How to pronounce the name of the president of Catalonia
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Short answer:
Long, detailed answer from a linguist, Francesc Torres-Tamarit.
Remember Eyjafjallajökull? This is much easier.
"Eyjafjallajökull fail " (4/16/10)
"A little Icelandic phonetics " (4/19/10)
"Feline ambulation and volcanic nomenclature " (4/22/10)
"Another jökull heard from? " (6/13/10)
"Jökull of the year" (5/22/11)
[h.t. Donald Clarke]
Keith said,
November 6, 2017 @ 9:13 am
So the first video in the post is in fact wrong if we are to believe Francesc Torres-Tamarit, and I see no reason to doubt him.
I think that the French radio presenters (or, at least those on the stations that I listen to) have been doing a remarkably good job, except for their inability to pronounce the d in the way that Torres-Tamarit pronounces it: almost as an eth (ð).
Wikipedia gives us ˈkarɫəs pudʒdəˈmon in IPA.
languagehat said,
November 6, 2017 @ 9:21 am
If I were you, I'd delete the "Short answer," because it's incorrect and will mislead people. Francesc Torres-Tamarit is clear and accurate in his video, which I heartily recommend, especially for his sensible remarks on "correctness" at the end. Short answer: it's /putʃ(ə)dəmon/ (pooch-(ə)-də-MON), with no /i/ in the first syllable (contrary to the useless video clip).
Coby Lubliner said,
November 6, 2017 @ 9:22 am
You can also find the pronunciation in Puigdemont's Wikipedia page.
However, with Catalan names there is usually a Catalan pronunciation (sometimes more than one, since the Valencian and Majorcan versions may be different from the Catalonian one) and a usually distinct Spanish one. The "Puig" part of Puigdemont (meaning "hill" and cognate to French puy and Italian poggio) is pronounced [putʃ] in Catalan and [pwiɣ] in Spanish (as, for example, the Cuban baseball player Yasiel Puig). And Puigdemont is [pudʒdəˈmon] is Catalan and [puɣðeˈmon(t)] in Spanish.
languagehat said,
November 6, 2017 @ 9:22 am
Yeah, as Keith says, it's actually /ð/ — sorry about that.
languagehat said,
November 6, 2017 @ 9:25 am
And frankly, I don't think "Pronounce this Catalan name the way the Spanish do!" is a sensible recommendation, particularly at this historical moment.
Coby Lubliner said,
November 6, 2017 @ 9:58 am
"I don't think 'Pronounce this Catalan name the way the Spanish do!' is a sensible recommendation…"
Sorry, languagehat, but Hispano-American descendants of Catalans do it all the time, with j pronounced as [x] not [ʒ], word-final ch as [tʃ] not {k], word-final r always pronounced, no vowel reduction etc.
languagehat said,
November 6, 2017 @ 10:02 am
I understand that, of course, just as Russian-American descendants of Russian immigrants frequently pronounce Russian names in Americanized ways. I still maintain that when someone wants to know "how to pronounce the name of the president of Catalonia," they want to know how to pronounce it the way Catalans do, not the way Hispano-American descendants of Catalans do.
Alon said,
November 6, 2017 @ 10:03 am
Catalan names are pronounced the Catalan way throughout the Peninsula; it's only in the Latin American diaspora that they've been nativised.
That can be by adjusting the pronunciation (as in the case of of Yasiel Puig, mentioned above, or Argentine pianist Martha Argerich, pronounced /aɾ.xeˈɾit͡ʃ/ instead of /əɾ.ʒəˈɾik/), or by adjusting the orthography (as in Argentine folk musician Gonzalo Pocho Roch, whose ancestors' surname was written ⟨Roig⟩, or Argentine serial killer Carlos Robledo Puch, originally ⟨Puig⟩).
Coby Lubliner said,
November 6, 2017 @ 10:14 am
Alon: if I remember correctly, Maragall is pronounced [maraˈɣal], not [məɾəˈɣaʎ], on the Spanish media, Feliu is [fel'ju] not [fə'liw], and so on.
'
Ellen K. said,
November 6, 2017 @ 10:44 am
Responding to the exchange between Coby Lubliner and Languagehat. Frankly, when I want to know how to pronounce the name of the President of Catalonia (or some other name), I don't want to know how to pronounce it as Catalans do (although I might be interested in that too), nor how to pronounce it how people with the same name who are outside of Catalonia pronounce it. I'm speaking English, not Catalan. I want to know how to pronounce it when speaking English. His name, not the name of some other people in another country. Just like many German names (ones with starting with W come to mind) I would pronounce differently for a person from Germany than a person from the U.S., but neither would be a precise match of the German pronounciation.
