understood this as distinct from Wikipedia's kær- pronunciation. And you don't have the cot/caught merger or the Mary/marry merger.

You can listen to two native speakers on Forvo: https://forvo.com/search/%D9%82%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%82%D8%B1%D9%8....

The original name is Turkic and it Urdu version (especially first one) is very similar to how I read it.

Yeah, I agree. Funnily enough, Katsu isn't pronounced that way either XD (it's pronounced cawt-sue)

That's the joke!

it's so over for me lol

They never bother to make an effort. All these decades and they still say "Gey-ndi" and "Jeena" and as if they will get constipated if they learn to pronouce country names correctly. It's not "Pack-istan. They just don't care. I am from India and whenever I hear any of them say that country name, or say Aef-gan-istan, or Eye-ran (that gan, ran are as in "run ran run"), I feel like reaching into the screen or the earpiece and deliver a hard one across one of the speaker's cheeks and hopefully being isnpired by Gey-ndi they'd offer the other one.

Everyone says Germany except for the Germans! And those I know couldn’t care less.

It’s easy to insinuate that people aren’t making an effort. But maybe it’s says more about the person on the receiving end than the person "who is not making the effort".

For “Germany”, the Spaniards say Alemania, the French say l’Allemagne and Arabic goes along with ألمانيا

Poles say "Niemcy", which essentially means "mute people".

There you go! And only Ze Germans say Deutschland

What about the Austrians? And Swiss?

> What about the Austrians?

From experience, they pronounce it "*those* arseholes".

Germany due to its history of being a conglomeration of smaller states has one of the widest variety of names in foreign languages, depending on the historical focus of those tongues on one or the other of the tribes/peoples: Deutschland (Germany), Germany (English), Allemagne (French, and similarly in Spanish), Tedesco (Italian for a German), Tyksland (Danish), with other variants in Polish and other languages.

The English name of the country of ایران is Iran, pronounced "eye-ran", there's nothing wrong about that. Just like the English name of the country which calls itself Deutchsland is Germany. And the French name of the country that calls itself England is Angleterre, and the Japanese name for China is 中国 (chuugoku).

There is nothing wrong or weird about exonyms. Sometimes they happen to be relatively close to the endonym, sometimes they are not.

> The English name of the country of ایران is Iran, pronounced "eye-ran"

This is an American thing. The British have been pronouncing it E-ran since forever.

It's one of many words that are pronounced differently in British English than American English.

When it comes to the "I" sound in words, American English almost always has both pronunciations (e.g. semiconductor, semifinal).

Interestingly, Merriam Webster's pronunciation for all these words (including Iran), have it without the "I" sound.

There was a discussion about this on NPR recently. According to the guest, the underlying phenomenon (which goes back a long way) is avoiding long-As, an aversion to sounding like snooty Boston Brahmans. It strongly correlates with political and socio-cultural affiliation, and with words that people are self-conscious about or otherwise are deemed to be more likely to signal affiliation. Iran is specifically discussed.

> snooty Boston Brahmans

What on earth are they?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Brahmin

EDIT: The radio show was Science Friday, October 15th episode, "Why do politicians talk like that?", https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/science-friday/articles...

Oh, people who moved in recently and act all full of themselves? In Scotland we call those "tourists".

It's best to have a light hearted attitude about these things (that's why I added a joke). The vast majority of people don't even know their pronunciation might be different from others', ignorance is very human. It isn't malice, though, and even if people did make an effort they would be the odd one out.

One interesting example of a blanket change is the N-word. As expected, it wasn't a grassroots movement but a mass publicized event and collective experience that made it happen.

If people's ignorance makes you angry you're in for a miserable and likely hypocritical life.

For me the hilarious one was Abbottabad - where Bin Ladin was killed. Everyone pronounced it A-Bot-A-Bad.

None of them knew that it's actually named after a British person (Abbott), and the first part is pronounced that way (as in Abbott and Costello).

TIL.

Do the locals pronounce it like Abbott and Costello?

Yup. Because it had been pronounced that way from the get go. It wasn't a town that the British renamed - they literally built the town. There was no "local" name prior to the British.

I'm surprised it hasn't been renamed. So many places on the subcontinent have as part of a decolonisation process.

I believe most/all of the renamed ones were renamed to a prior name. Here, the city didn't exist.

That doesn't matter, plenty of places like that have been renamed. You either rename it after what the area was called previously or come up with a completely new name.

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