Yeah, it’s weird. Sometimes people think it’s pretentious and sometimes people think you’re an idiot, whether you do it correctly or not. Like all rules with the English language, it’s a case-by-case issue. If anyone tells you a rule to remember it, it’s likely wrong more often than it’s correct.
Only if you are not a native speaker of that language, or always? Am I supposed to imitate how Americans botch the names of German car manufacturers like Porsche or Volkswagen if I ever go on vacation there?
In my experience, you’re exempt if it’s from your native language. Unless they can’t tell your native language from your accent (people can tell I’m not a native speaker of English, but they can’t tell what my native language is). British are similar.
I mean, I get it to an extent. I’m much more in favor of linguistic descriptivism rather than prescriptivism, so I acknowledge that terms and pronunciations can develop over time and are not wrong.
If someone pronounces “Beijing” in English with a softened J/G sound (like “beige”) and someone else corrects them with “Oh do you mean bei-JING”, truthfully neither are wrong. The correct pronunciation is whatever people understand and accept.
On the other hand, suggesting that there is a single correct/more authentic pronunciation (particularly in cases where it may not even conform to standard English phonemes) veers into prescriptivism and has problematic connotations.
Hm, but reacting negatively to someone pronouncing it, for lack of a better term, the original way IS presciptivism. This isn’t about someone who pronounces a Spanish word the Spanish way criticizing someone who pronounces it the English way, but the other way around.
I think it depends on intent and what one’s native language is. Basically, why would someone opt to pronounce a word a certain way if they know there’s differing standards.
No one can help accents, so if for example I was natively Spanish speaking and, while speaking English, I pronounced some Spanish-derived loanwords with the occasional rolled R, no one should be faulted for that.
But if I grew up speaking English natively, learned Spanish after the fact, and then I opt to use the Spanish pronunciation of Spanish-derived terms while speaking English, that comes across as pretentious. I used to pronounce these words one way, but then I gained knowledge, and now I self-correct because I (consciously or subconsciously) want to signal to others that I know more about a language than they do. That act of self-correcting would be an implicit declaration that there is a more correct way to pronounce these words that people who know the difference should use, and pushes back on the idea that the pronunciation of a loanword in the destination language can be equally valid.
To be honest, when I’m speaking German, I pronounce it as French as I can (foh-pah), but when I’m speaking English, I pronounce it like the English speakers do (foe-pah).
This video says it both ways I’ve heard. The white people around me pronounce it like the one with the union jack (heavy emphasis on the B), the Spanish speakers pronounce it more like the version with the American flag background (ironic). Most of the other pronunciation videos I could find seem to be made by AI voices and mangle the pronunciation in a myriad of ways. This other video has an actual person speaking well (I can’t speak to the rest of the content of the video).
What’s pretentious about it is that you’re talking in English, so you should use the English place name. The purpose of communication is to be understood by the other person. If you use a non-standard pronunciation, even if it’s the name as the locals there pronounce it.
So, to communicate effectively to another English speaker in English you shouldn’t be saying “Munchen” you should be saying Munich. You should be saying Prague, not Praha. Vienna, not Wien.
Choosing to say the name of a place “like the natives do” might be seen as pretentious because instead of trying to communicate effectively, you’re attempting to seem smart or cultured.
For me is a matter of respect, I try to pronounce place names just as I try to pronounce names. If I say them wrong I feel like I’m disrespecting the locals.
If that makes me pretentious I’ll be a petty removed and mispronounce the names of the ones calling me so. Bastards.
So, you have more respect for the people who live in a city, who are not part of the conversation, than you do for your conversational partner? That’s weird, dude.
Thank you for detailed responce. For some people it might be just a habit, I’m sure most people aren’t against using equivalent names if they exist. Just never occured to me that it would be pretentious, for example until you mentioned that Praha is Prague in English it didn’t click with me.
probably that he’s not from there. absent other information, his lisp would then indicate that he is imitating the accent in order to sound more cultured. like someone from the us midwest saying “have you been to mehico?”
And then there’s the layer on the other side, because the majority of Spanish speakers worldwide pronounce it with an “S” sound.
So, the majority of Spanish speakers in the Americas (which by far outnumber the number of Spanish speakers in Spain) use an “S” sound. The dominant form of Spanish in Spain uses the “th”, but the local dialect goes back to an “S” sound.
So, what rule are you going to go by? How the locals say it? The most locally of locals will use an “S” sound. How the majority of Spanish speakers say it? That’s again an “S” sound. How the majority of the people in the country who legal sovereignty over that region say it? Then I guess you’d go with the “TH” sound.