Quim said,
November 6, 2017 @ 10:51 am
@Coby Lubliner: We Catalans know that monolingual Spanish speakers have a hard time with final [ʎ] (as in Maragall) or with [ʒ], etc. But we often resent it if they don't at least give a try to easier challenges, feeling that this shows some sort of disdain for our language. (I am thinking about things like as pronouncing Artur with the stress on the first syllable, as PM Rajoy used to do with regard to the predecessor of Puigdemont).
That some English speaking people try to pronounce Puigdemont's name "correctly" by following the Spanish pronunciation would seem somewhat silly but not really offensive.
Coby Lubliner said,
November 6, 2017 @ 11:01 am
Quim: it isn't just monolingual Spanish speakers. A Catalan I know with the surname Oliver refers to himself as [oli'ver] when speaking Spanish, but of course [uli've] when speaking Catalan.
languagehat said,
November 6, 2017 @ 11:13 am
Frankly, when I want to know how to pronounce the name of the President of Catalonia (or some other name), I don't want to know how to pronounce it as Catalans do (although I might be interested in that too), nor how to pronounce it how people with the same name who are outside of Catalonia pronounce it. I'm speaking English, not Catalan. I want to know how to pronounce it when speaking English.
An excellent point, but until a "standard" English pronunciation shakes out (assuming that ever happens), probably the best you can do is perform homemade anglicization on the Catalan version; I guess I'd go for pooch-də-MON(T) myself, with an optional final /t/ in case omitting it feels too weird.
Quim: it isn't just monolingual Spanish speakers. A Catalan I know with the surname Oliver refers to himself as [oli'ver] when speaking Spanish, but of course [uli've] when speaking Catalan.
That's not really responding to Quim's point, which is that Catalans prefer it if Spanish-speakers at least try to approximate the Catalan version rather than settle for the Spanish one. (I'm old enough to remember when Spanish names in sports were routinely anglicized by broadcasters and pretty much everyone else, so that Pedro Ramos was "PEE-droh RAY-mohss," which understandably irritated the bearers of those names. It's real progress that such names are now only lightly anglicized.)
Quim said,
November 6, 2017 @ 11:16 am
Coby: and some would consider this a lack of self-respect, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ughlrD3CyA
But anyway, pragmatics is a complicated issue. If called "Joaquín" with no overtones I just feel amused. The point was, I can see no reason for English speakers to chose a Spanish pronunciation for Puigdemont's name.
Alon said,
November 6, 2017 @ 11:27 am
@Coby Lubliner: if I remember correctly, Maragall is pronounced [maraˈɣal], not [məɾəˈɣaʎ], on the Spanish media, Feliu is [fel'ju] not [fə'liw], and so on.
Fair enough: I should have said ‘Catalan names are pronounced in the best possible approximation to the Catalan way that Spanish phonology allows’. So vowel reduction doesn't happen, and speakers of yeísta dialects substitute [l] (or [i] in word-final position) for the [ʎ] they lack.
Even if you go that way, though, it should be [put͡ʃ.deˈmon(t)]; I'd read someone saying [puɣ.ðeˈmon(t)] as making a deliberate anti-Catalan statement.
Victor Mair said,
November 6, 2017 @ 11:28 am
From a witty linguist friend of mine who has long been deeply interested in Catalan and Catalonia:
"I always read it as pudgy-mon."
rosie said,
November 6, 2017 @ 11:56 am
@LanguageHat "PEE-droh RAY-mohss," might be the Americanization of Pedro Ramos, but it certainly isn't the Anglicization: we in Britain pronounce the e short (it can't be long because a consonant cluster follows it) and never pronounce word-final -os as "ohss".
Coby Lubliner said,
November 6, 2017 @ 11:59 am
Victor: Fair enough, if your witty linguist friend is Irish or northern English, so that the first vowel in pudgy is the same as in pudding, but not otherwise.
Coby Lubliner said,
November 6, 2017 @ 12:08 pm
@languagehat: But [uli've] isn't any more difficult for a Spanish-speaker than [oli'ver].
For another example of a Catalan pronouncing his own name the Spanish way: Serrat refers to himself as [se'rat] in A quien corresponda, not [sə'rat].
phanmo said,
November 6, 2017 @ 12:10 pm
No hi fa res
RP said,
November 6, 2017 @ 12:16 pm
@rosie,
To be fair, I think the word "anglicize" is ambiguous in the same way as the word "English" is.
mg said,
November 6, 2017 @ 12:34 pm
Ellen K – I'm surprised that you feel that way. I'm American and I always want to know how to pronounce names as native speakers do. I may not be able to manage it, but I'll always come as close as possible – and I expect news broadcasters to do the same. When I'm in another country, I appreciate people trying to get as close to my name as possible though I don't fault those who just pronounce it according to their own language rules since it has sounds that not all languages use.
