I’m American, with no ability to speak more than a few words in any other language. Increasingly, it seems non-American names are being used for places and people in print and speaking.
At times, it sort of surprises me when someone will be speaking in a plain, American-sounding accent, and then they will say their name or someone/someplace’s name, and they roll their "r"s like crazy, or pronounce something otherwise non-American.
I wonder how common the reverse is? When someone in a Spanish speaking country is pronouncing an American name, do they make a point of pronouncing it as an American would? On maps printed in countries other than America, do they use native or American place names?
Is there an etiquette for using/pronouncing non-native names/words? When is it respectful, as opposed to pandering?
Growing up Dutch, pronouncing American place names in an American accent would be seen as pretentious and assholery, unless done for some specific effect - as in(pretend) quoting an American, for example. We did use the American word/name, but dutchified the pronunciation.
I lived in Europe for about ten years and in Africa for another three. While living there, I almost always used the local place-name pronunciations. It’s a hard habit to break, but I usually use the American pronunciation now. I’ve also had formal training in French, Portuguese and Spanish, so I tend to pronounce words in those languages as I learned them. If people think it’s pretentious, I can live with it.
I’m honestly curious, what would they use instead? New York is New York, Detroit is Detroit?
I know that, for instance, an American map will show the city of “Vienna”, whereas a local map will show “Wien”. Or “Munich”/“Munchen” (don’t know how to do the umlat).
If you listen to foreign language radio here in the States for any length of time, you’ll hear it. Quite often the American words in the commercials are spoken in an American accent.
Spanish generally translates city or state names, like Nueva York, Dakota de Norte, Virginia Occidental, etc. (but Rhode Island). Some spellings are Hispanicized (Luisiana, Misisipi), some are not (Massachusetts, Tennessee).
For New York:
In Irish: Nua-Eabhrac
In Esperanto: Novjorko
But a lot of languages do in fact use “New York” or something very close to it, including French and Spanish (“Nueva York”)
You’re correct that most American place names seem to be known by the American name around the world, perhaps with a small alteration due to local accents and constructions, but older places use different names for the same place.
For Germany:
In English: “Germany” of course.
In French: L’Allemagne
In German: Deutschland
In Irish: An Ghearmáin
So place names are going to vary all over the place depending on history, how well known the place is globally, the particular language you consider, and so forth. The newer the place the more likely there is to be consistency, at least it seems that way, but even that is not guarantee.
Then we have “misleading” place names - for New Madrid, Missouri the “Madrid” portion is NOT pronounced the way Spanish speakers say it. “Cairo” Illinois is pronounced as KAY-row. Lots of that with settlers naming new places but not knowing how the source language pronounced the word. And I suspect that some folks not from around here would struggle with some of the ones derived from Native American languages.
Rinse and repeat for every place and language on Earth.
If you’re going “What?” - Dublin was not founded by the Irish, it was founded by Viking raiders. The name “Dublin” is not of Irish origin but probably Viking.
The Cattle Raid of Cooley, a First Century Irish Epic, makes reference to Dublind rissa ratter Áth Cliath, which translates (if I haven’t screwed this up) to Dublin, called Ath Cliath So close to two thousand years ago the place had two different names.
So Irish people in Dublin speaking English call the place Dublin and if they’re speaking Irish they call it Baile Átha Cliath. Except when they’re calling it “Dublin” despite speaking Irish because, of course, languages mutate like that.
I generally use Japanese pronunication for English names of places but sometimes not for people. “Roonaruddo” Reigan comes to mind. Places are generally shorter and I will have already “processed” them in my mind so it’s easier to remember the pronunication.
As someone who grew up in the 60s, it seems a tad strange to see Bombay now Mumbai, Peking/Beijing, etc. I guess a large part of me thinks a country out to be able to choose place names within its borders, and other countries ought to respect that.
Sometimes it strikes my ear as odd, when an American newscaster will be reporting on a story, and then when they hit a particular place or person’s name, the obviously pronounce it using a non-American accent. Spanish’s rolled R and “th” sound come immediately to mind. If I accept that they are doing that as a sign of respect or courtesy, I wondered if non-English speakers tried to return the favor.
