don't get me started wrote:A friend who is married to a Japanese was musing on what name to give to their soon to be born daughter.
It was agreed that if he was going to bring her up in Japan, Lorelei was not an ideal option.

It would created a challenge.

chairman bill wrote:Augusto Pinochet. The language is Spanish, but Brits are so much more used to French that it gets pronounced 'Pino-shay', not 'Pino-shet'.

It's actually a French surname - Pinochet's father was from Brittany.

For that reason, I'd say "Pinoshay", "Pinoshet" and "Pinochet" are all legitimate pronunciations in English.

Anyone read Iain M Banks' Feersum Endjinn, a rather Gothic ode in which the fourth quarto of each chapter consists of a narrative from a character with a brain defect that makes them spell everything phonetically? It's quite a challenge.

Banks wrote:"Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u 1/2 a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith."

@Amazon

I've found, from decades living in Hong Kong, that very few Chinese can pronounce my surname. They tend to coalesce the -dg- into a kind of guttural glottal stop. Mind you, in my home town in England, where Hodgson is the third most common surname (after Wilson and Thompson), the tendency is to omit the -g- altogether, which is how I pronounce my name (but only because that's what I was taught by my parents, reinforced by how I was addressed by friends, neighbours, teachers, etc. The former England football manager's name is usually spoken with the three consonants -dgs- all pronounced (as is mine if I'm introduced by someone from the south of England).

A few years ago, I posted an article on my blog about the pronunciation of place names that was mainly a complaint about the way the BBC treats pronunciation nowadays. However, it also included a quiz on the pronunciation of English place names (source: a booklet produced for the BBC by an advisory panel in 1936) that you might like to try. You will be doing well if you get more than two right out of twelve!

You don't have Woolfardisworthy there.

Fallible wrote:You don't have Woolfardisworthy there.

Or Featherstonehaugh?

THWOTH wrote:Anyone read Iain M Banks' Feersum Endjinn, a rather Gothic ode in which the fourth quarto of each chapter consists of a narrative from a character with a brain defect that makes them spell everything phonetically? It's quite a challenge.

Banks wrote:"Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u 1/2 a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith."

@Amazon

I'm dyslexic, and the words I know, I know as words, recognised by pattern matching, not by reading the sound/syllable associations. I found the whole thing impossible to read, because all those phonetically spelled words were simply unknown words to me. It was a real struggle, as I had to work out what his neologisms were supposed to refer to, then add that to my bank of known word shapes & sound correspondences. I gave up quite early on - just too much like hard work.

Or Mousehole.

Or St Agnes on the north Cornwall coast - pronounced 'snaagnuss'

Or the old chestnut Hawick or Jedburgh. The latter being pronounced as Jethert locally.

There is always Trottiscliffe in my home county of Kent.




Pronounced Trozlee (stress on first syllable)

Blackadder wrote:

Fallible wrote:You don't have Woolfardisworthy there.

Or Featherstonehaugh?

No. No Woolsery or Fanshawe. OR Herstmonceux.

Alan B wrote:Or Mousehole.

Or Mouzle, ooarr!

Not exactly not able to pronounce, but R-L confusion (as exists in Chinese, Japanese but also Kirundi and Kinyarwanda) is always fun when there are Presidential elections.

Not that it's particularly difficult to pronounce — however, it does seem unnecessarily long, in my opinion. Once you manage to string it all together, though, it kind of rolls off the tongue. Happy birthday in Polish: wszystkiego najlepszego z okazji urodzin.

I still refuse to acknowledge the proper pronounciation of Edinburgh.