Sean Connery: I don’t get it?
This is a sign on the road to Budapesht near the border between Ukraine and Hungary. There’s the weird insistence in Ukraine to do a one-to-one transliteration of Cyrillic to Latin without much thought, so Ш just becomes SH… Google Maps link: https://maps.app.goo.gl/YyzH7xx7gWNJCcqA6
In polish we say and write Budapeszt.
In polish you do almost anythig for those crazy Scrabble scores.
Polish Scrabble has just 1 point for
Z. Meanwhile, the Czech spelling Budapešť uses the 7-pointŤ!
First I didn’t know what was wrong, only saw the cyrillic version. Then I noticed they transcribed it back to Latin in a different way to the original - that’s mindblowing! I also kinda read it as bud ape shit.
The real test is Montreal.
Louisville, KY is neither of the pronunciations you’re thinking.
Luu-uh-vuul!
Also occasionally sounded like Lull-vull.
Leur’vl
“LUH-vull.”
As a Craig Ferguson enthusiast, I know for a fact It’s pronounced “Wrvrl”
As an Ohioan I got really confused until I realized louville wasn’t one of the ways I was supposed to be thinking…
Meh better than Versailles Kentucky (pronounced like it’s an English word)
Tiohtiá:ke? :p
Your mean joe-jah-geh ?
As long as anglophone Canadians say Montree-all, I’ll take that as the correct pronounciation lol
and Toronto.
All I know about Toronto is that its residents are called Torontulas. That by itself makes me want to move there.
I say Paris but here it sounds like Paris.
Tomato tomato
Where does Hawai’i vs Hawaii fall on the scale?
I believe the whiter you are, the more stank you’re supposed to put on the “'i.”
Germans when pronouncing the name of the Seine river:
„𝑍𝔢𝑦𝔫𝔢!“
What?
“Seine” is also a German word meaning the pronoun “his” or “its”, indicating a [m/n]'s ownership/relation to [f/pl]. (Brackets indicate grammatical gender of the subject/object that make seiner inflect into seine.)
Examples:
- Seine Eltern kommen aus Polen. His parents come from Poland.
- Das Schaf lasste seine Wolle geschnitten werden. The sheep let its wool get cut.
It’s possible to take this too far, like mispronouncing “Beijing” as “bei-zhing” because it sounds more foreign and gives the impression of being educated and well-traveled.
TIL it’s not bei zhing
This will sound weird, but if I say it “in English” it’s Bei-zhing, and if I say it in Chinese it’s Běi-jīng, and that J isn’t really a phoneme we have in English anyway. So nobody’s really pronouncing it right.
A name from a tonal language will never sound entirely right in English, though I got used to pronouncing “-jing” with the “j” sound from “jiffy”. For a while, I thought the “zh” sound was correct, partly because other people said it that way, and partly because it sounded plausibly exotic, until I discovered that there was actually a phenomenon for this mistake called hyperforeignism.
I’m familiar with the phenomenon, what I’m saying is “j” in pinyin represents a phoneme that we don’t actually use in English. Ironically, the “zh” sound in pinyin is probably a closer approximation to the “j” sound in “jiffy”. The hyperforeignism of Beijing seems to be from misapplying the reading rules for French, not Mandarin, so it’s an interesting case, but both pronunciations are only approximations.
Kinda opposite where I live because we speak a dialect (of German) where s gets turned into sh
Nett hier
Oida
We’re more like. Oulta
Saying Ahmsterdahm instead of emsterdem
ermagerd, Emsterdem!
That’s just common sense. Who would say emsterdem?
Americans
Iyeemsturrdyem
The difference is saying the am and dam like the american english version of those words, versus saying both As like the beginning of Amish.
Funny thing is that both ways aren’t quite right, as both As should be short. The second way is best though
My German father, who lived and worked in Budapest for a long time, pronounced it wrong. I rarely have cause to use the name but when I do, I try to do it justice.
I wouldn’t say it’s wrong if he pronounced it the German way in German speech. I mean I also don’t go around saying My grandma lives is Moskwa and I met my husband in Sankt Peterburg just to keep the native pronunciation. If he talks Hungarian and pronounces it wrong within a Hungarian sentence though…
In German in recent decades it’s fashionable/expected to pronounce central European cities the way the inhabitants do. Probably due to the wars and the ethnic transformations…
Sure? I have never heard anyone say Praha or Warszova or anything
Me neither. If someone here in Germany started saying Lisboa or Barcelona I would be thrown off and, very honestly, also find it a tiny bit pretentious.
Edit: throwing in the question how to pronounce towns that are on a border and have both kinds of pronunciations used by inhabitants
Bratislava instead of Pressburg, Ljubljana instead of Laibach, Zagreb instead of Agram.
Lwiw/Lemberg or Brno/Brünn is probably both used.
Prag and Warschau as well as Krakau are firmly used instead of the local ones.
Ok, true. It’s a slow process but the trend is there
I just say Budapesht because I liked Castlevania.
The one that always makes me laugh is any time someone has Pablo Escobar without a Paisa accent. In the accent Pablo should have, the city he is from (Medellin) is pronounced Med-uh-jean, not Med-uh-yeen.
There are other words and phrases that you can tell when the actor isn’t colombian paisa but that’s the biggest.
Now do Nijmwegen
Nijmegen? Is it particularly exceptional, or just normal Dutch? /'nɛɪ.meː.ɣə(n)/, in a GenAm accent I would imagine something like NYE-may-ghen or NAY-may-ghen… but being American, it’s not something I’ve ever actually heard one of my compatriots say aloud.
I’m not even sure how I would pronounce Nijmegen if I didn’t speak Dutch lol
Now I’m having flashbacks to how horribly every city was pronounced in that Dracula anime lol
Cartoon. That was a cartoon.
Sorry, my mistake. Either way the pronunciation was rough lol.
Still better than peaky blinders getting actors to speak broken Romanian instead of the actual Romani language in the first season. At least they fixed it later on.
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