6 ms·

Karel Čapek's name is a perfect example of the ridiculous habit of English-speakers to preserve foreign spelling. As you'll notice, ‘Čapek’ isn't written in Eng

by aasasd 7y ago

Karel Čapek's name is a perfect example of the ridiculous habit of English-speakers to preserve foreign spelling. As you'll notice, ‘Čapek’ isn't written in English, as ‘Č’ isn't a letter in English alphabet. Now, how many people in English-speaking countries know how to pronounce Czech letters? I've heard the name pronounced as ’Kahpek‘ or ‘Kaypek’ (e.g. right in the Librivox book linked in the thread). But it's actually [tʃapɛk], which would be better represented as ‘Chapek’. Apparently, since English-speakers have no idea how to pronounce English words that they didn't memorize beforehand, they also gave up on the idea of representing foreign words phonemically. But they still keep trying to read them that way if they see vaguely-Latin alphabet.

smcl 7y ago
Inconsistent localization of names and people struggling with pronunciation an unfamiliar glyph is not a problem unique to English native speakers. As a counterpoint foreign names - let's say Serena Williams - can get sort of inconsistently mangled in Czech too. Sometimes it'll be left alone as "Serena Williams", sometimes localized "Serena Williamsova". And the sometimes the "W" might be pronounced correctly or mistakenly pronounced as "V". Nobody's perfect, people make mistakes and if you are able to suggest a correction then most people are happy to learn the "correct" way.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >I'm not sure why you're so upset about this. Why did your parents didn't love you? See how redundant and non-sequitur this psychological question is? The "upset" question is equally irrelevant, whether they (the parent) are upset or not. Who said they're that much upset? Who said it upsets them more than other more important things? And even if they are, who said it's not important in their line of work (e.g. a translator or proof reader) and thus it's not justifiably a pet peeve of them? Parent didn't come in swearing, fuming, writing in all caps, etc -- they merely made a point.
  - smcl 7y ago
    Well I actually removed this part a very short time after posting (your reply was posted a handful of minutes after mine) because "upset" was the wrong word and sounded confrontational.
- aasasd 7y ago
  The problem is not unique, but it's uniquely persistent among the languages that I'm more-or-less familiar with. “Foreign names can get inconsistently mangled in Czech”—but to my knowledge Czech doesn't attempt to preserve foreign spelling, with e.g. letters Ñ or Ø. Czech adapts spelling to native pronunciation, which is my entire point. The ‘mistake’ here is that English keeps doing things backwards, and ‘Čapek’ is just one example here. I had to look up the usage of ‘W’ in Czech, and Wikipedia says: “The letters Q, W and X are used exclusively in foreign words, and the former two are replaced with Kv and V once the word becomes ‘naturalized’.” There's a close example in Russian: John ‘Dr.’ Watson's surname can be pronounced either ‘Vahtson’ or ‘Oo-ohtson’, but there's no intermediate sound like English ‘W’ in Russian (and no letter for it). So the name was spelled either of the two ways in print until it became settled on ‘Vahtson’ (‘Ватсон‘), which fits more naturally in the rest of the language. I expect a similar thing to happen to ‘Williams’ in Czech, though I'm surprised that they still have trouble with it at all, as the surname is old and widespread. However, current strong influence of English can mess things up—people, including myself, use English pronunciation even in the context of a native language.
  - smcl 7y ago
    That quote from wikipedia is interesting, because it says something you're interpreting as a being a consistent and simple rule but it's actually really vague and ill-defined - basically "Q, W and X are preserved in foreign words for a while until they're not". Another example, place names are often localized even if they don't contain a non-Czech letter: Venice=>Benátky, Paris=>Pařiž, London=>Londýn, and so on. And sometimes original place names are left in place when they do have a letter or letters that are not Czech (or not very Czech) - see Washington, New York, Sydney, Chicago. In fact the last one is particularly interesting, since "ch" is considered a single letter in Czech - and there's a pretty perfect mapping to the Czech alphabet that preserves the stress on the "a" in "Chicago": Šikágo. "Venice" is interesting too since "-ice" is a common place-name suffix. It behaves quite weirdly - sometimes it's singular (e.g. Lednice) and sometimes plural (e.g. Valtice). This becomes fun when you start to decline them so "I'm going (by vehicle) to Lednice" is "Jedu do Lednice" and to Valtice it's "Jedu do Valtic" (note: no "e" at the end). And the Venice/Benátky is apparently plural (http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?slovo=Ben%C3%A1tky http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?slovo=Ben%C3%A1tky). Why, I do not know. This is unrelated to the original discussion of course - just an interesting aside :-)
