open-sketchbook:
keeningthoughts:
party-gilmore:
syphabelnyades:
thingsidothingsidont:
corporatetwitteraccount:
zomdead:
fullmetalwindbreaker:
youtubers love to say “i hope i’m pronouncing that correctly” while recording themselves in a video that they upload to the internet, which they have access to
via @glorioustragedykid
Hint: its because the video is not as well researched as its presentation implies
Hint: it’s because sometimes it’s hard to pronounce words especially if you don’t use them very often
Don’t leave this in the tags!! They’re good points! An attempt is better than nothing!
It’s one thing to listen to a correct pronunciation. It’s another to actually have your mouth form the words, especially when you’re using a sound you don’t normally use in your native language.
Maybe they’re not saying “I didn’t look up the actual pronunciation and I’m just winging it.” Maybe it’s “I looked it up and it uses a sound that I don’t use in my day to day speech and I don’t think I did it quite right but I tried.”
And sometimes, there aren’t sufficient resources to teach you the correct pronunciation! Sometimes you’ll get bot-made videos that contradict each other.
This this this this. As someone who struggles to pronounce a couple of words I use fairly often my FIRST LANGUAGE, thanks to those particular sounds just being difficult shapes for me to string together coherently, I am constantly afraid of fucking up words in other languages or even just with roots in other languages.
It’s one thing to not even try, but the “I hope I’m doing this correctly” isn’t always “I’m hoping I can just wing this word with whatever I think it’s supposed to sound like,” a lot of times it “okay so I’ve looked it up and tried it a few times so I’m really hoping its coming out right, but I’m not used enough to the language to really be sure .”
Languages are fucking DIFFICULT for a lot of people. Not just the repeating/speaking part, but also the ability to HEAR and RECOGNIZE the patterns and sounds.
I think it’s also important to add… a lot of the researchers for videos or podcasts aren’t the hosts. The host themselves may not have had the foreknowledge to look a name pronunciation up or have the ability to do it then and there during recording (time during the schedule, internet access, studio rules, etc etc).
different languages use different sounds, and not only do we struggle to vocalize sounds we aren’t used to, it is very common when one language distinguishes between two sounds but the languages a person speaks doesn’t that their brains literally can’t tell the sounds apart.
When a language make a distinction that, in your sound inventory, are the same sound? Yeah, you’re fucked for pronouncing it. There’s a reason that people who learn other languages have accents from their primary language which persist for years without intense and specialized training. You can listen to somebody pronounce it but not only do you not know how to physically make the inside of your mouth make the sound, you might not know how to make your brain hear the sound in the first place.
A lot of languages like Russian and Turkish have sounds they make distinctions between that to English speakers is just “k”, and the Chinese distinction between what we romanize as Shi and Xi are just the same fucking sound to us. Grow up speaking Japanese? Congrats, the rhotic R and lateral L are both the same liquid consonant and you hear them both as the same thing. Speak Arabic as a first language? Good luck with English’s distinction between Sh and Ch!
I know where this comes from, it’s tumblr’s sympathy with the very real problem that many people with names in foreign languages experience where people don’t even try to pronounce their names correctly and refuse to learn even when you try to teach them.
But somewhere along the way we picked up the idea that any mispronunciation is just people not trying hard enough and deliberately being an asshole when like, no, different languages are different in a way that goes beyond grammar and vocabulary, in a way that interacts with a part of our brain which streamlines sounds into meaning in a way that actually obscures the precise specifics of what you are hearing. When you get this far into it, you loop around to treating people shitty for not speaking second languages perfectly and congrats we’re back to the very xenophobia we were trying to avoid.
I’m glad folks are expressing this. Whenever we encounter non-English proper nouns on the podcast, I get really anxious about saying them correctly. (“Oh no, I’m one of those horrible ignorant Americans people are always complaining about online, maybe I should just cut this whole section out of the recording to hide my shame…”)
It’s kind of a no-win situation. Just confidently saying the word incorrectly is obviously the wrong approach. Posts like the OP tell me it’s also wrong to acknowledge that you might be mispronouncing it. (And I’ve seen similar posts saying that, if you’re conversing with a native speaker, it’s also wrong to ask them how to pronounce stuff because, like, it implies that these are Strange and Exotic Words for you or something.) So what do you even do when you come across a personal name or place name or etcetera that you don’t know how to say?
The only option remaining is to Already Know and say it right the first time without any qualification or hesitation. So you go to look it up ahead of time, and… surprise! Whatever massive database full of reliable pronunciations people think you can just search through doesn’t exist. More often than not, all you get are those bot-made recordings @syphabelnyades mentions. And even if you were willing to trust the pronunciation of a random Youtube channel (which, why would you be? what are this robot’s qualifications?), they’re obviously untrustworthy because they often contradict each other. (Which you know because you checked more than one, because you know enough about information literacy to not just blindly trust the top Google result, which i kind of suspect is what these people who swear you can just easily Google unfamiliar pronunciations are doing.) Like, we all know that Googling something these days gets you mostly junk that you have to sift through in order to find anything reliable. The same applies here — and in the situation where all of your results are pretty sketchy looking (this website says it’s pronounced such-and-such, but it’s not clear who made this website or where they get their information and it kind of looks like it might just be another bot), what are you meant to trust?
Now, sometimes you can get an actual dictionary entry (extremely rare if you’re looking for a proper noun, though, since dictionaries generally don’t include those), or you’ll luck out & the Wikipedia entry will include the IPA. Then you have to deal with the fact that it’s still an unfamiliar word. People mispronounce words that aren’t from their native language all the time! This is known! This happens even when they’re relatively fluent in that language and have years of education and immersion to lean on! Of course it’s going to be hard if you don’t speak the language at all. Different languages have different phonemes — even if you’re pretty familiar with IPA and know what all the symbols mean (I recommend learning the IPA, incidentally, it is a useful tool and it’s interesting in its own right), your mouth does not have practice making those sounds. You’re going to screw up. And then there’s the whole issue of allophones that @open-sketchbook describes. Or maybe it’s a tonal language or something, and you’re not used to that even being an aspect of pronunciation that carries real lexical weight. There are challenges, is what I’m saying.
At the end of the day, you’re going to have to make peace with the fact that you’re not fully confident in how you’re saying that word. But if you acknowledge this on air, you’re going to get folks like OP up there going “oh, you didn’t even bother to look it up.” Like, no! I tried! I’m doing my best! When I say I might be pronouncing something wrong, I’m just acknowledging that I am a flawed and fallible human who does not speak every language I encounter with perfect ease, and that I want to apologize for any errors I might make. That seems obviously better than just forging ahead, probably saying it wrong, and not admitting it.
Because what is the alternative? Make sure you only ever mention people & places that have English names so that you never have to try and say a word from an unfamiliar language? Seems bad!
(Also, I do want to acknowledge a bit of hypocrisy on my part here in that for French words specifically, I have basically given up on getting them right. Those I do sometimes just sort of wing because I know it’s going to be wrong anyway, and I’m sorry. Other languages I do look stuff up and try my best, but French… look, I know I shouldn’t be throwing stones from the glass house that is English orthography, so I’ll just stop there.)