The most logical rule, to me, is to pronounce it however the person you’re speaking to will most easily understand it. In English to another English speaker, that almost certainly isn’t going to be the “th” pronunciation.
Different vowels, though. Like I said below, I wonder what the “pretentious” read would be with an accurate Catalan pronuntiation. Gonna guess it’d pass better, because all anglophones tend to know about that whole situation is “Castillian Spanish lisp hur hur”.
Maybe that’s why this strip and the whole “he said it with a lisp to sound cultured” joke rub me the wrong way. It always seems like latching on to the pretentiousness to get away with an ignorant or xenophobic joke.
The first a is a schwa and the o isn’t rounded.
Honestly, it looks quite similar to English, to the point where there might be some English dialect that sounds exactly like that.
That’s fine, I intend to aggressively say “Los An-heles” and “Ari-tho-nah” from now on, see how the anglophones deal with using a normal accent to say their names.
I mean, I get it, it sounds weird when people say “Los Anyeles” or “London” when speaking Spanish, too. But… you know, if the spelling is the same I don’t see the problem using the way it’s actually meant to be said.
I’ve gotten enough weird looks for ordering a “BuRRi-toh” in anglo speaking countries to be annoyed by this. And don’t get me started with how Americans have chosen to pronounce “Los Gatos”. If you’re going to steal our word you at least could give us the deference of not mocking us for saying it correctly.
Now, if the anglophone in question is out there calling it “Barna” you know they’re a poser.
This drove the point home for me. If a Spanish-speaker says “London”, it just sounds completely wrong. For those wondering, it’s pronounced “Londres” in Spanish.
saying “barcelona” with a faked spanish accent is the same as saying “berlin” with a faked german one. it’s weird, and it makes you took pretentious. bar th elona and ibi th a are just common versions because a lot of people know about them.
now, some people can’t help it. they might be german, for example. that’s different, and the comic is saying we shouldn’t judge for that, and we shouldn’t assume someone is trying to sound clever just because they pronounce a word differently.
I really disagree honestly. I think at least attempting yo match local pronunciation, at least when there’s no translated name available for the language you’re speaking, is just respectful to the people there. I have no issues with someone saying berlin the english way, but I’ll always appreciate the attempt to pronounce it german. Ane this goes moreso for places where the typical english pronunciation is just completely off (such as english speakers silencing trailing 'e’s and such).
Slightly, anyway. It’s less annoying than hearing Colbert do it (he really likes this one, and generally slightly xenophobic country stereotype jokes, for some reason), but it always rubs me the wrong way a little bit, for the reasons I mentioned elsewhere.
I mean, I’m not mad or anything, I still get to have a sense of humor. For as much as “guy speaks funny” is one of those, anyway.
It’s the opposite (as far as I could find). Pronouncing “c” similar to “th” is only done in Spanish in Spain. In Catalan (as well as Latin/South American Spanish) all pronounce it like “s”.
Nevermind, I just can’t read. You wrote Castilian, not Catalan.
Castilian and Catalan are two different things, I think the previous poster may have just misinterpreted the top level post which was not wrong about C being pronounced as the English TH.
But that’s how c is pronounced in castillian, no? What’s pretentious about it?
Funny video about pronouncing individual words in an accent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKGoVefhtMQ
Pronouncing things as they would be in the language they’re actually in is sometimes a faux pas in American culture, I’ve learned
Yeah, it’s weird. Sometimes people think it’s pretentious and sometimes people think you’re an idiot, whether you do it correctly or not. Like all rules with the English language, it’s a case-by-case issue. If anyone tells you a rule to remember it, it’s likely wrong more often than it’s correct.
Only if you are not a native speaker of that language, or always? Am I supposed to imitate how Americans botch the names of German car manufacturers like Porsche or Volkswagen if I ever go on vacation there?
In my experience, you’re exempt if it’s from your native language. Unless they can’t tell your native language from your accent (people can tell I’m not a native speaker of English, but they can’t tell what my native language is). British are similar.
Let’s be fair: doing things the correct way, or just being slightly educated, is often a faux pas in this wasteland pretending to be a civilization.
Let’s not put them on the pedal stool
I mean, I get it to an extent. I’m much more in favor of linguistic descriptivism rather than prescriptivism, so I acknowledge that terms and pronunciations can develop over time and are not wrong.