NotOscarWilde 7y ago
I wouldn't attribute this to English or English speakers at all. Imagine I am Czech (I am) and my last name is "Gödel" (it is quite similar, and Kurt Gödel was actually born in what is now Czechia). Such a name has at least three pronunciations which are relevant to me -- the way Czechs themselves pronounce it [Ge:dl], the way Germans do [ɡøːdl̩], and the way an English speaker would [ˈɡɜːrdəl]. Can you really say the Czech pronunciation is correct because I am Czech? Or the German one, because it is a last name of German origin? If so, are all the people in my native country mispronouncing my last name? :-)
- aasasd 7y ago
  You point it out right there yourself—each language picks a pronunciation and sticks with it. The German pronunciation doesn't come in when you're speaking Czech—for the simple reason that German pronunciations don't fit in Czech. Then, just write down the pronunciation in the system used for the language. A Ukrainian speaker would easily use two pronunciations and spellings for ‘Gödel’, since Ukrainian doesn't have a ‘yo’ letter but Russian does and Russian is widespread in Ukraine. But the person would use each pronunciation and spelling in the corresponding language, not in the other one. English doesn't do that—instead, it goes with the foreign spelling first, and then people pronounce the word whatever which way since they can't be bothered to look in an encyclopedia, or don't have one on them.
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    > You point it out right there yourself—each language picks a pronunciation and sticks with it. I feel this is rapidly turning into an impromptu session of "Falsehoods Programmers Believe" about names.
  - mc32 7y ago
    At least in the US when Ellis island was one of the main processing centers for immigrants we would anglicize names. But over time that changed and now we keep the spelling of the original/source language where possible. Of course things become complicated when we go from non-alphabetic languages to English and vice versa. Ex a last name “Guo” can have multiple transliterations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo and getting your English (or alphabetic) name rendered in ideographs or characters can be quite challenging. Often it’s easier to just adopt s local name.
i_am_proteus 7y ago
Especially for less-common words (such as "Čapek"), keeping the original spelling helps accurate cross-referencing and avoids ambiguity.
- aasasd 7y ago
  Referencing works fine in phonemic-orthography languages: unambiguous spellings are picked after a time by convention combined with fitness for the target language. See the example of ‘Watson’ here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799966 Curiously, your argument unabashedly presumes independence, if not primacy, of written language from oral. That wasn't ever the case at least in continental European languages—afaik spelling did matter in development of only a few words, contrary to some of modern folk etymological intuition. But this may change now that writing is much more prevalent in people's lives, with the English web getting ubiquitous, and English finally becoming completely logographic. If Mandarin doesn't wipe it all out sooner, anyway.
billfruit 7y ago
May be related, the pronunciation of the word quixotic, is odd in English compared to how Quixote is pronounced.
yread 7y ago
On the other hand Arabic names do get transcribed and as a consequence you can find like 15 different spellings of Al-Qaida. At least you can write it whichever way you want
tasogare 7y ago
The response to that is more education and more curiosity. Pronouncing <cz> as /tʃ/ is no more obvious than the reading of <č> except in the word Czech because of how common it is. But the advantage of using the original graphy is (1) it's more respectful to the original, (2) it can motivate people to search about it and learn stuffs because it is unusual. As an aside, I would love that more scientific papers use original names in their original scripts in the references section in addition to transcription, the way Knuth does it in tAoCP.
