When American celebrities can't pronounce their own name properly

Firstly you must be familiar with the name. If you are not, you can;t know.
And this was only an example. There are thousands of surnames which you
do not know, and from hearing, you will not be able to know, what it is. The
matter is more complicated, when people spell it differently. Total mess.

Rather you are obtuse than me, becasue you cannot get a simple fact.

You really shouldn't speak about things about which you know nothing. Colbert is not at all a rare name in the U.S., especially not in areas where the Irish settled, as is the case with New York, or where there are a lot of descendants of the original English settlers, like the south and New England. I actually happen to know two families with that surname, and they certainly pronounce that "t".

https://surnames.behindthename.com/name/colbert/top

Here's another funny one: Weiner. A recently disgraced political personality carried that surname. He made a habit of sending nude photos of his "appendage" to women by cell phone. Some newsmen would pronounce it "weener", like an alternate word for hot dog, and, ironically, the male sexual organ, and others like "whiner", the word for a chronic babyish complainer. Either way it was good for some chuckles. :) It was probably too much fun to just ask him how he pronounced his name.

Like I said, most Americans couldn't care less what Europeans think of this habit, and that includes me.
 
You really shouldn't speak about things about which you know nothing. Colbert is not at all a rare name in the U.S.,.

You again fail to understand that it was
an example, even if it was explain to you.

Ok, I get - any talk with you has no sense, becasue you either do not
understand, what it talking to you, or you do not want to understand.

Live in your imaginary world. I am done talking with you. You claim to
be the smartest, but you do not understand simple things. So pathetic.
 
You again fail to understand that it was
an example, even if it was explain to you.

Ok, I get - any talk with you has no sense, becasue you either do not
understand, what it talking to you, or you do not want to understand.

Live in your imaginary world. I am done talking with you. You claim to
be the smartest, but you do not understand simple things. So pathetic.
Yup, the smartest people here never understand what you are talking about. Therefore the only conclusion you can make is that we are always wrong and you are always right. You must be some kind of genius, lol.

Do us a favor, look today in the mirror, see your face, and remember. The face that looks like this never gets anything right.
Come back when you understand this, and want to learn something this time.
 
Yup, the smartest people here never understand what you are talking about. Therefore the only conclusion you can make is that we are always wrong and you are always right. You must be some kind of genius, lol.

So you must be a genius, who can write from hearing every surname he hears,
no matter how and by whom spoke, and no matter what is his real provenance...

Even if you would know all surnames in the world, you wouldn't be able to do that.
If you cannot understand this - it only means, that something is wrong with you.
It also makes senseless every english spelling problem or spelling contest, becasue
if there is no problems with writing from hearng foreign or rarely used surnames,
the more there should be no problems with writing regular english words...

And now, let's Anglela writes from the hearing Dżeynowsayq properly.
I doubt, if even you know, what it is...

Do us a favor, look today in the mirror, see your face, and remember. The face that looks like this never gets anything right.
Come back when you understand this, and want to learn something this time.

Sadly, that you do not do that every day.
 
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You really shouldn't speak about things about which you know nothing. Colbert is not at all a rare name in the U.S., especially not in areas where the Irish settled, as is the case with New York, or where there are a lot of descendants of the original English settlers, like the south and New England. I actually happen to know two families with that surname, and they certainly pronounce that "t".

https://surnames.behindthename.com/name/colbert/top

Here's another funny one: Weiner. A recently disgraced political personality carried that surname. He made a habit of sending nude photos of his "appendage" to women by cell phone. Some newsmen would pronounce it "weener", like an alternate word for hot dog, and, ironically, the male sexual organ, and others like "whiner", the word for a chronic babyish complainer. Either way it was good for some chuckles. :) It was probably too much fun to just ask him how he pronounced his name.

Like I said, most Americans couldn't care less what Europeans think of this habit, and that includes me.

Yeah, and to add to this, I thought Europe was a place in Germany from 6th up until ninth grade lol.

I take pride in not knowing much, don't know why., but it's kinda cool.
 
Another good example of this is Charlize Theron. While most people think her name is pronounced "there-on", it's actually an Afrikaans surname and pronounced "Tron" with a very hard "r" sound, as in standard with the Afrikaans langauge.
 