RP said,
November 6, 2017 @ 12:50 pm
I thought what Ellen K was talking about was the perfectly sensible approach of trying to pronounce names correctly but within the bounds of English phonology, more or less. Even if one speaks a language with fluent native-like pronunciations, it isn't necessarily realistic to reproduce that level of precision in the middle of a flowing English sentence.
Tom Dawkes said,
November 6, 2017 @ 12:51 pm
It strikes me that English speakers on either side of the Atlantic (I live in the UK) are uneasy with foreign names and slow to appreciate that spelling and orthography are particular to each language. A few misleading rules of thumb lead to unsatisfactory approximations. Many people will know that in German 's' before a consonant will be 'sh' but they transfer it to languages where this does not apply, so they pronounce Stockholm as Shtockholm, or Stalingrad as Shtalingrad, as Laurence Oliver dis consistently in his narration for the TV series on WWII 'The World at War'. And people who vaguely know that French leaves unpronounced many final consonants will say 'coo de gra' for 'coup de grace'. As for the general attitude of British speakers towards Welsh names ……!
Alon said,
November 6, 2017 @ 12:52 pm
@Coby Lubliner: I think the most useful analogy here is with Puigdemont's predecessor Jordi Pujol, who is invariably [puˈʝol], not [puˈxol] in the Spanish media. See, for example, the pronunciations at 0:03 and 0:36 in this video. So no [ʒ] and no [ł] because these phonemes don't exist in Spanish, but the substitutions are the closest phonetic matches, not a naïve reading of the name according to Spanish orthographic norms.
In contrast, Juan Pujol Avenue in my hometown of Corrientes is always [puˈjol], with a fully nativised reading.
Alon said,
November 6, 2017 @ 12:54 pm
Arrrgh. That should have been ‘[puˈxol], with a fully nativised reading’, of course.
languagehat said,
November 6, 2017 @ 1:15 pm
@LanguageHat "PEE-droh RAY-mohss," might be the Americanization of Pedro Ramos, but it certainly isn't the Anglicization: we in Britain pronounce the e short (it can't be long because a consonant cluster follows it) and never pronounce word-final -os as "ohss".
Sorry! But I was using the word in the generalized way RP suggests.
@languagehat: But [uli've] isn't any more difficult for a Spanish-speaker than [oli'ver].
For another example of a Catalan pronouncing his own name the Spanish way: Serrat refers to himself as [se'rat] in A quien corresponda, not [sə'rat].
But surely you can see that Catalans can pronounce a Catalan name however they want; a foreigner pronouncing a Catalan name is an entirely different matter. Do I have to drag out obvious racial analogies to make the point?
Jerry Friedman said,
November 6, 2017 @ 1:36 pm
rosie: I think you British people do pronounce "e" with the FLEECE vowel in "secret", "egret", "polyhedron", and other words. However, my anglicized pronunciation of "Pedro" is "PAYdro".
In American English, it's very common to pronounce "foreign" -os with the GOAT vowel. That doesn't necessarily apply to "o" before other consonants.
Ellen K. said,
November 6, 2017 @ 1:43 pm
Mg, when I met a German friend, and she said her name was (as I heard it) Do_te, I didn't need to know a description of how that incomprehensible to my ears sound in the middle is pronounced by a German. I needed to know that it was an R, and that I should put an R sound there. She said "like Dorothy" and so then I understood she was saying Dorte and could pronounce her name. (The underline is my attempt to represent the hole in there middle of the word because of the consonant sound I didn't recognize being used in a word I didn't know.)
Ellen K. said,
November 6, 2017 @ 1:48 pm
@Rosie: We in the U.S. don't to my knowledge, pronounce Pedro Ramos the way Languagehat describes either. But, then, Languagehat didn't claim that we do. He was making a statement about how things used to be here.
languagehat said,
November 6, 2017 @ 2:03 pm
But, then, Languagehat didn't claim that we do. He was making a statement about how things used to be here.
Exactly, this was in the late '50s and early '60s (Pedro Ramos; I was a fan of his first team, the Senators).
ngage92 said,
November 6, 2017 @ 3:13 pm
Related to Ellen's point, nothing, and I mean nothing, is more irritating than English speakers who say Barthelona.
Sniffnoy said,
November 6, 2017 @ 3:40 pm
The second video on the page automatically started playing when I loaded the page; can you do something to turn this off? Thank you!
Mick O said,
November 6, 2017 @ 3:46 pm
If an English speaker says "eebeetha" for Ibiza, then I demand they also say Barthelona.
ngage92 can seethe.
