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It’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 b
by dep_b 2y ago
It’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.
- BalinKing 2y ago> True, but to my ear at least, /eɪ/ is further from /ɛi/ than /aɪ/ is. If I may ask purely out of curiosity, are you a native English speaker? I only say this because, to my American English ear, [eɪ] and [ɛi] are virtually indistinguishable. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what you're trying to say....
- samatman 2y agoI think you're wrong about that, sorry. As in, you're not getting the right sound out of the string /ɛi/ when you read it off. I encourage you to listen to a native Dutch speaker pronounce Mynheer Dijkstra's name, which you can do on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra Does that sound more like "dike" or more like "day"? To me (yes, native American English speaker, of one of the dialects very close to 'Standard'), it is obviously more like the former.
- BalinKing 2y agoSorry if I sounded argumentative by the way, that was not my intent at all—it was an entirely honest question, and I'm really bad at wording things (especially via text).... I do agree that the WP recording of "Dijkstra" sounds more like "dike" than "day". I might've figured out the disconnect. According to this image on Wikipedia[0], the Northern Standard Dutch realization of [ɛi] starts lower than the monophthongal [ɛ] in the same dialect[1]. Just speculation on my part, but maybe in the context of Dutch linguistics, [ɛi] conventionally signifies a wider diphthong than I would've naïvely thought? (If so, I guess this makes me a cautionary tale against directly comparing IPA transcriptions between languages....) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology#/media/File:Dutch_diphthong_chart.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology#/media/File:Du... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology#/media/File:Dutch_monophthongs_chart.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology#/media/File:Du...
- 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”