If someone pronounces “Beijing” in English with a softened J/G sound (like “beige”) and someone else corrects them with “Oh do you mean bei-JING”, truthfully neither are wrong. The correct pronunciation is whatever people understand and accept.
On the other hand, suggesting that there is a single correct/more authentic pronunciation (particularly in cases where it may not even conform to standard English phonemes) veers into prescriptivism and has problematic connotations.
Hm, but reacting negatively to someone pronouncing it, for lack of a better term, the original way IS presciptivism. This isn’t about someone who pronounces a Spanish word the Spanish way criticizing someone who pronounces it the English way, but the other way around.
I think it depends on intent and what one’s native language is. Basically, why would someone opt to pronounce a word a certain way if they know there’s differing standards.
No one can help accents, so if for example I was natively Spanish speaking and, while speaking English, I pronounced some Spanish-derived loanwords with the occasional rolled R, no one should be faulted for that.
But if I grew up speaking English natively, learned Spanish after the fact, and then I opt to use the Spanish pronunciation of Spanish-derived terms while speaking English, that comes across as pretentious. I used to pronounce these words one way, but then I gained knowledge, and now I self-correct because I (consciously or subconsciously) want to signal to others that I know more about a language than they do. That act of self-correcting would be an implicit declaration that there is a more correct way to pronounce these words that people who know the difference should use, and pushes back on the idea that the pronunciation of a loanword in the destination language can be equally valid.
But if you pronounce faux pas wrong, it’s also faux pas
To be honest, when I’m speaking German, I pronounce it as French as I can (foh-pah), but when I’m speaking English, I pronounce it like the English speakers do (foe-pah).
“Foh” and “foe” both read as the same pronunciation to me. What’s the difference?
https://i.imgur.com/ErOd97q.jpeg
I’m curious, what is it?
[ faux pas ]
Pronounce both x(ks) and s. That’s how I believed it to be pronounced until 30s lmao
I assume most people without actual knowledge of the pronunciation (ie. has only seen it on text) would pronounce it
Fowks pass!
I’ve been mocked and had some people outright pretend they don’t understand what I’m saying when I pronounce guanábana correctly.
How do the people around you pronounce it? I don’t think I’d understand it if it were pronounced differently
This video says it both ways I’ve heard. The white people around me pronounce it like the one with the union jack (heavy emphasis on the B), the Spanish speakers pronounce it more like the version with the American flag background (ironic). Most of the other pronunciation videos I could find seem to be made by AI voices and mangle the pronunciation in a myriad of ways. This other video has an actual person speaking well (I can’t speak to the rest of the content of the video).
What’s pretentious about it is that you’re talking in English, so you should use the English place name. The purpose of communication is to be understood by the other person. If you use a non-standard pronunciation, even if it’s the name as the locals there pronounce it.
So, to communicate effectively to another English speaker in English you shouldn’t be saying “Munchen” you should be saying Munich. You should be saying Prague, not Praha. Vienna, not Wien.
Choosing to say the name of a place “like the natives do” might be seen as pretentious because instead of trying to communicate effectively, you’re attempting to seem smart or cultured.
For me is a matter of respect, I try to pronounce place names just as I try to pronounce names. If I say them wrong I feel like I’m disrespecting the locals.
If that makes me pretentious I’ll be a petty removed and mispronounce the names of the ones calling me so. Bastards.
So, you have more respect for the people who live in a city, who are not part of the conversation, than you do for your conversational partner? That’s weird, dude.
Thank you for detailed responce. For some people it might be just a habit, I’m sure most people aren’t against using equivalent names if they exist. Just never occured to me that it would be pretentious, for example until you mentioned that Praha is Prague in English it didn’t click with me.
probably that he’s not from there. absent other information, his lisp would then indicate that he is imitating the accent in order to sound more cultured. like someone from the us midwest saying “have you been to mehico?”
Barcelona kinda has an extra layer of this too, because Catalan does pronounce “Barcelona” with an S sound rather than an unvoiced TH
Someone should make a silly comic about it
And then there’s the layer on the other side, because the majority of Spanish speakers worldwide pronounce it with an “S” sound.
So, the majority of Spanish speakers in the Americas (which by far outnumber the number of Spanish speakers in Spain) use an “S” sound. The dominant form of Spanish in Spain uses the “th”, but the local dialect goes back to an “S” sound.
So, what rule are you going to go by? How the locals say it? The most locally of locals will use an “S” sound. How the majority of Spanish speakers say it? That’s again an “S” sound. How the majority of the people in the country who legal sovereignty over that region say it? Then I guess you’d go with the “TH” sound.