- kome 7y ago
  I agree, changing the orthography because pronunciation would be a disaster, especially when you don't have a consistent spelling system like in English.
- NotOscarWilde 7y ago
  > As an aside, I would love that more scientific papers use original names in their original scripts in the references section in addition to transcription, the way Knuth does it in tAoCP. Being a scientist, I believe most of my colleagues prefer to cite names exactly as the authors typeset them -- therefore, if there is a work by Karel Čapek, I would cite him as [Čapek, 1921] but I would not re-type a name like Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi back into the "original" spelling if the author himself writes it this way in a paper (e.g. [1]). And on top of that, sometimes (with say Japanese-Americans) you could re-type a name only to end up with an incorrect result! [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.05998.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.05998.pdf
  - tasogare 7y ago
    > to cite names exactly as the authors typeset them This is not incompatible with the transcription+native (if any) approach: these researchers will most likely have papers or website with their name in their native language, while descendants of immigrants don’t. Following your example, Kawarabayashi’s original name can be found in few seconds of googling. It is 河原林健一. (https://www.jst.go.jp/pr/info/info915/shiryo2.html https://www.jst.go.jp/pr/info/info915/shiryo2.html)
  - 7y ago
jcranmer 7y ago
The general rule of thumb is not to transliterate names written in Latin sript, but to transliterate those not written in Latin script (e.g., Cyrillic, Arabic). The annoying habits are people who preserve the basic acute, grave, diaeresis, and circumflex accents on vowels but not those in other contexts (such as the Turkish ǧ, which really changes how the word is pronounced)--The Economist is a.bad offender here.
david927 7y ago
I couldn't disagree more. Literally no one has a problem pronouncing yet another great Czech: Dvořák. And I defy you to turn that into a phonetical spelling that isn't a abomination upon church and Christ. We shouldn't be afraid of asking too much of people in regards to other cultures and languages. We humans are more intelligent than you're giving us credit for.
- pavel_lishin 7y ago
  > Literally no one has a problem pronouncing yet another great Czech: Dvořák I know exactly how I pronounce it, but it wasn't until your comment that I realized that I have no idea whether I'm doing so correctly or not.
- CrLf 7y ago
  Does that mean everyone pronounces it "Dvorjak"?
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    The better approximation to fricative z is usually rz. (Like Polish dipthong.) rj could be mispronounced as unrecognizable ar-jay combo, resulting in something resembling dwor-yak or dwor-jak instead of rd3. (Sorry about lack of proper IPA.)
- trickstra 7y ago
  You are most safe just pronouncing it as "Dvoraak".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Sharlin 7y ago
  Literally no one? I'm fairly sure a majority of native English speakers has never even heard of Dvořák, never mind know how to spell his name correctly.
- yread 7y ago
  Spanish call him Deborak or something like that... So not everyone
trickstra 7y ago
Well let's see what do Czech people do when they encounter English names. It seems like they learn about how to pronounce them in English. So why should the vice-versa be any different?
- kazinator 7y ago
  Czechs and Slovaks assimilate English (and other) words using native spelling when those words pass into comon use. For example: víkend (weekend), hemendex (ham and eggs), anketa (enquête: questionnaire, poll, ...). Proper names are not treated this way: Charlie Chaplin, New York, ... Japanese words and names receive their own Czech and Slovak style romanization, e.g. džómon džidai (縄文時代: joumon jidai: joumon period , 14000-300 BCE). Curiously, the letter "w" (a letter not used in these languages) is used, e.g. Kanagawa.
  - trickstra 7y ago
    Yes, for ordinary words, I believe every language assimilates them after some time. But I was talking about names. No Czech would in their right mind write Čarlí Čeplin even after many decades. So let's not do that with Čapek in English either. Let him be written Čapek (or Capek due to the limits of our keyboards), but pronounce [Chapek], remembering he is Czech.