That's odd considering that the spelling rules in Turkish were mostly copied from German, and like German it is perfectly phonetic. Turkish even has the same sounds as in German (ö, ü). There are really just a few consonants to know:

C => like an English j (a sound that doesn't exist in German)
Ç => like an English ch (ditto)
Ş => like an English sh
Ğ => lengthen the preceding vowel (everybody knows it in the name Erdoğan)

Do you really know Turks in Germany who can't remember how these four letters are pronounced?

your second letter is an s sound in french, spanish and venetian languages ................except in venetian it is prounced as the sound th if it is the first letter of a word.


the other issue is that many have dropped the symbols if they had in their surname ............like Café ...that symbol is a sound spacer, one needs to emphasis the f and not the e

another issue is that americans alter surnames , example , my relative married a D'Amico ......the americans keep writing her surname as Damico .......2 different surnames
 
Interesting discussion.

And yes, as the Americans/those living in the Americas commented, Americans are disinterested in what came before. Their history. That isn’t all Americans but from what I’ve encountered the majority seems to fall into the past grandparents or great-grandparents of ancestry don’t know and couldn’t care. Same as how they are disinterested in Europe or anything that doesn’t directly associate with American culture. It is possibly a British thing (Brits & Americans are similar in their disinterest with foreign cultures) as you will encounter Brits who couldn’t give a dang about what their great-grandparents did or where they came from. However, as DNA tests were lauded in the USA & the UK economics in some areas it isn’t as “obvious” in the UK as it is in the USA.

I can understand mispronouncing some foreign surnames. Slavic surnames, for example, can be a tongue twister if you are not used to it. A German surname doesn't necessarily mean it is pronounced one way all throughout Germany - dialect & accent will add a little "extra" to it.

However, as Maciamo has said throughout, you don’t need to know the language to “understand” the surname itself. I don't speak German but I've never said fried as "fred".

You can also research it (there are dozens of online translators), particularly if you know you will be encountering the person often enough.


But then again Europeans mispronounce each other's surnames depending on where you are, their own background, and what dialect is spoken.



The interesting part though is, since coming to the Americas, I’ve found Americans can’t pronounce certain English surnames properly.

A close British friend is a prime example of this. A large number of Americans can’t get his surname right. Even though you will find it in America/Canada & despite the fact you’re supposed to pronounce it exactly how it is spelled. There are no tongue-twisting phonetic “tricks”* to his surname.



*For fun I ran the name through google translate/different languages. It’s essentially pronounced the same regardless if in English, French, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek, etc. The only real difference is what consonants/vowels to empathize & Norwegian is the most “different” as the vowel pronunciation deviates. On the reverse, if I ran my surname through those same languages the entire name pronunciation would deviate.
 
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Interesting discussion.

And yes, as the Americans/those living in the Americas commented, Americans are disinterested in what came before. Their history. That isn’t all Americans but from what I’ve encountered the majority seems to fall into the past grandparents or great-grandparents of ancestry don’t know and couldn’t care.

That's my experience as well. When I asked my grandfather what he knows, he said something like "I had a German grandparent, a Norweigan one, but I never really cared." If you ever ask someone from my generation they'll be able to tell you some ethnic background. British ancestry may have been forgotten by most Americans but anyone who has a great-great German grandparents knows about it.

I think the same thing that happened to my great-grand parent's is currently happening to Hispanics in my generation. They're becoming more and more Americanized to the point that race and ethnicity doesn't matter to them at all.
 
That's my experience as well. When I asked my grandfather what he knows, he said something like "I had a German grandparent, a Norweigan one, but I never really cared." If you ever ask someone from my generation they'll be able to tell you some ethnic background. British ancestry may have been forgotten by most Americans but anyone who has a great-great German grandparents knows about it.

Or Dutch, etc. I've had this discussion a few times with American colleagues.

I think it's a two-folded thing. British ancestry is "cliche", a goes with the land sort of deal, as America was a mostly British colony. But being "German-American", "Italian-American", "Swiss-American", etc. is something "exotic" and/or distinctive. No offense to anyone but I have seen on forums Americans desperate to use DNA to "prove" claims of "Princess Pocahontas" in their family tree.

But in some ways making those claims can, in a way, backfire.

