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Erdős I was told by a hungarian, that hungarian written spelling and spoken pronunciation is pretty precisely aligned compared to, say, english. Except when
by gerdesj 11mo ago
Erdős
I was told by a hungarian, that hungarian written spelling and spoken pronunciation is pretty precisely aligned compared to, say, english. Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random!
Why not do the bloke the decency to spell his name correctly? Those diacritics are important.
Anyway, I was told that Paul's name is very roughly pronounced by an anglophone as: "airdish".
- yeasku 11mo agoIs not American so nobody here cares...
- mjcohen 11mo ago(I saw this on a math department bulletin board about 1960) A theorem both deep and profound States that every circle is round But in a paper by Erdos Written in Kurdish A counterexample is found
- ChicagoBoy11 11mo agoI suspect there is a great joke embedded in here, but sadly it went over my head. Any help?
- gerdesj 11mo agoErdős rhymes with Kurdish. EDIT: Oh and Erdős was the great collaborator. There is an Erdős number (Bacon and Ozzie too) which defines how close you are to him. eg if you co-authored a paper with Erdős you have a Erdős number of one. If you co-auth a paper with someone with an Erdős number of one, then you have an Erdős number of two etc. I think that the Bacon (Kevin Bacon) number was the original and there is also a Black Sabbath number which is related to Ozzie (MHRiP). I also gather that a very few people have managed a minimum measure of all three numbers. Feynman might be one of them (its too late to check).
- School-Cotton 11mo agoI could be wrong, but FWIW I doubt Hungarians include diacritics that don’t exist in Hungarian (like ñ) when writing foreign names.
- hgal 11mo agoYou are wrong.
- gf000 11mo agoDepends. There are names that are "romanized" to Hungarian pronunciation rules, like Dosztojevszkij (Dostoevsky), or Kolumbusz Kristóf (Cristoforo Colombo - Hungarian puts the family name first), though it is no longer the practice, it's mostly used for historic names only. That is, Trump is written like that, and not as we would pronounce (something like "Trámp") In general, if the source language has a latin alphabet, we try to stick to the original spelling in most cases, but it is not uncommon to replace non-Hungarian letters with the closest one. It's a bit more complicated in case of non-latin alphabets, especially Cyrillic due to a lot of shared history.
- School-Cotton 11mo agoHow would you write e.g. the Spanish surname Yáñez ?
- gf000 11mo agoUnless it's a famous person who lived several centuries ago, probably would leave it as Yáñez, or if I (or more realistically, an average, not too technical user) were to not have an easy way to input the special characters, then as Yanez. Probably not as Yánez, even though we do have the letter 'á', but leaving it as is may be more misleading in terms of pronunciation then the non-accented version.
- School-Cotton 11mo agoI think that's roughly similar to how it's done in American English (though Americans are probably less likely to have any idea how to type accented letters). A serious publication would write Yáñez but an average person would be pretty likely to just type "Yanez". Anyway, my point was just that it's not too weird to see someone write "Erdos" if their native language doesn't have the ő character.
- renewiltord 11mo agoIrrelevant. Cf. Diogenes on death
- perching_aix 11mo agoSounds like nihilism for beginners.
- renewiltord 11mo agoMore like "for enders", innit?
- somenameforme 11mo agoI take it that that's a palatalized ending? I read your comment at first and was like "airdish" wtf? Then I palatalized the 'os' ending and realized oh yeah... that does sound kind of like airdish!
- zajio1am 11mo agoDiacritics are language-dependent, so using hungarian-meaning diacritics into english text makes no sense.
- perching_aix 11mo agoŐ is just œ (oe), nothing crazy. Certainly not a scenario that would belong to the quirky category. The only weird ones I can think of are the ones that end in -y. For example, Görgey. They're meant to be -i endings. They signify a noble lineage (or at least used to). I guess "ch" might also show up every now and then too (it's just "cs", just like "ch" in English). For example, Széchényi. Since this is a compsci forum to some extent, maybe I should also mention that the so-called Lanczos-interpolation is "actually" Lánczos. Took even me a while to pick up on that one! Thinking about it, I now see that it features a "cz", another letter (digraph) that is longer part of the alphabet. Also note that Paul is a "translated" name. His actual name was Pál Erdős. He got lucky with that one, it's an easy swap. Edward Teller (Ede Teller) was the same way, and so was John (von) Neumann (János Neumann). As a bonus trivia, the Hungarian name order is big endian, like the Japanese. So it would be "Erdős Pál", "Teller Ede", "Neumann János", and "Lánczos Kornél". Though just like with Japanese, I would not recommend trying to adhere to this order in most English speaking contexts.
- int_19h 11mo agoThe "weird" part about Hungarian names and words for English speakers is that "y" is a modifier letter in most cases, not a sound in and of itself. So e.g. "Nagy" is pronounced closer to something like "Nahj".
- perching_aix 11mo agoThey said: > Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random! The letters "gy", "ty", and "ly" are not exclusive to names, nor are they significantly more common in names. It's not that I disagree people would struggle with these, just that it's not unique to names, so it couldn't have been what they were referring to there.
- int_19h 11mo agoMy implicit point was that this: > The only weird ones I can think of are the ones that end in -y. For example, Görgey. They're meant to be -i endings. is not actually surprising to an English speaker.