Hello!

I have signed the contract, finally, so I can now say that I’m going to be translating an entire novel over the next two months (or as much as I can), it’s due by the end of the year, and it will tentatively be out within a year after that. I don’t think I can say publicly what it is yet, but it’s a really cool, very queer book with a very hopeful vibe, and I can’t wait for my Anglophone friends to be able to read it.

On a personal note, I have a new tradition to do something nice for my birthday after having a series of shitty birthdays (in 2020 I got a lockdown for my birthday!). Last year I went to Tromsø with a writer friend to see the auroras, and this year I took myself to see the ruins in Herculaneum and Pompeii for my birthday, which is something I’ve wanted to do most of my life, and I’ve finally done it. In a different timeline, you see, I became an archaeologist.

Loan words and how to pronounce them

In the last few months, I’ve seen a bunch of Instagram reels and various internet posts about people mispronouncing foreign words or telling people how to say their names. (It’s an Instagram reel, so I hope everyone can see it.) Since that’s directly in my wheelhouse, I thought I’d write about it.

First off, people’s names are a different matter. Make the effort to pronounce them as accurately as you can. Depending on the set of phonemes you’ve been exposed to, you may or may not be able to wrap your tongue around the sounds, and if you don’t speak a tonal language, the tones will add further difficulty. But at least try. Most people will be happy that you’re making the effort.

At the same time, don’t be weird when you’re asking people how to say their names. If you try to sound it out, you can preface with something like “Please correct me if I get it wrong.” Or if you can’t figure out how to sound it out, ask them politely how to say their name.

Why does it happen?

Different languages have a different set of sounds, and if the borrowed word contains a sound that doesn’t exist in the borrowing language, it will be changed. Now the science part.

Phonetic inventories

The sounds of language are called phones. There are several dozen consonants and vowels that have been documented from languages around the world, and they are described on the IPA chart. (This interactive IPA chart got me through the mandatory phonetics class in grad school.) No language uses all of the existing phones, and some languages use more phones than others. This subset of phones used in a language is what I refer to as the phonetic inventory and is also called speech sounds.

A phonetic repertoire is the set of phones an individual can produce and perceive as distinct. There may be sounds in an individual’s repertoire that aren’t part of their speech sounds. For example, clicks are speech sounds in the Khoisan languages in southern Africa (and some others). They are not speech sounds in English, but we use them in other contexts, like tut-tutting people (dental click) or making the horse-calling sound (lateral click). In fact, the Wikipedia entry on clicks uses these as examples.

Languages and phonetic inventories

When a word is borrowed from one language into another, the borrowed word is adapted to fit the borrowing language’s phonetic inventory. The easiest set of borrowed words in English to discuss are food names, so I’ll start out there.

Who doesn’t love a good taco? I wish I could find good tacos more easily here in Berlin. But English speakers pronounce /taco/ differently than Spanish speakers do. In English, the voiceless plosives (p, t, and k) are aspirated, which means there’s a little puff of air that comes along with the consonant sound. Try it out: Hold your palm in front of your mouth and say “taco.” You should feel a little air hit your hand when you say the /t/ and the /k/. You can try it with other words, like pit, cap, top, and so on. English “voiced” plosives are actually voiceless plosives without the aspiration. (Listen to them on the interactive IPA chart! The recordings of /p, t, k/ sound like /b, d, g/.)

Which leads nicely into the fact that Spanish does not aspirate the voiceless plosives, so to an English speaker, it might sound like dah-go instead of tah-ko. (If you’re like me, you just spent 30 seconds saying “taco” and trying not to aspirate the /t/ and /k/. It’s difficult!)

There are also differences in the vowels; Spanish /a, o/ are different from US English /a, o/. This issue is already too long for me to get into the details on vowels, so I’ll stick to consonants.

Syllable structure is also a factor

A syllable is composed of three parts: the onset, the nucleus, and the coda. The onset is, as it says on the tin, the beginning of the syllable. The nucleus is the core of the syllable, and it is always a vowel or a vowel-like sound (r, l, n, m). The nucleus is also the only required portion of a syllable. The coda is the end of the syllable. Let’s look at a few simple examples from English.

