Barcelona

[racketlauncher831@lemmy.ml]

I can't type out the pronunciation but have you guys heard American people read Japanese names? My god, it is so weird. Say that to Japanese people and I bet half of the time they don't recognise what it is. The way a foreign language is being butchered is beyond imagination.

[wolf314159@startrek.website]

I've been mocked and had some people outright pretend they don't understand what I'm saying when I pronounce guanábana correctly.

[kusimulkku@lemm.ee]

The sense of scale has always been off with these games. Huge battles have 20 people fighting, cities have less people than a small apartment building.

[merc@sh.itjust.works]

Except one way is better, and that's the way that the person you're speaking to understands best.

[ytg@sopuli.xyz]

That would be the (standard) Spanish, right? Catalan, the local language, has it with /s/

But it's very language-dependent. English has established names for many places, so you should probably use those. But some languages just don't, and if you borrow everything, you might as well borrow properly.

[merc@sh.itjust.works]

Sure, but as a general rule, if you're trying to decide how to say the name of a place, you should say it as it is said in your language/dialect if you're speaking your language/dialect, and especially if you're speaking your language/dialect with another person who speaks the same language/dialect.

[merc@sh.itjust.works]

When I mispronounce words I’ve been giggled at and/or corrected

By whom?

When I pronounce it right

What do you mean by "right"? "Barcelona" with an "s" sound is right.

[monkrome@lemmy.world]

If I say Barcelona with a lisp, or without, 99.9999% of people that know what Barcelona is will understand me, you're being unnecessarily pedantic. Anyone who seeks to control language should talk to a linguist. Language isn't prescriptivist as much as non linguists like to think so. It is fluid and ever changing. People will choose how they want to speak and it will either work or it won't. If people understand what someone is saying, nothing else matters as much as many like to think.

[stevedice@sh.itjust.works]

When Spain invaded Latinamerica, they recorded the language of the natives phonetically but there were a lot of sounds that didn't have an Spanish equivalent so they just wrote X for all of them and now they're trying to retroactively fix the spelling of several words so you're kinda right. For example, Spain insists México is spelled Méjico.

[saharamaleikuhm@feddit.org]

Una thervetha por favor!

[ai_toothbrush@lemmy.zip]

Im bilingual and speak 4 languages and i like it when people pronounce names correctly. Especially in hungarian which a lot of people pronounce incorrectly, it feels nice. Then again i could be alone but other peoples comment suggest otherwise. I just dont know why you reacted so offensively to my comment. Btw a language not having the correct sounds doesnt mean you dont hear/know them. Im really bad with the scratchy sounds in french, danish, arabic, etc but i still hear them so i recognise what is being said.

[bob_lemon@feddit.org]

Well that's awkward. My brain seems to have "autocorrected" Castilian to Catalan. I literally didn't notice until I reread it just now. My bad.

[droggelbecher@lemmy.world]

How do the people around you pronounce it? I don't think I'd understand it if it were pronounced differently

[kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de]

The one that keeps surprising me over and over again is Karyohkey instead of Ka-ra-o-ke

[kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de]

Here in Switzerland we have four languages and we simply say words like they sound in the language they are from, even if most of us only speak one of the languages natively and one as a second language from school. There is no reason to make up separate pronunciations. Buillon is buillon and Tiramisu is Tiramisu even if I'm speaking Swiss German.

[flyingsquid@lemmy.world]

There is an urban legend that everyone in Spain started speaking this way because of the super-inbred Habsburg kings had a terrible lisp and everyone wanted to make him sound normal. There's no evidence of it, but considering this guy was king of Spain...

[merc@sh.itjust.works]

Switzerland is a tiny country, so it's no surprise that certain words are standardized.

[merc@sh.itjust.works]

i like it when people pronounce names correctly

How do you define "correctly"? Is "Munich" a correct way to pronounce that city in Germany, or is only Munchen acceptable? Or should it be "Minga" because that's how it's said in Bavarian?

[merc@sh.itjust.works]

Yes, Barcelona is a place that people have heard enough of the two versions to know the "strange" version that isn't natural to their language. But, what about Zaragoza? I doubt most English speakers would understand what you meant if you dropped the Castillian version of that into a sentence when speaking English.

Language isn’t prescriptivist

Of course not, that's why the names of places in English don't sound like the names used locally. If it were prescriptivist there would be no Munich, only Munchen. No Prague only Praha, no Geneva, only Genève. Only someone who doesn't understand how languages work would think that it's appropriate to say "Barcelona" with a "th" sound when speaking English.

[fushuan@lemm.ee]

The english Th sounds different from the spanish C. Source: spaniard.

It's similar though.