Victor Mair said,
November 6, 2017 @ 3:46 pm
@Sniffnoy
It does that to me too. Perhaps one of my more capable colleagues can fix it. Meanwhile, you can click on the stop button at the bottom left of the screen — takes only a second.
RP said,
November 6, 2017 @ 3:51 pm
@ngage92,
We should, however, distinguish two separate things:
(1) How we pronounce the names of countries, big cities and famous historical individuals. Here we follow convention even if we know it's completely at odds with the native prounciation ("Paris", "Caesar") and sometimes we have our own name for the place ("Rome") or person ("Philip II of Spain").
(2) How we pronounce people's names (and place names without a conventional anglicization) in English conversation, which should generally be close to how they would say them, but usually adapted (to one extent or another) to English phonology.
Rule 1 rarely applies to living individuals, although there are well established exceptions such as the Pope. Rule 2 should probably not be applied to somewhere like Barcelona, which has a well known English pronunciation. American English does seem to apply Rule 2 to some Spanish place names (such as "Nicaragua") where British English anglicizes, but perhaps this just means that there are two rival Rule 1 pronunciations of that name.
cliff arroyo said,
November 6, 2017 @ 4:20 pm
""I always read it as pudgy-mon.""
I myself pronounce it 'pudgy-demon'…. this might be politically motivated but it's fossilized for my internal voice – I would probably try to say poodge-deMON if ever called to pronounce it out loud but I don't think that will happen.
anhweol said,
November 6, 2017 @ 5:55 pm
Eebeetha? The most strongly Anglicized form is the bizarre "Eye-bee-tha" ( /aɪˈbiːθə/), with English initial vowel but Spanish second consonant. Pretty common in UK usage. Not sure how you would produce a suitably bizarre version of Barcelona to match it.
Juanma Barranquero said,
November 6, 2017 @ 7:29 pm
@languagehat
"That's not really responding to Quim's point, which is that Catalans prefer it if Spanish-speakers at least try to approximate the Catalan version rather than settle for the Spanish one."
You're talking as if "Catalans" are only the Catalonia inhabitants who speak catalan as a native tongue. By all accounts there's about 50% of Catalans whose native tongue is Spanish.
And uses are weird. There's a small municipality, Pallejà, which is pronounced /pəʎə'ʒa/ in Catalan, but I've heard even Catalan speakers say /paʝe'xa/ when talking in Spanish.
Rodger C said,
November 6, 2017 @ 8:38 pm
@Mick O: You mean Eivissa?
languagehat said,
November 6, 2017 @ 8:58 pm
You're talking as if "Catalans" are only the Catalonia inhabitants who speak catalan as a native tongue. By all accounts there's about 50% of Catalans whose native tongue is Spanish.
And uses are weird. There's a small municipality, Pallejà, which is pronounced /pəʎə'ʒa/ in Catalan, but I've heard even Catalan speakers say /paʝe'xa/ when talking in Spanish.
Good points, but again, I'm pretty sure that when someone wants to know "how to pronounce the name of the president of Catalonia," they want to know how to pronounce it the way Catalan-speaking Catalans do, not the way Catalans whose native tongue is Spanish do or the way Catalan speakers do when talking in Spanish. I'm sorry if my wording was insufficiently precise, but I would have thought my point was clear enough.
Filter Fodder said,
November 6, 2017 @ 10:17 pm
I usually comment as "dainichi", but LL doesn't like that nick.
@Languagehat:
> /putʃ(ə)dəmon/(pooch-(ə)-də-MON/
/..dʒ../poodge…/, right? Or am I missing something? Something about final devoicing that does or doesn't kick in here?
> I'm pretty sure that when someone wants to know "how to pronounce the name of the president of Catalonia," they want to know how to pronounce it the way Catalan-speaking Catalans do.
I don't see how that is obvious. I can see how that would probably be a safer stance if you want to support the Catalonian case. However, there are many things that are not obvious to most people.
1. Are there more native Castilian or Catalan speakers in Catalonia? If Wikipedia is to believed, there are more Castilian speakers.
2. Is Puigdemont a Castilian or a Catalan name? Most people on LL would be able to make an educated guess that it's Catalan, but that might not be the case for the general public.
3. Is Puigdemont's native language Castilian or Catalan (or both)? I have no idea.
4. How common is it for people with Catalan names to use both Castilian or Catalan versions/pronunciations of their name? Again, I have no idea.
stedak said,
November 7, 2017 @ 12:41 am
If Puig means "hill", and demont means "of hill", then should English speakers call him Torpenhow?
(runs away)
Matt said,
November 7, 2017 @ 12:48 am
Languagehat, just to clarify, do you mean Catalan-speaking Catalans currently speaking Catalan who aren't not pretending to demonstrate the Castilian pronunciation but intentionally getting it wrong and sounding like Castilian-speaking Catalans educated in a house precisely on the border by two teachers, one of whom has a speech impediment, and the other of which is a knave who always lies?
