Barcelona

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Bey-a lean

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My experience has been the exact opposite. When I mispronounce words I've been giggled at and/or corrected. When I pronounce it right, people either don't notice or act pleasantly surprised, I've even gotten some head nods that I assumed was acknowledgement of my trying

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Thank you for detailed responce. For some people it might be just a habit, I'm sure most people aren't against using equivalent names if they exist. Just never occured to me that it would be pretentious, for example until you mentioned that Praha is Prague in English it didn't click with me.

BigAssFan

English spelling can be difficult as well:
http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

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There is a lot of people that speak english as a second or third language often they just don't know correct english toponims or idioms, sometimes it's just happens. English for a lot of people isn't objective by itself just a means to an end.

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And like... I'm just guessing... 800 square feet? That's a district? Nazeem is crazy

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The ancient Spanish basically all had a lisp. Nobody thought about it at the time and it eventually became the status quo and then correct pronunciation. I base this on absolutely nothing and will die on this hill.

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Language is indeed for communication, which is why both ways of saying it work...

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Americans, white Americans especially, have essentially no cultural heritage to draw on

I thought they drew from the varied backgrounds of the people that came over there? That's a shitload of heritage

CarrotsHaveEars

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.

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

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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.

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

YTG123

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Una thervetha por favor!

AItoothbrush

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.