Never mind very long names. My in-laws never could pronounce my name. it’s not really Sam, but it is similarly one syllable. But in my in-laws’ Chinese dialect, syllables DO NOT start with the letter/sound my name does and DO NOT end with the letter/sound mine does. One syllable, and it was completely unpronounceable to them.
My family has an uncommon, but recognizably German, 10-letter surname. There are no diacritical marks. We pronounce it EXACTLY like it is spelled. There are no silent letters or unusual letter combinations. It has four syllables of 2-3 letters each.
In spite of this simplicity, virtually everyone who tries to read it aloud for the first time mangles it completely. They insert “meister” (??) where there’s nothing of the sort, or they reverse the syllables.
I wish I could say that German-speakers get it right…but they don’t. (Of course, they tell us that we “are not pronouncing it correctly,” but my family emigrated to the US 180 years ago and Anglicized the pronunciation. It is, however, spelled exactly as it was in 1840.)
I really think that’s the answer: we (English-speakers, as a culture) really don’t care much about getting people’s names right, so we find it difficult if they’re outside the core repetoire. I think the length is a red herring, as there are quite a few long English names that don’t phase us. But we’ve all enountered people that manage to mispronounce, misspell, or otherwise mangle really common short English names, even when they’ve just heard or read it.
Couple of points.
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I don’t think any English speakers would have a hard time pronouncing Uusipaavalniemi. It seems pretty straightforward. What is hard is picking up the pronunciation from reading it (the first time). The way most people read is by recongizing entire words or at least big chunks of them in the case of long words. If you have a word where the entire word is completely unfamiliar then you need to read it letter by letter, like a little kid who recently learned how to read, and this takes a lot longer. That can come off as “hard to pronounce” in situations where you’re trying to use the name based on having just read it off a paper, but it’s just hard to pick up.
Somewhat similar if the person told it to you once or twice - it’s not hard to pronounce but just hard to remember what that pronunciation is. -
I think with these things - especially memory - the number of syllables counts for more than the number of letters. “Schwarzenegger” might be one letter shorter than “Uusipaavalniemi”, but it’s 4 syllables vs (I assume) 7. That’s a pretty big difference.
Took me a couple of reads to separate what are actually all familiar words/syllables, but then it was fine.
Nitpick: “faze”, not “phase”. A while back there was a thread where people told of commonly encountered errors, and this was my contribution.
Sanskrit is designed such that people do not get accents. People from any part of India, when speaking Sanskrit - speak without accent (almost entirely).
Yeah, AKA “rigorously prescriptivist” in phonetics and grammar. The classical language par excellence for language nerds.
Everyone, in any language, speaks with an accent. And Sanskrit is a natural language. It’s not designed.
I used to work for a chap who gloried in the name Shubramanian Bhattacharyya - Shoob for short. We used to get calls from customers saying things like “Do you have someone there called … Battery Charger ?”.
Maybe so and I maybe totally wrong, but I have heard people from Indian - North, South, East and West speak Sanskrit Mantras and I can understand them all. In fact they all sound the same whether their mother tongue is Tamil, Bengali, Hindi or Rajasthani. If the same people speak English or any other Indian language - they do not sound the same.
I do not know the difference. Perhaps you can explain.
At first glance, that sounds like a made up name - but it maybe two people from different parts of India had a kid. Shubramanian is a name more popular in South India and Bhattacharyya is a last name from Bengal. (east India).
Yeap - I know how that feels. The good news is that there are lot of good people, who go out of their way to learn to pronounce my Indian origin name correctly.
I may have misremembered the first name - this was ~25 years ago - but it definitely started with the “shoob” sound and was about that long.
I don’t know anything about the accent part, but when he says “natural language” he means it is a language that evolved naturally in human societies. Essentially every language that any human culture organically developed is a natural language, or more or less virtually every language spoken by every person on Earth is a natural language. While some of these languages have had “governing bodies” that proscribe certain standardized rules and etc, all of them share in common they developed organically in human societies.
Non-natural languages which have a few different terms, are basically any language that DID NOT develop naturally in a human society. An example, probably the most famous: Esperanto, a language essentially invented by language nerds for language nerds.
There’s other examples out there, and while I don’t think they’re fully fleshed out, some fictional languages like Klingon have some of the basic features of the language fleshed out.
All true, but Sanskrit is a learned and literary classical language that hasn’t had any significant presence as a “first language” acquired in infancy for well over 2000 years. During that time, an elite form of Sanskrit has been very stringently regulated by highly sophisticated and widely disseminated phonetic and grammatical normative rules.
Which is why am77494 is correct that regional phonetic variation among Sanskrit speakers tends to be much less than among speakers of less prescriptively controlled languages.
The same doesn’t hold for most other classical learned languages such as Latin, because they didn’t have such a formidable suite of linguistic controls attached to them since antiquity. Which is why, as any historical choral music director will tell you, there are different pronunciation rules for medieval/Renaissance “Italian Latin”, “German Latin”, “French Latin”, etc., influenced by the pronunciation of regional vernaculars.
(To be fair, it’s not as though spoken Sanskrit has none of that, especially in the many loanwords it’s transmitted to regional languages. Dravidian-language speakers often conflate the different sibilants in originally-Sanskrit words, for example. But not when they’re reciting a standard classical form of liturgical/literary Sanskrit.)