B.Ma said,
November 7, 2017 @ 12:54 am
As this is a Victor Mair post, and coming from a Chinese / Cantonese perspective – let's just say that Guangdong has similarities to Catalonia.
But in terms of language and names, even though my name is Cantonese, I am perfectly happy using the Mandarin pronunciation of my Chinese name when speaking Mandarin, and the same for all other Chinese languages (if I knew any). This is in contrast to Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, of whom a video was linked by Quim, November 6, 2017 @ 11:16 am, where he corrected the "Castillianization" of his name and insisted that his name is Josep-Lluís everywhere in the world.
If I had any ability in Korean, I would gladly read the characters of my name in Sino-Korean; and the same for Vietnamese or Japanese (though there is considerable leeway and choice for pronouncing characters in names in Japanese). I dare say that most East Asians would feel the same way, although I'm not sure about Koreans since they seem to spell out proper nouns in Mandarin or Japanese rather than reading the characters in Korean.
The B. in my name is actually my English name, not my Chinese name. When I was learning French and Spanish I was also quite happy to translate it to the equivalent version in those languages when introducing myself.
On the other hand, when Romanizing my Chinese name, then it is the Cantonese pronunciation all the way. I'm glad that I have the freedom to do so, unlike Cantonese (and other language) speakers in the PRC who are forced to use Pinyin for their names regardless of what they consider to be the "correct" version.
Quim said,
November 7, 2017 @ 2:33 am
Juanma, Coby: Spanish speaking Catalans (and most Spaniards I believe) pronounce [put͡ʃ.deˈmon]. But I still don't get, if a foreigner is trying to approximate the original pronunciation, why they would go with the Spanish approximation. This is the name of a particular guy, and it is not hard at all to find out how he likes it.
This connects with "nativization", as Alon says. You could try to pronounce Mauricio Pochettino's name (Argentinian soccer player and trainer) as [poket'iːno] the "right" Italian way, but he would get pissed off, as he expected the spanicized (?) [pot͡ʃet'ino].
It is also true that Puigdemont won't get pissed off anyway, because he wants all attention he can get. As a famous Catalan artist wrote, "que se hable de Dalí, aunque sea para bien".
Quim said,
November 7, 2017 @ 2:39 am
@Filter Fodder / dainichi
1. Are there more native Castilian or Catalan speakers in Catalonia? If Wikipedia is to believed, there are more Castilian speakers.
Yes, but not by a large margin
2. Is Puigdemont a Castilian or a Catalan name? Most people on LL would be able to make an educated guess that it's Catalan, but that might not be the case for the general public.
It is a Catalan name
3. Is Puigdemont's native language Castilian or Catalan (or both)? I have no idea.
Catalan
4. How common is it for people with Catalan names to use both Castilian or Catalan versions/pronunciations of their name? Again, I have no idea.
This would depend on many environmental variables, but Puigdemont has no Spanish version, just an approximation using Spanish phonology, as above.
Jongseong Park said,
November 7, 2017 @ 8:14 am
Francesc Torres-Tamarit answers based on the Central Catalan (or Standard Eastern Catalan) pronunciation, which is appropriate considering that Puigdemont himself is from the Central Catalan area. But it does mean that the answer overlooks the fact that the [t] can in fact be pronounced in mont in Valencian and Balearic, whereas it is silent in Central Catalan.
What he fails to mention is the strong regressive voicing assimilation present in Catalan (as in Castilian or French) that gives [puʤdəˈmon], with [ʤ] instead of [ʧ] due to the following /d/ (even when it is optionally lenited to [ð̞].
One could make a strong case for /puʤ/ being the underlying form for puig. The word does derive from Latin podium, pujol is a derivative, and above all, when it is followed by a vowel, the -ig surfaces as [ʤ]. But puig by itself is pronounced [puʧ] due to final devoicing which is regular in Catalan.
I myself would pronounce the name in English as [ˈkɑːrl.əs ˌpʊʤ.də.ˈmoʊn], the closest approximation to the original pronunciation using the sounds in English, unless I'm feeling pretentious enough to pronounce it closer to the original.
I don't think there's necessarily a clear-cut answer for this, but let me mention a parallel case. Say I want to write the Welsh name Hywel in Korean. The Welsh pronunciation is something like [ˈhə.wel]. The anglicized pronunciation is [ˈhaʊ‿əl]. Which do I follow? The former would give 허웰 Heowel while the latter would give 하월 Hawol. Still, this is easy enough once you come up with a principle. But what if you now need to translate a whole list of Welsh names, some of them quite obscure with no obvious established anglicized pronunciations?
