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Radioclare’s TAC log 2014 (*jäŋe/*ledús) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 385 of 522 24 October 2014 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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The problem that I've found with foreign names in BCMS/SC is that none of the conventions work very well and basically any lofty idea from Croatian linguists to be true to the source language falls apart when dealing with languages outside the narrow world of Romance and Germanic. The non-Croatian technique of trying to express the name using the native graphemes of BCMS/SC isn't much better since those symbols are constrained by their own prescriptions. Things worsen when the phonemic inventory of the source language on diverges "too much" from BCMS/SC. I doubt that the average Croat seeing the name "Owens" would pronounce it properly unless he/she already knows English well.
I'd like to see one of them to try to pronounce even close to properly a place name such as Jyväskylä (almost certainly pronounced Jiveskile as suggested by the Serbian spelling), Hódmezővásárhely (Croats cheat and truncate it to Vaš(a)relj while Serbs come quite close to the sound of the Hungarian original with Hodmezevašarhelj in addition to using “Vašarelj” as an alternative) or God forbid 黑龍江省 (Croats don't even bother with "staying true" to the native spelling and use Pinyin instead. It's likely though that they pronounce it just like the Serbs do who spell it Hejlungđang which is a decent approximation of the native Mandarin form (minus the tones) coming from a speaker of BCMS/SC who's likely unfamiliar with Pinyin). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 386 of 522 24 October 2014 at 11:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ouch about lovely Jyväskylä. I suggest Juvaskulja as the closest option.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 387 of 522 25 October 2014 at 12:07am | IP Logged | ||
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The biggest problem for my ears is that I don't know of any Slavonic phonemic inventory that contains the sound represented by Finnish y. BCMS/SC i sounds much more like the Finnish i than y.
Jiveskile being (mis)read in Finnish does sound fugly compared to Jyväskylä. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 388 of 522 25 October 2014 at 12:07am | IP Logged | ||
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I guess this is something that could be criticised in any language really. Some of the
ways English people try to pronounce foreign names is dreadful. I remember getting really annoyed during the World Cup because there was a player called 'Wijnaldum' and the BBC kept calling him 'Why-naldum'. Also I once dealt with a German client called 'Sonja' and my manager kept pronouncing her name (to her face!) with an English 'j' sound no matter how many times I told him it should be 'Son-ya'. The Owens/Ovens thing made me laugh though because if I ever get around to arranging my wedding (engaged for over 5 years!) my new surname would be Owen. I have already had to come to terms with being called 'Klara' when I'm in the Balkans because people really struggle to hear and understand the vowel sound in 'Clare'. Now I have realised I would be condemned to a future of introducing myself as 'Klara Oven' :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 389 of 522 25 October 2014 at 12:27am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, in Wijnaldum only the w is wrong afaiu.
English commentators actually do quite a decent job with the consonants and most vowels. I hate the diphthongization but at Real Madrid Luka Modrić had to become nearly as important as Ronaldo before Spaniards (mostly) learned that his name is not pronounced Modrick. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 390 of 522 25 October 2014 at 10:42am | IP Logged | ||
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In Wijnaldum you can pronounce an English "w" actually - that's the Surinamese accent,
and the player is of Surinamese descent. A regular Dutch "w" is like a cross between a v and a w. The ij isn't quite "aj", but it's close enough for foreign purposes. The only thing is that you should pronounce the "a" as an a and not leaning towards "è". 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 391 of 522 25 October 2014 at 11:21am | IP Logged | ||
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My daddy's name is Ronaldo. If I say the W in Wijnaldum as a v, ir sounds as if I'm saying "Véi Naldo" which
is a witty way to call one's parents ("oldie Xxxxxx", ir just "meu véi/velho, minha véia/velha). During the World Cup I told my brother that and we made fun of it :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 392 of 522 27 October 2014 at 10:14am | IP Logged | ||
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The Esperanto weekend in London seemed to go well :) The discussion group was actually oversubscribed and we only just about managed to fit everyone who had signed up into the room. I felt like I made a mess of speaking Esperanto at times: once in the pub I said 'dobro' when I meant 'bone', another time my boyfriend asked me what I wanted to drink and I said 'bijelo vino', and at one point I managed to double-negate a sentence, which was quite impressive as I normally struggle to get this correct in Croatian anyway!
On the train to London I finished reading 'The Hammer of Eden'. The only other book I'd brought with me was 'Što je muškarac bez brkova' which, as I think I said last week, is the first actual Croatian book (as opposed to translation to Croatian) that I've tried to read. I was a bit nervous about starting it, because I think when I read an English book in a foreign language, people are behaving like English people, making English cultural references and saying the sort of things an English person would say - albeit in a different language - which sometimes makes it a lot easier to follow the plot. Generally - for that reason - I don't like reading translations; I have always gone out of my way to avoid translations from English into German, for example, and although I've read a couple from the library, I have never purchased one. With Croatian I feel like I started reading 'too early' to cope with original Croatian literature, partly because the language is more likely to be difficult/idiomatic, and partly because my knowledge of Croatian culture is still quite limited. So I have exclusively read translations of English and American novels. You have to start sometime though and doing so pretty much confirmed my worst fears. It was soooooooo difficult! The story is set in a small village in Dalmatia and although the narration is written in standard language, the characters all speak in a dialect. This is an example of a passage where one of the characters is telling a story about a man who was kidnapped by the mafia.
The strange things I noted were... 1) Ikavian spellings, eg. 'dici' 2) Endings that would normally be -m changing to -n, eg. 'sa sobon', 'van', 'nan' 3) The letter 'h' is sometimes dropped 'oćes' 4) Completely different words, such as 'ćaća' (I think I might have read before that this is a Dalmatian word for 'tata'). Let's just say I found it quite heavy-going. I think it was supposed to be humorous book, but most of the humour was way above my head. Unfortunately it was the only book I'd brought with me to London, so I spent several hours reading it on Sunday. So many hours, that I actually got to the end of it on the train to work this morning. So I can now officially say I have read my first Croatian novel, but I think I really need to go back and work on my vocabulary before I read any more. I mentioned before that there is a film of the book and I found a copy online last night to watch. The storyline of the film differs quite a bit from the book, but I actually found I could understand the film a bit better than the book, which is a first! I found a website where I can get English subtitles for it so I might try to download it and watch it again with those. I would rather watch it with Croatian subtitles, but couldn't find those anywhere. With subtitles it seems to be a choice between watching an American film with Croatian subtitles or a Croatian film with American subtitles. While we were in London we went to Foyles again which was fun :) Their selection of German literature is really good and I spotted a few things I want to add to my Christmas list. I used to read in German a lot and I'd like to get back to doing that. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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