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Very interesting. An example that users of this forum will be familiar with is Edsger Dijkstra.
by jetrink 2y ago
Very interesting. An example that users of this forum will be familiar with is Edsger Dijkstra.
- segfaltnh 2y agoDoes this mean the correct pronunciation is "deekstra"?
- wirrbel 2y agono, daykstra. In the dutch of the middle-ages it might have been deekstra
- dep_b 2y agoIt’s more like dye-kstra. But that would still be wrong. It’s a sound that doesn’t exist in English. Daikstra - you can pronounce this Dijkstra - a sound in between you cannot pronounce coming from English Diekstra - you can pronounce this too
- samatman 2y agoIn IPA, the name is /dɛikstra/. Americans (English vowels vary quite extremely by dialect/accent, so I'm sticking with Standard American English) can easily pronounce ɛ, we say the word 'bed' as /bɛd/. But the 'ɛi' is a dipthong, and we don't have that dipthong. We have aɪ, as in 'bride' /bɹaɪd/, which is what usually comes out, at least for those of us who know that /dʒɪkstɹə/ is not even close to right. What you'll hear is generally something like /daɪkstɹə/, which make sense, as we pronounce 'dike' /daɪk/ as well. So yes, completely correct, I just wanted to add the IPA for clarity.
- BalinKing 2y agoTo my understanding, most American and British English dialects[0] have /eɪ/, e.g. in "maze", which I imagine is quite close to /ɛi/. [0] The exceptions being dialects where it monophthongizes to /eː/
- _a_a_a_ 2y ago"monophthongizes" Heck of a word is that.
- CRConrad 2y agoAn example from the WP article linked by user BalinKing: > Some dialects of English make monophthongs from former diphthongs. For instance, Southern American English tends to realize the diphthong /aɪ/ as in eye as a long monophthong [äː], a feature known as /aj/ ungliding or /ay/ ungliding. You know, where “I spy with my eye” from a (caricatured) Southerner becomes “Ah spah with mah ah”. What are diphthongs in most dialects of English have been turned into monophthongs. Thanks, BalinKing, TIL!
- BalinKing 2y agohey, I don't make the rules :-P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophthongization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophthongization
- tomsmeding 2y agoDutch /e/ has the tendency to become /eɪ/ as well (not in Flemish, I think), so /eɪ/ just sounds mostly like "e" to us (Dutch speakers in NL). The "ij" is really /ɛɪ/, but because we don't really have /aɪ/, it turns out that /aɪ/ works fine as a fairly non-ambiguous substitute.
- gpvos 2y agoThat is indeed pretty close, but not exact.
- samatman 2y agoTrue, but to my ear at least, /eɪ/ is further from /ɛi/ than /aɪ/ is. Maybe more to the point, English speakers (American ones at least) are going to "realize" the name Dijkstra with an /aɪ/ dipthong. "Dayksra" would not occur to us to say. Phonemes are a funny thing: if an American were to pronounce that last name perfectly (or a Dutch person speaking English, for that matter), other Americans would still hear /daɪkstɹə/, or at most, "/daɪkstɹə/ but it sounds a bit foreign". Some sounds which we don't produce are audibly not-English-phonemes, like German ü or Scandanavian ø, but others are not. Another example of this is that native English speakers aren't usually sensitive to the difference between the r sound in our word "pear" and the r sound in Spanish "pero", but recognize that "perro" is a different rhotic sound.
- segfaltnh 2y agoIn my region and accent (Boston area), I don't know how I would pronounce the first and third one differently. Maybe this is a Mary/Merry/Marry thing based on accent.
- mywittyname 2y agoJust guessing here, because my pronunciation is the same as yours... Dai = Day Die = Die If you make an "ay" sound, then transition to an "i" sound, you can feel that the sounds are continuous. So maybe that inbetween sound OP is talking about literally the sound you make with your tongue between "ay" and "i".
- dep_b 2y agoSorry, the second one should be more like “Deekstra”
- gpvos 2y agoIt could be in several Dutch dialects (which did not take part in the sound shift I described), but not in the standard language. See the sibling replies.