What about Maori names in New Zealand? Inuktitut names in Canada? The way the transcription rules are set up for Korean, where English reduced vowels are supposed to be indicated, it is actually very unwieldy to transcribe names like Te Atairangikaahu or Natar Ungalaaq if they are treated as English names, whereas the transcriptions would be straightforward if we give up that pretense. Perhaps these are not perfect parallels, but it will give you an idea of why for some people it would seem simpler to try to model the pronunciation of foreign names on the original language instead of filtering through the dominant language of the area.
Phil Ramsden said,
November 7, 2017 @ 8:48 am
I think the query is actually quite complex. What people mostly really mean is something like "To what sequence of phonemes native to my own speech group is this word, as pronounced by locals, most closely assimilated?"
Now, that's a relatively easy question to answer when the language concerned is big and well-known, so that there are widely-accepted conventions about what phonemes in my speech group get used for what phonemes in the "foreign" language. (Some of the discussion upthread illustrates the interesting ways in which these conventions can vary with the version of English one speaks: AmE long 'o' vs BrE short 'o' for Castilian 'o', for example, or AmE short 'o' vs BrE short 'a' for Castlian 'a'.) But in a case like Catalan, such accepted conventions don't really exist, and the issue can become a bit vexed.
Never mind consistency across speech groups: our practice isn't even always *self*-consistent where smaller languages are concerned. In Dutch, for example, see the way the "uy/uij" in "Cruyff" (another Catalan connection there!) is usually pronounced by British soccer commentators, as opposed to the way they generally handle "Kuyt". ("Croyff" vs "Kite", broadly speaking.)
languagehat said,
November 7, 2017 @ 9:00 am
But I still don't get, if a foreigner is trying to approximate the original pronunciation, why they would go with the Spanish approximation. This is the name of a particular guy, and it is not hard at all to find out how he likes it.
Exactly. And again, the fact that native speakers of a language/dialect can be cool with alternate versions of their name should have no bearing on the question of how somebody else's name should be pronounced. Everyone has the right to be accommodating on their own behalf; nobody has the right to be accommodating on someone else's behalf.
Ellen K. said,
November 7, 2017 @ 10:01 am
I think the query is actually quite complex. What people mostly really mean is something like "To what sequence of phonemes native to my own speech group is this word, as pronounced by locals, most closely assimilated?"
Yes. Although, in this case, for me, if I had reason to pronounce this name, there would also be the question of do I follow my inclination to pronounce the last syllable like it's a French word, or do I resist that tendency and pronounce it like the word "moan"? The former feels much more natural to me than the latter.
Jongseong Park said,
November 7, 2017 @ 10:20 am
One of the stupid and immensely frustrating decisions made by the South Korean committee that decides the standard transcriptions of foreign names into Korean was to write Danish tennis player Caroline Wozniacki's name as 캐럴라인 보즈니아키 Kaereollain Bojeuniaki based on the English pronunciation [ˈkær.ə.laɪn ˌvɒz.ni.ˈɑːk.i], despite my protestations that it should be 카롤리네 보스니아키 Karolline Boseuniaki reflecting the Danish pronunciation [kɑːoˈliːnə ʋʌsniˈɑɡ̊i]. The reason? Apparently they asked her what they should call her in an interview when she was in Korea and she pronounced her name the English way. Somehow I doubt that the interview was conducted in Danish…
Victor Mair said,
November 7, 2017 @ 10:52 am
Another layer of complexity:
Wozniacki or Woźniacki (Polish pronunciation: [ˈvɔʑɲatski]; feminine: Woźniacka, plural: Woźniaccy) is a Polish-language surname related to Woźniak.
Woźniak (Polish pronunciation: [ˈvɔʑɲak]; plural: Woźniakowie; archaic feminine: Woźniakowa) is the tenth most common surname in Poland (89,015 people in 2009).[1] The name likely refers to a driver or person in charge of horse-drawn carriages.
Breffni said,
November 7, 2017 @ 11:58 am
Interesting discussion, but it shouldn't go unremarked that whether Puigdemont is now correctly referred to as president of Catalonia, as he is in the title of the post, is an even more ticklish question than how to pronounce his name.
Jonathan Gress-Wright said,
November 7, 2017 @ 12:48 pm
@Tom Dawkes:
Good point but you might be too hard on English speakers. When each language comes with its own orthographical idiosyncrasies, it can be difficult to command them all and you would expect the rules of more salient foreign languages like German to be more easily remembered than those of less salient languages like Russian or Swedish. An English speaker knows that Stockholm and Stalingrad are not English, and the most salient non-English orthography they know is German, where "st" is "sht", so they will apply German rules. The English speaker doesn't know that Russian and Swedish "st" happen to be pronounced like English "st"; he only knows they're not English and therefore probably should be pronounced "sht." Sure, it's ignorant, but it's not as if I'm familiar with all the rules of foreign language orthographies, and I'm much interested in those questions than the average person.