by aasasd 7y ago

smcl 7y ago

Inconsistent localization of names and people struggling with pronunciation an unfamiliar glyph is not a problem unique to English native speakers. As a counterpoint foreign names - let's say Serena Williams - can get sort of inconsistently mangled in Czech too. Sometimes it'll be left alone as "Serena Williams", sometimes localized "Serena Williamsova". And the sometimes the "W" might be pronounced correctly or mistakenly pronounced as "V". Nobody's perfect, people make mistakes and if you are able to suggest a correction then most people are happy to learn the "correct" way.

coldtea 7y ago
>I'm not sure why you're so upset about this. Why did your parents didn't love you? See how redundant and non-sequitur this psychological question is? The "upset" question is equally irrelevant, whether they (the parent) are upset or not. Who said they're that much upset? Who said it upsets them more than other more important things? And even if they are, who said it's not important in their line of work (e.g. a translator or proof reader) and thus it's not justifiably a pet peeve of them? Parent didn't come in swearing, fuming, writing in all caps, etc -- they merely made a point.
- smcl 7y ago
  Well I actually removed this part a very short time after posting (your reply was posted a handful of minutes after mine) because "upset" was the wrong word and sounded confrontational.
aasasd 7y ago
The problem is not unique, but it's uniquely persistent among the languages that I'm more-or-less familiar with. “Foreign names can get inconsistently mangled in Czech”—but to my knowledge Czech doesn't attempt to preserve foreign spelling, with e.g. letters Ñ or Ø. Czech adapts spelling to native pronunciation, which is my entire point. The ‘mistake’ here is that English keeps doing things backwards, and ‘Čapek’ is just one example here. I had to look up the usage of ‘W’ in Czech, and Wikipedia says: “The letters Q, W and X are used exclusively in foreign words, and the former two are replaced with Kv and V once the word becomes ‘naturalized’.” There's a close example in Russian: John ‘Dr.’ Watson's surname can be pronounced either ‘Vahtson’ or ‘Oo-ohtson’, but there's no intermediate sound like English ‘W’ in Russian (and no letter for it). So the name was spelled either of the two ways in print until it became settled on ‘Vahtson’ (‘Ватсон‘), which fits more naturally in the rest of the language. I expect a similar thing to happen to ‘Williams’ in Czech, though I'm surprised that they still have trouble with it at all, as the surname is old and widespread. However, current strong influence of English can mess things up—people, including myself, use English pronunciation even in the context of a native language.
- smcl 7y ago
  That quote from wikipedia is interesting, because it says something you're interpreting as a being a consistent and simple rule but it's actually really vague and ill-defined - basically "Q, W and X are preserved in foreign words for a while until they're not". Another example, place names are often localized even if they don't contain a non-Czech letter: Venice=>Benátky, Paris=>Pařiž, London=>Londýn, and so on. And sometimes original place names are left in place when they do have a letter or letters that are not Czech (or not very Czech) - see Washington, New York, Sydney, Chicago. In fact the last one is particularly interesting, since "ch" is considered a single letter in Czech - and there's a pretty perfect mapping to the Czech alphabet that preserves the stress on the "a" in "Chicago": Šikágo. "Venice" is interesting too since "-ice" is a common place-name suffix. It behaves quite weirdly - sometimes it's singular (e.g. Lednice) and sometimes plural (e.g. Valtice). This becomes fun when you start to decline them so "I'm going (by vehicle) to Lednice" is "Jedu do Lednice" and to Valtice it's "Jedu do Valtic" (note: no "e" at the end). And the Venice/Benátky is apparently plural (http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?slovo=Ben%C3%A1tky http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?slovo=Ben%C3%A1tky). Why, I do not know. This is unrelated to the original discussion of course - just an interesting aside :-)

NotOscarWilde 7y ago

I wouldn't attribute this to English or English speakers at all. Imagine I am Czech (I am) and my last name is "Gödel" (it is quite similar, and Kurt Gödel was actually born in what is now Czechia). Such a name has at least three pronunciations which are relevant to me -- the way Czechs themselves pronounce it [Ge:dl], the way Germans do [ɡøːdl̩], and the way an English speaker would [ˈɡɜːrdəl]. Can you really say the Czech pronunciation is correct because I am Czech? Or the German one, because it is a last name of German origin? If so, are all the people in my native country mispronouncing my last name? :-)

aasasd 7y ago
You point it out right there yourself—each language picks a pronunciation and sticks with it. The German pronunciation doesn't come in when you're speaking Czech—for the simple reason that German pronunciations don't fit in Czech. Then, just write down the pronunciation in the system used for the language. A Ukrainian speaker would easily use two pronunciations and spellings for ‘Gödel’, since Ukrainian doesn't have a ‘yo’ letter but Russian does and Russian is widespread in Ukraine. But the person would use each pronunciation and spelling in the corresponding language, not in the other one. English doesn't do that—instead, it goes with the foreign spelling first, and then people pronounce the word whatever which way since they can't be bothered to look in an encyclopedia, or don't have one on them.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  > You point it out right there yourself—each language picks a pronunciation and sticks with it. I feel this is rapidly turning into an impromptu session of "Falsehoods Programmers Believe" about names.
- mc32 7y ago
  At least in the US when Ellis island was one of the main processing centers for immigrants we would anglicize names. But over time that changed and now we keep the spelling of the original/source language where possible. Of course things become complicated when we go from non-alphabetic languages to English and vice versa. Ex a last name “Guo” can have multiple transliterations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo and getting your English (or alphabetic) name rendered in ideographs or characters can be quite challenging. Often it’s easier to just adopt s local name.

i_am_proteus 7y ago

Especially for less-common words (such as "Čapek"), keeping the original spelling helps accurate cross-referencing and avoids ambiguity.

aasasd 7y ago
Referencing works fine in phonemic-orthography languages: unambiguous spellings are picked after a time by convention combined with fitness for the target language. See the example of ‘Watson’ here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799966 Curiously, your argument unabashedly presumes independence, if not primacy, of written language from oral. That wasn't ever the case at least in continental European languages—afaik spelling did matter in development of only a few words, contrary to some of modern folk etymological intuition. But this may change now that writing is much more prevalent in people's lives, with the English web getting ubiquitous, and English finally becoming completely logographic. If Mandarin doesn't wipe it all out sooner, anyway.

