I knew a Mexican guy with this name years ago and he pronounced it: “hah-MAY”
I’ve just met a guy from South America who pronounces it: “HIGH-mee”
I know a person is the ultimate authority on how to pronounce his own name, but how do other Spanish-speakers pronounce it?
**Note **that this is not the Anglo name “Jamie” (which can be male or female) and is the name of the Commissioner’s son on Blue Bloods.
I don’t think I’ve heard either, though it’s hard to be sure what you mean without IPA.
I live in California which is more than 50% Latino. The name is not rare out here and I’ve only heard the second version used.
High-Mee
I suspect the guy you knew called hah-May was part of a minority. I’ve on rare occasions run into people who pronounce their name a bit different than the common usage in the US too. Once knew a girl with name spell Dana. Which I’ve only heard pronounced
Day-Naw
but this girl wouldn’t tolerate that way of saying Dana and said her name was
Dan-Naw
Don’t know why.
That would be the Hebrew “Dana”.
I guess “Jaime” is also originally Hebrew, but so morphed that even just in Spain/Portugal there are at least half a dozen variants.
Yes, but that seems like an Anglicization to me.
Pronunciations from Chile, Argentina and Mexico:
I’m hearing the “may” ending from all three speakers (Argentina debatable).
I’m not a Spanish speaker, but the only pronunciation I remember hearing is “HIGH-MAY” (i.e. like the English words “high” and “may,” with a roughly equal accent on both syllables), in reference to people like Jaime Escalante (the high school math teacher who was the inspiration for the film Stand and Deliver) and Jaime Garcia (MLB pitcher from Mexico).
J = somewhere between an English “H” and “K”. (If you want to be catty, you can describe it as the sound you make when you hawk a loogie.)
A = as in English “father”
I = as in English “machine”
M = pretty close to the English “M”
E = somewhere between an English “short E” and “long E”
When you say the “A” and “I” quickly, you get an English “long I”. So most English speakers will hear the first syllable as “high”. The “E” doesn’t quite match any English letter. To my ear, it sounds close to an English “long A”.
So, I would render it as “high-may”
Unless there is an accent mark to indicate otherwise, Spanish words stress the second-to-last syllable. None of the Jaimes I know stress the last syllable.
Where in South America? Because it’s also a Portuguese name (although IME that’s more like “zhamie” - that Brazilian Portuguese s/z thing)
It’s perfectly obvious to everybody (except IPA snobs) what she meant.
Also in California, and I’ve only heard High-Mee.
I just asked my Costa Rican friend, and she said High-Mee.
I agree with high-may as being the best English words description of the pronunciation of the name.
However, in Spanish for a word with no accent marks, you stress the LAST syllable of a word unless the word ends in a vowel or n or s.
That’s what I am used to hearing in LA. A couple of those sounds aren’t typical in the standard American pronunciation set.
Not necessarily. The OP is using *English *short-hand to refer to a foreign language. When that happens, these threads often just go around in circles, because what “XX” means to one person, might not be the same for another. You can’t just assume, when referring to a foreign language. Sorry–it’s not about being a snob; it’s just about being clear, and not second-guessing what’s going on in another person’s head.
/'xai.me/
Two syllables, stress on the first.
The first syllable is a dypthong, the vowels sound as the English word “I”.
The second syllable has a single vowel. Americans tend to turn it into a dypthong, but it’s not. It’s like the “eh” in those bad Canadian jokes: /e/, not /ei/.
(Referring to “high-mee”) High-mee sounds Yiddish to me.
Colombia
This is really interesting. It sounds like it’s pronounced both ways in different places. Thanks, y’all.
This how I’ve heard native Spanish speakers pronounce it.
But when saying their name to a native English speaker (here in California), I often hear people anglicizing the pronunciation. I have a good friend from Nicaragua who’s been in the US since early childhood and has a completely unaccented American English accent. He would always introduce himself as Fernando with the ‘a’ pronounced like the ‘a’ in ‘apple.’
The problem is not referring to another language, the problem is that different English speakers will use different transliterations for English itself, and have different notions about whether Mary, marry and merry are pronounced the same or not.
Ehm… which ‘a’ in ‘apple’? Is that like the “a in ‘cat’” my bilingual Collins used as the reference for the Spanish /a/, or is it a schwa? Which dialect of English?
To my Spanish ears, the biggest differences between Fernando in Spanish and the Feh. Nan. Dou. I’ve most often encountered in Anglospanish isn’t the sometimes-overly-open a, it’s the disappearing r, the extra vowel at the end, and an absurd overstressing of the syllables which I expect a Nicaraguan won’t suffer from.
When MLB pitcher Jaime Garcia (a Mexican) was playing in my town, the radio and TV announcers pronounced it High May. There was maybe a slight accent on the first syllable.
I never heard Garcia himself pronounce it.