Jonathan Gress-Wright said,
November 7, 2017 @ 12:51 pm
@Breffni:
Gosh, I think I didn't even notice that. I assume "president of Catalonia" was not his official title before the Catalans unilaterally declared independence. Though I suppose this question is really political rather than linguistic.
Peter Taylor said,
November 7, 2017 @ 2:13 pm
@Jonathan Gress-Wright, at a pinch there's a related linguistic point or two… The title is formally (in Catalan) President de la Generalitat de Catalunya, so to say President of Catalonia is simple synecdoche. Similarly the leader of the Spanish government is formally the Presidente del gobierno de España, but this is not uncommonly abbreviated to Presidente de España. It is often translated to English as Prime Minister to avoid confusing people into thinking that Spain is a republic.
J.W. Brewer said,
November 7, 2017 @ 3:09 pm
Here's a hilarious-to-me youtube video purporting to explain how to pronounce "Jimmy Carter." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibY7W2AsLF4 It gives a generic GenAm pronunciation that is nothing like the way the President of that name pronounced it himself. But on the other hand, my sense is that for a speaker of another variety of English to attempt to pronounce "Jimmy Carter" with the best approximation they could master of old-time-rural-Georgia phonology would be more likely taken to be making fun of Pres. Carter than demonstrating respect.
Perhaps that's not analogous, of course.
Tim said,
November 7, 2017 @ 7:21 pm
Can anything be done to stop the second video from automatically playing? It's now in my RSS feed, and for every new LL message that arrives and I read, I have to scroll all the way down to this annoying recording and turn it off.
I think if the original could be fixed, I could delete it and achieve silence, even if my RSS aggregator found and collected it again.
Victor Mair said,
November 7, 2017 @ 9:46 pm
@Tim
We couldn't figure out how to turn off autoplay, so we just removed the embedded video. The hyperlink is still there.
Keith said,
November 8, 2017 @ 4:37 am
@ngage92, RP, Mick O, Jonathan and anybody else interested,
I pronounce /ib'i:θə/ and /bəɾsəˈlonə/. There's not really a strong logic to this; I've never been to either place, but I suppose that since Ibiza is the Castillian Spanish name for it, it makes sense to use my closest approximation to the Castillian pronunciation. It would be different if I were to use the Catalan name Illa d'Eivissa; I suppose I would try to approximate the Catalan pronunciation, as I do when referring to Barcelona.
Catalan: /bəɾsəˈlonə/
Castillian: /baɾθeˈlona/
I've spent many hours thinking about how place names change when being "adopted" or "borrowed" into other languages. A good example is that of the capital of Russia: Москва́ /mɐˈskva/ in Russian, Moskau /'mɔskaʊ/ in German, leading (in my mind) to the American pronunciation /ˈmɒskaʊ/, Moscou /mɔs'ku/ in French, leading (in my mind) to the pronunciation in the rest of the English speaking world while keeping the spelling, Moscow, closer to French.
RP's example of the Pope's name is particularly interesting; The Pope chooses his name on being elected, presumably he chooses the name's Latin form. But he is referred to in different languages using a localized version of the name, so for example the Polish cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła became Papa Ioannes Paulus Secundus, but was known in English as Pope John-Paul the Second, in French as pape Jean-Paul deux, and so on.
Tim said,
November 8, 2017 @ 8:48 am
Thanks for the fix! I had heard it enough times to learn how to pronounce the name.
Jonathan Gress-Wright said,
November 8, 2017 @ 1:26 pm
Here's a College Humor video lampooning those who insist on pronouncing foreign words authentically:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKGoVefhtMQ
languagehat said,
November 8, 2017 @ 2:07 pm
A good rant on the topic.
Catannea said,
November 8, 2017 @ 4:13 pm
This is about the first time I have ever dared comment without reading ALL the comments before me.
My brain is screaming.
Yes, the Catalan guy is right (surprise). Thank goodness.
Now please go wherever you go and tell your lawmakers that Catalonia deserves self-determination.
Thank-you.
Tom Christiansen said,
November 11, 2017 @ 3:12 pm
The Awkward Tale of GOAT and GOOSE
It's ironic that people who can't even manage to pronounce Catalunya right would ever care how to pronounce its deposed president's name. After all, if you can't even bother to say the region's name right, why bother trying to say its leader's name right? Why one and not the other?
Even though in Castilian (read "Spanish") the region under discussion is spelled "Cataluña" while in Catalan it's spelled "Catalunya", those two spellings represent the same underlying pronunciation, outside of minor adaptations reflecting slightly different phonologic conditioning in the two languages.