billfruit 7y ago

May be related, the pronunciation of the word quixotic, is odd in English compared to how Quixote is pronounced.

yread 7y ago

On the other hand Arabic names do get transcribed and as a consequence you can find like 15 different spellings of Al-Qaida. At least you can write it whichever way you want

tasogare 7y ago

The response to that is more education and more curiosity. Pronouncing <cz> as /tʃ/ is no more obvious than the reading of <č> except in the word Czech because of how common it is. But the advantage of using the original graphy is (1) it's more respectful to the original, (2) it can motivate people to search about it and learn stuffs because it is unusual. As an aside, I would love that more scientific papers use original names in their original scripts in the references section in addition to transcription, the way Knuth does it in tAoCP.

kome 7y ago
I agree, changing the orthography because pronunciation would be a disaster, especially when you don't have a consistent spelling system like in English.
NotOscarWilde 7y ago
> As an aside, I would love that more scientific papers use original names in their original scripts in the references section in addition to transcription, the way Knuth does it in tAoCP. Being a scientist, I believe most of my colleagues prefer to cite names exactly as the authors typeset them -- therefore, if there is a work by Karel Čapek, I would cite him as [Čapek, 1921] but I would not re-type a name like Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi back into the "original" spelling if the author himself writes it this way in a paper (e.g. [1]). And on top of that, sometimes (with say Japanese-Americans) you could re-type a name only to end up with an incorrect result! [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.05998.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.05998.pdf
- tasogare 7y ago
  > to cite names exactly as the authors typeset them This is not incompatible with the transcription+native (if any) approach: these researchers will most likely have papers or website with their name in their native language, while descendants of immigrants don’t. Following your example, Kawarabayashi’s original name can be found in few seconds of googling. It is 河原林健一. (https://www.jst.go.jp/pr/info/info915/shiryo2.html https://www.jst.go.jp/pr/info/info915/shiryo2.html)
- 7y ago

jcranmer 7y ago

The general rule of thumb is not to transliterate names written in Latin sript, but to transliterate those not written in Latin script (e.g., Cyrillic, Arabic). The annoying habits are people who preserve the basic acute, grave, diaeresis, and circumflex accents on vowels but not those in other contexts (such as the Turkish ǧ, which really changes how the word is pronounced)--The Economist is a.bad offender here.

david927 7y ago

I couldn't disagree more. Literally no one has a problem pronouncing yet another great Czech: Dvořák. And I defy you to turn that into a phonetical spelling that isn't a abomination upon church and Christ. We shouldn't be afraid of asking too much of people in regards to other cultures and languages. We humans are more intelligent than you're giving us credit for.

pavel_lishin 7y ago
> Literally no one has a problem pronouncing yet another great Czech: Dvořák I know exactly how I pronounce it, but it wasn't until your comment that I realized that I have no idea whether I'm doing so correctly or not.
CrLf 7y ago
Does that mean everyone pronounces it "Dvorjak"?
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  The better approximation to fricative z is usually rz. (Like Polish dipthong.) rj could be mispronounced as unrecognizable ar-jay combo, resulting in something resembling dwor-yak or dwor-jak instead of rd3. (Sorry about lack of proper IPA.)
trickstra 7y ago
You are most safe just pronouncing it as "Dvoraak".
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Sharlin 7y ago
Literally no one? I'm fairly sure a majority of native English speakers has never even heard of Dvořák, never mind know how to spell his name correctly.
yread 7y ago
Spanish call him Deborak or something like that... So not everyone

trickstra 7y ago

Well let's see what do Czech people do when they encounter English names. It seems like they learn about how to pronounce them in English. So why should the vice-versa be any different?

kazinator 7y ago
Czechs and Slovaks assimilate English (and other) words using native spelling when those words pass into comon use. For example: víkend (weekend), hemendex (ham and eggs), anketa (enquête: questionnaire, poll, ...). Proper names are not treated this way: Charlie Chaplin, New York, ... Japanese words and names receive their own Czech and Slovak style romanization, e.g. džómon džidai (縄文時代: joumon jidai: joumon period , 14000-300 BCE). Curiously, the letter "w" (a letter not used in these languages) is used, e.g. Kanagawa.
- trickstra 7y ago
  Yes, for ordinary words, I believe every language assimilates them after some time. But I was talking about names. No Czech would in their right mind write Čarlí Čeplin even after many decades. So let's not do that with Čapek in English either. Let him be written Čapek (or Capek due to the limits of our keyboards), but pronounce [Chapek], remembering he is Czech.