I did, after all, have someone tell me their maternal great-great-grandparents were Belgians & that they were "Belgian-American" with some concocted grandiose as if Belgians have never been in the US before. They didn't speak Belgian, had never been to Belgium, & knew almost nothing of the cultural habits [or food] of that ancestry. Hence, to me, they were just Americans.



I think the same thing that happened to my great-grand parent's is currently happening to Hispanics in my generation. They're becoming more and more Americanized to the point that race and ethnicity doesn't matter to them at all.

It happens. Some people hang onto their culture & others give into what could be, in a way, seen as a sort of "(mainstream) peer pressure" & that isn't a habit isolated to the Americas alone.

But, regarding the Americas, I saw it when visiting friends just outside of New Orleans. There were those who still had a "different" [a Cajun or Creole] feel to their mannerism and then there were others who so emulated American culture that you'd think you were anywhere but Louisiana.
 
I find myself somewhere in the middle of all this.

I am pretty good in reading and spelling names correctly, as well as detecting the ethnic background behind the surname. How will I decide to pronounce it, though, depends. Usually I change pronounciations , depending on the language I speak at that point and the people I am talking too. It's kinda funny to use strong German or Austrian accent, even for a name, when I talk to some of my Greek bodies in Greek for example, or change completely voice colour etc when I address a Greek name in an English conversation.

I can totally understand the Americans in this. It's not only that they don't care, it's also that the surname has been already Americanized, thus they are "allowed" to spell it the way they want.

And btw it's not only an "American" thing. I never get mad on Austrians pronouncing my Greek surname according to their sounds; they simply can't make the "δ" or the "γ" sound. In some cases though it's really annoying to keep doing the same mistake over and over again: a guy here is named "Printezis", spelled "Prí - nde - zis", like the famous basketball player and it's very rarely that somebody addresses him correctly, even if he keeps correcting them. They will keep saying "Pri - nté - tsis" till they die [emoji14]

Sent from my Robin using Tapatalk
 
I have one of those names that can be pronounced in many ways. And honestly, I am cool with whatever variation is comfortable to people. I have traveled a lot and obviously there are different tendencies how to pronounce my name. If I ever insisted on the original spelling, I would almost feel like a nationalist or something. It's just a name to me.
 
Americans are disinterested in what came before. Their history. That isn’t all Americans but from what I’ve encountered the majority seems to fall into the past grandparents or great-grandparents of ancestry don’t know and couldn’t care.

I think that's definitely part of it. In my own family no one knew our ethnicity and that never struck me as weird until I went to college and met people who knew theirs and asked about mine.

I vaguely recalled that my grandfather said his mother was Swedish and asked my mother about it, and she claimed not to have ever realized that side of the family was Swedish (to be fair she mostly spent her childhood interacting with her maternal relatives). Certainly even with that recent ancestry (he immigrated in 1889), no one would have thought to pronounce their name (starts with a W) other than the anglicized way that everyone in their rural Nebraska town pronounced it. And beyond that -- and I think this has as much to do with it as Americans not caring -- by the time my mother was growing up, and probably well before, it was just their surname, not some particular Swedish word with a particular correct pronunciation independent of how the family wanted to pronounce it. (It being Swedish and Swedish naming customs might be relevant in this specific case, as it appears my immigrant ancestor took the name upon coming to the US, and changing one's surname was historically not uncommon in Sweden.)

I have a co-worker with an Italian name who is quite proud of and interested in his Italian heritage and KNOWS the family in the US pronounces it incorrectly (he has met some relatives in Italy even), and it's not about making it easier, it gets butchered (vs. his preferred way of saying it) all the time, but to him -- and this is an attitude I think is really common in the US -- how he grew up with it is the correct pronunciation of his own surname, it is how his family chose to pronounce it and since it is their name, they decide, period. But he would not say he has a right to change it, it would upset his family (meaning family in the US), who have a common way of saying the name.

Apart from this, it is possible (and not uncommon) to have surnames where you don't know the origin. There are several in my own family if you go back to the 1700s. One example of a surname of unknown origin that I've worked on quite a bit is Guess. My family has always pronounced it like the English word (would be easier if it were not pronounced that way sometimes). Even if that is not how it was pronounced in the country of origin, we don't know the origin or if the spelling was changed.
 
how he grew up with it is the correct pronunciation of his own surname, it is how his family chose to pronounce it and since it is their name, they decide, period.
There is no need to be a Grammer Nazi, so I agree you.
 

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