Or - as isosleepy suggests, are the American reporters rolling their Rs being pretentious assholes?
Yes, mikecurtis, now that you say it, I have heard when a foreign language ad or something sounds like “badabadabada - Sears Roebuck - badabada…”
I’ve noticed the reporters on NPR seem to make an effort to pronounce foreign words the way a native speaker of that language would pronounce them. I’m guessing this is their policy.
No, “Dublin” is derived from Gaelic. “Dubh” means “black” or “dark”, while “lind” means pool. It’s a reference to a dark tidal pool in one of the oldest parts of Dublin, near the castle.
Dublin probably became a Viking settlement, while another town up-river was named “Baile Átha Cliath” (“town of the hurdled ford”) was the Irish settlement. That name won at as the formal name for the community as they gradually merged.
The components of the name are indeed Irish, but the order is Norse; in Irish the noun (linn) would come first, followed by the adjective (dubh), whereas the adjective-noun order that we see here is distintively Norse. So what we have here is evidence of a Irish/Norse pidgin, borrowing from both languages. Presumably this pidgin was in use in the Norse settlement.
Áth Cliath (Irish: the ford of hurdles) may have been a distinct Irish-speaking settlement, or it may just have been a crossing point about 500 metres upriver, without a settlement associated with it. It could be that the Norse/Irish inhabitants of the settlement referred to it by its hybrid Norse/Irish name, while the surrounding Irish-speaking people called it after the nearby crossing point.
It depends: bigger or more important places are more likely to have localized versions. For example, New York City is Nueva York in Spanish, but Boston is Boston (and thankfully easy to pronounce) and New Hampshire is New Hampshire (pronunciation varies depending on who says it).
For people’s names, Hispanics try to respect that person’s pronunciation; we will change the spelling of our own names to make it easier for foreigners to pronounce them, or use the local version if it’s available and there are no cultural/political issues involved. For example, a Spanish Enrique in the US who’s nicknamed /kike/ and who at home spells it Kike may either become a Henry, still introduce himself as /kike/ but spell it Quique (which leads to both mangled pronunciations and mangled spellings) or go with Enrique (mainly if there is already a Henry in the group), taking advantage of having a name which to American ears sounds “exotic” but not too badly. It’s nice when a foreigner localizes his name but that’s not necessarily possible: Brian or Kevin don’t have a Spanish equivalent that I know of. And if someone tells you his name is John, you ask if it’s ok to call him Juan and he says “no”, then you do your best to pronounce John unless you got raised at the back of a pigsty after the porcine inhabitants kicked you out.
I’ve heard David Guetta’s name pronounced three different ways so far (by himself even): he’s French and that has both stresses in the final syllables, in Spanish the phonetic is very similar to the original but the stresses move to the first syllables, people from other European languages often pronounce the “David” as in English and stress the “Guetta” in the first syllable.
I had a coworker who totally cracked me up with the sudden switches. Her English was very good in general, except for the occasional word she’d learned from her programming teacher. The teacher would read code as if it was Spanish. So my coworker would say “and then we will DELETE the line…” with the ‘delete’ pronounced as if it was Spanish. Completely fluid English and then BAM! a concrete beam of an English-for-programmers word, then back to English.
Dakota del Norte, at least in Spain. For the ones with too many letters I’ve seen both localized and preserved versions: Misisipi/Mississippi/Misisipí, Massachusetts/Masachusets/Massachusets, Tennessee/Tenesi/Tenesí.
My own name is Josh. When speaking English, it’s pronounced in the standard American style (“Jaash”), but in Hebrew, the vowel sound is somewhere between “Rose” and “Rush”. When speaking with my bilingual family and friends, who often switch languages mid-conversation, they’ll pronounce it one way while speaking English, and pronounce it the other way the very next sentence after switching to Hebrew.
And it’s also spelled Londres in Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan, but those pronunciations and the French one are all different. Not sure if Galego and Portuguese pronounce it different from each other or not.