Yet many English speakers mysteriously continue to use the GOAT vowel for the region's stressed vowel, not the GOOSE vowel that its own denizens use, and it is by no means clear why. Lack of world travel and awareness of other cultures and languages, perhaps, but that's not a very satisfying explanation.
The historical "Catalonia" orthography that's still used in today's English derives either indirectly from the French one, now spelled "Catalogne", or else more directly from when the word first appeared in various Medieval writings dating from the early 1100s, where it was variously "Catalaunia", "Cathalonia", "Catalania", "Catalonia". Although those spellings probably reflected contemporary pronunciations, that was 900 years ago now, and pronunciations have certainly changed since then.
You might be tempted to think a world that now writes the former Peking as Beijing and the former Calcutta as Kolkata would at long last be able to give Catalunya its due by spelling and pronouncing it more the way its own people do.
But apparently this isn't in the cards. Perhaps the Caledonians and the Catalonians could join up and rename both their would-be countries for the new millennium.
languagehat said,
November 11, 2017 @ 4:40 pm
You seem awfully het up about the fact that English has an English word for the place rather than using the local name. Are you equally bothered by our not saying "France" with the French nasal vowel, by our saying "Russia" rather than "Rossiya" (stress on the -i-), "Germany" rather than "Deutschland," "China" rather than "Zhongguo," etc. etc. etc.?
Andrew Usher said,
November 11, 2017 @ 7:08 pm
Yes, English is not totally consistent with anglicising foreign names. But 'Catalonia' has a long history, and reflects the English preference to use Latinate names (and pronounce them as English) where available.
It's far from alone among Anglicisations in reflecting an older pronunciation than that used now in the language of origin. French provides the most obvious examples.
On the topic of this thread, the man is now pooj-d'-MONT for me – last two syllables just like 'Dumont' which is probably etymologically identical.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
Ellen Kozisek said,
November 12, 2017 @ 2:15 pm
It's not a mystery why contemporary English speakers pronounce Catalonia with a GOAT vowel. They do because that's how it's pronounced in English, and that how it's been pronounced in the recent past (going back into the farther away past). The same reason we pronounce Spain as we do, and not Espanya, and we pronounce Germany as we do, not Doichlund.
And, note we don't pronounce Peking as Beijing. And, similarly, we don't pronounce Catalunya with the GOAT vowel. We pronounce Catalonia with the GOAT vowel.
Andrew Usher said,
November 12, 2017 @ 4:47 pm
Whether 'Catalonia' and 'Catalunya' are the same word is a semantic distinction, not a linguistic one. They are of course cognate, and so are Peking/Beijing and Calcutta/Kolkata, so I was right in saying we are inconsistent. Presumably for political reasons non-European names are more likely to get changed.
But if the author of that post, 'Tom Christiansen', had bothered to look at Wikipedia, he'd see that English is far from alone – almost all non-Iberian languages use a derivative of Latin 'Catalonia'; and would he criticise them all equally?
(I assume 'Catalaunia' was just a fancy alternative created by someone that didn't distinguish 'au' from 'o' in speech – is there any evidence that a pronunciation with a diphthong was ever current?)
Rodger C said,
November 13, 2017 @ 7:52 am
And, note we don't pronounce Peking as Beijing.
We don't??
languagehat said,
November 13, 2017 @ 8:55 am
We don't??
Some of us do, some of us don't. The number of catch-the-wave, proud-to-be-modern Beijing-users has been growing and will prevail, but I have no idea what the ratio is at the moment, and neither does anyone else (we're talking, of course, about what English-speakers around the world say, not what appears in print). It doesn't matter anyway; the point is valid whatever the Peking/Beijing ratio might be. Nobody says Pah-RREE or Mask-VAH in English or is likely to, and that's fine, English is English and not French or Russian or Chinese. I confess I don't understand some people's primeval horror when confronted with that fact (especially since they don't seem to be in the least bothered by the fact that other languages continue to use their own versions of English-language place names rather than slavishly adopting ours).
Ellen K. said,
November 13, 2017 @ 9:55 am
My point was, Peking and Beijing, each are pronounced like they are spelled. That is, the pronunciation of those written forms. If we see "Peking" we pronounce it with P and K sounds, not B and J sounds. It wouldn't be corrected to write that we changed the pronunciation of Peking. We didn't. It's the spelling and how we say it that changed together.
Though, I admit I'm making an assumption about what others do when they see Peking. I certainly hear/say it in my head as Peking. And if I were reading something out loud and thought it better to say "bayzhing" or "bayjing", I would not think of my pronunciation as being me saying Peking. It would be me changing Peking to Beijing.