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I hate westernized and Anglo pronunciations of Slavic/Eastern European names (rant) (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by Kirbywithwhip1987@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml

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While Anglos and Westerners usually at least try to pronounce, say, Japanese names right, they don't even bother with Slavic/Eastern European ones, especially the ones with Cyrillic letters in them, which means that they end up writing the names ending with 'ić', as 'ich', and pronounce it with K. For example, if the last name is 'Jovanović', they'll write it 'Jovanovich' and pronounce it 'Jovanovik'.

There are names such as Ivan, Bela or Vera, which get pronounced as Ajvan, Beyla or Veyra instead of properly and of course Stalin being pronounced as Stalin instead of Staljin.

Then DimitrescU, if I have to hear it pronounced without U one more time, I'm going to lose it... They keep saying it without U, which just makes it sound French almost as if it's Dimitresque, how hard is it to pronounce it with U?

Then the last name Ćertić, they write it as Certic or Sertic, which is completely wrong.

And the one I saw most recently, Miloch or Milosh instead of Miloš, it's one of the most common names in Serbia and I see it frequently written like that for some goddamn reason.

So, why is it so hard for Westoids to at least try to pronounce and write Eastern European names correctly while being able do it accurately for Japanese ones which are miles harder?

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[–] sevenapples@lemmygrad.ml 17 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

After some googling, I found this:

ć: A soft ty sound as in "Katya" or "feature"; occurs nearly exclusively in the combination ić at the end of family names. F Radić, Pavelić, Ranković, Milošević.

How do you expect people to know how to pronounce this without having studied the language before hand? It's a pretty stupid thing to be angry about. People are raised with native language(s) and they can't pronounce sounds or combinations of sounds not found in them without some training.

Japanese is easier to pronounce for English speakers, because it consists of simple syllables that map almost 1:1 with English ones. And people still mess up pronunciations, because of course they would, that's how languages work, unfortunately.

It also helps that some Japanese words appear in English as their phonetic pronunciation and not their literal transliteration. E.g. tofu is actually written 'toufu' in hiragana, with 'ou' being a long 'o' sound.

[–] Kirbywithwhip1987@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I can excuse not knowing the ones with Cyrillic in them, but not even trying to spell Ivan correctly is just ridiculous, that's like someone failing to say easiest 4 letter English name correctly.