A is a syllable with only a nucleus. At is a syllable with a nucleus and a coda. Hat is a syllable with an onset, a nucleus, and a coda. Ha is a syllable with an onset and a nucleus.

Different languages have different rules about what a syllable can look like. English is pretty flexible, as demonstrated above, but Japanese cannot have anything in the coda. A Japanese syllable can be either onset-nucleus (na) or nucleus (a). German is also less flexible than English: Every syllable requires an onset. Even words that start with vowels have an onset: a glottal stop. (This is one theory of why all vowels alliterate with each other in medieval alliterative verse! But that’s a different newsletter.)

Different languages also have different rules about what can go in each part of a syllable. English doesn’t allow the /ng/ sound like in thing to begin a syllable, but it’s fine in the coda; Vietnamese does allow it, as in the name Nguyen (see above!). This is part of the reason we say Spanish, but in Spanish it’s Español: You can’t start a syllable with /sp/ in Spanish, so there’s a vowel in front of it. (Please note this isn’t the etymology; that’s a different matter.) When words are borrowed into Japanese, they’re adapted to fit the phonetic repertoire and the coda-less syllable structure. Take, for example, home run, which is borrowed in as ho-mu ra-n (ホームラン). (Remember that /n/ is a vowel-like sound and can constitute a nucleus.) Putting anything after the nucleus is not allowed, so /home/ has to be split into /ho mu/.

Then you get into what consonants are allowed to form clusters, if any at all (English and German: many; Japanese: none), and where the clusters are allowed to be in a word, and you’ve introduced even more complexity. One example I use in my book is Mozart. In German, the /ts/ sound is allowed to begin syllables, so the name is split as Mo-zart (mo-tsart). In English, however, /ts/ is only allowed in the coda, so it’s split into Moz-art (motes-art) (though a lot of people probably just say /mows-art/ because that’s what /z/ means in English spelling).

Is adapting the pronunciation to the borrowing language “mispronunciation”? Is “pronouncing it right” better?

No, and no. If you are an Anglophone talking to Anglophones about your recent trip to Paree and how many cwassang you ate, you will sound pretentious. If you tell an Anglophone you’re going to [dʁesdn] or [laɪptsɪç], they won’t know you’re talking about Dresden [dɻɛzdɨn] and Leipzig [laipzig]. If you talk about your teen ahngst instead of ængst, pronounce doppelganger or poltergeist like it’s German, and so on, it’s the same thing. What about Mozart, then? Well, it’s his name, and one can get taught it in school. See also Beethoven.

The purpose of language is to communicate, and if you can’t make yourself understood, you are not communicating. (And if you’re an Anglophone who insists on talking about cwassang, you’re communicating something about your personality in addition to the food item.)

That said. There is a long history of colonization and imperialism and “renaming” places to  make them easier for the colonizers to say. This is bad. It’s a good thing that India, for example, has asserted that the cities are Mumbai and Chennai and so on. Is your average non-Indian person pronouncing them accurately? Probably not, but mum-bye is probably closer than Bombay ever was. 

To give a personal example, I have to completely mispronounce my own name in Germany to avoid spelling it out every time. It makes my life a little easier. It annoys me, but it saves effort. I always have to spell my first name, even in English, because it’s not spelled the usual way, and the German version ends in Y. So I just change the first vowel sound and it’s fine.

Covington, however, presents a much larger problem. German doesn’t allow accented schwa (IPA symbol wedge [ʌ]), and words like cup become more like cop. German also doesn’t reduce Os in unaccented syllables, so the last syllable is also a problem. So rather than CUH-ving-tuhn, I’m “COH-ving-tohn, mit C” (because K would be the more usual initial consonant).

I’ll end with a link to a tumblr post (yes, it still exists; yes, I stole my shoelaces from the president; no, you do not get to know who I am at the devil’s sacrament) and a different branch from the same post because that’s how tumblr works. This one contains an old interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Comments are open on the webpage, so feel free to discuss!

Until next time!