The most logical rule, to me, is to pronounce it however the person you’re speaking to will most easily understand it. In English to another English speaker, that almost certainly isn’t going to be the “th” pronunciation.
Different vowels, though. Like I said below, I wonder what the “pretentious” read would be with an accurate Catalan pronuntiation. Gonna guess it’d pass better, because all anglophones tend to know about that whole situation is “Castillian Spanish lisp hur hur”.
Maybe that’s why this strip and the whole “he said it with a lisp to sound cultured” joke rub me the wrong way. It always seems like latching on to the pretentiousness to get away with an ignorant or xenophobic joke.
The Wikipedia entry has a pronunciation guide:
English: [bɑːrsəˈloʊnə]
Catalan: [bəɾsəˈlonə]
The first a is a schwa and the o isn’t rounded. Honestly, it looks quite similar to English, to the point where there might be some English dialect that sounds exactly like that.
Having heard native speakers say it many times, this post is mostly showing the limitations of IPA because… yeah, no, not really.
That’s fine, I intend to aggressively say “Los An-heles” and “Ari-tho-nah” from now on, see how the anglophones deal with using a normal accent to say their names.
I mean, I get it, it sounds weird when people say “Los Anyeles” or “London” when speaking Spanish, too. But… you know, if the spelling is the same I don’t see the problem using the way it’s actually meant to be said.
I’ve gotten enough weird looks for ordering a “BuRRi-toh” in anglo speaking countries to be annoyed by this. And don’t get me started with how Americans have chosen to pronounce “Los Gatos”. If you’re going to steal our word you at least could give us the deference of not mocking us for saying it correctly.
Now, if the anglophone in question is out there calling it “Barna” you know they’re a poser.
That makes me feel upset.
This drove the point home for me. If a Spanish-speaker says “London”, it just sounds completely wrong. For those wondering, it’s pronounced “Londres” in Spanish.
When my dad is trying to joke about it he’ll call it “Londón”, and I’m weirdly fine with that.
i feel like the wider point got missed there.
saying “barcelona” with a faked spanish accent is the same as saying “berlin” with a faked german one. it’s weird, and it makes you took pretentious. bar th elona and ibi th a are just common versions because a lot of people know about them.
now, some people can’t help it. they might be german, for example. that’s different, and the comic is saying we shouldn’t judge for that, and we shouldn’t assume someone is trying to sound clever just because they pronounce a word differently.
I really disagree honestly. I think at least attempting yo match local pronunciation, at least when there’s no translated name available for the language you’re speaking, is just respectful to the people there. I have no issues with someone saying berlin the english way, but I’ll always appreciate the attempt to pronounce it german. Ane this goes moreso for places where the typical english pronunciation is just completely off (such as english speakers silencing trailing 'e’s and such).
if you are attempting to communicate with locals, sure. if not, you just make yourself harder to understand.
Bey-a lean
Yeah, no, I get the joke.
I’m just annoyed by the joke.
Slightly, anyway. It’s less annoying than hearing Colbert do it (he really likes this one, and generally slightly xenophobic country stereotype jokes, for some reason), but it always rubs me the wrong way a little bit, for the reasons I mentioned elsewhere.
I mean, I’m not mad or anything, I still get to have a sense of humor. For as much as “guy speaks funny” is one of those, anyway.
yeh. “accent humor” is almost always just thinly veiled just racism or ableism. here at least it’s got a bit of a spin on it. not a lot, but some.
Fair but unkind. People talk weird most of the time. 😺
yes, that is indeed the joke of the comic.
It’s the opposite (as far as I could find). Pronouncing “c” similar to “th” is only done in Spanish in Spain. In Catalan (as well as Latin/South American Spanish) all pronounce it like “s”.Nevermind, I just can’t read. You wrote Castilian, not Catalan.
Castilian Spanish is the dominant dialect of Spanish in Spain.
Edit: A helpful map:
And that’s the point, I believe. Catalan is not a dialect of Spanish.
Castilian and Catalan are two different things, I think the previous poster may have just misinterpreted the top level post which was not wrong about C being pronounced as the English TH.
deleted by creator
There is no mention of catalan in my post because it wasn’t about catalan. 🙃
Well that’s awkward. My brain seems to have “autocorrected” Castilian to Catalan. I literally didn’t notice until I reread it just now. My bad.
The english Th sounds different from the spanish C. Source: spaniard.
It’s similar though.