Barcelona

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Fowks pass!

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Castilian and Catalan are two different things, I think the previous poster may have just misinterpreted the top level post which was not wrong about C being pronounced as the English TH.

AItoothbrush

I know its sounds like im an asshole but i lived 4 months there and picked itnup lol. So now i alsways say it like that even tho my spanish is pretty bad. But i like to pick up the correct, native pronounciacion of place names anyways to show a bit of respect to the people living there and i dont judge you if you dont do it.

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What knock-off Google Translate clone did you use?

"If it's that urgent, you could have checked my profile.

Have a nice day."

translation provided by Google Translate (for realsies)

lime!

yeh. "accent humor" is almost always just thinly veiled just racism or ableism. here at least it's got a bit of a spin on it. not a lot, but some.

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Hm, but reacting negatively to someone pronouncing it, for lack of a better term, the original way IS presciptivism. This isn't about someone who pronounces a Spanish word the Spanish way criticizing someone who pronounces it the English way, but the other way around.

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I think it depends on intent and what one's native language is. Basically, why would someone opt to pronounce a word a certain way if they know there's differing standards.

No one can help accents, so if for example I was natively Spanish speaking and, while speaking English, I pronounced some Spanish-derived loanwords with the occasional rolled R, no one should be faulted for that.

But if I grew up speaking English natively, learned Spanish after the fact, and then I opt to use the Spanish pronunciation of Spanish-derived terms while speaking English, that comes across as pretentious. I used to pronounce these words one way, but then I gained knowledge, and now I self-correct because I (consciously or subconsciously) want to signal to others that I know more about a language than they do. That act of self-correcting would be an implicit declaration that there is a more correct way to pronounce these words that people who know the difference should use, and pushes back on the idea that the pronunciation of the destination language can be equally valid.

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Not OP, but maybe it's better phrased as "white Americans have a limited shared cultural heritage."

Waves of immigration make it hard to tell what of that 5 centuries is actually shared. It's also viewed as tacky to try and lay claim to the bit before your ancestors arrived.

If your ancestors were Irish and Italian immigrants from around 1850, going off about the Mayflower can be viewed as similar putting on airs

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There is no mention of catalan in my post because it wasn't about catalan.

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Many Spanish folks I have met roll their eyes when my Latin American Spanish skills rill my r's.

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Let's not put them on the pedal stool

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I'm bilingual and that's dumb.

People living in a place don't care how you say the name of the place where they live when you're talking to someone else in your own language. They don't feel a sudden burst of respect from someone elsewhere in the world.

More importantly, the native names of most places use phonemes that simply don't exist in English. Turkey wants you to say "Türkiye" but not only does English not have the "ü" character, that phoneme simply doesn't exist in English. If you're trying to communicate with someone in English, you shouldn't use phonemes that don't exist in English.

Fundamentally, the purpose of saying a place's name is to communicate with someone, it's not to show respect to the people who live in the place being named. If someone is going to find it even slightly difficult to understand you because you're choosing to pronounce the name of a place in a way that's unnatural to English speakers, then you're doing a bad job of communicating.

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It's our national Mythology, we're a land of migrants and refugees. People have been coming to this land for 500 years, yeah that's a long time compared to our perspective, but there are traditions and cultures in Europe that predate even knowing about the existence of other land in another hemisphere by an additional 1000 years.

And the culture you describe as dominant over the world while yes is predominantly white, is just unchecked capitalism and neoliberalism and a product of whoever controls the largest military and acts as the economic measuring stick to the rest of the world and that if any other nation were to unseat the US as the dominant economic and militant force, then their oligarch's culture would dominate the planet.

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What's pretentious about it is that you're talking in English, so you should use the English place name. The purpose of communication is to be understood by the other person. If you use a non-standard pronunciation, even if it's the name as the locals there pronounce it.

So, to communicate effectively to another English speaker in English you shouldn't be saying "Munchen" you should be saying Munich. You should be saying Prague, not Praha. Vienna, not Wien.

Choosing to say the name of a place "like the natives do" might be seen as pretentious because instead of trying to communicate effectively, you're attempting to seem smart or cultured.

Flying Squid

Reminds me of one of the best Kids in the Hall sketches.

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And then there's the layer on the other side, because the majority of Spanish speakers worldwide pronounce it with an "S" sound.

So, the majority of Spanish speakers in the Americas (which by far outnumber the number of Spanish speakers in Spain) use an "S" sound. The dominant form of Spanish in Spain uses the "th", but the local dialect goes back to an "S" sound.

So, what rule are you going to go by? How the locals say it? The most locally of locals will use an "S" sound. How the majority of Spanish speakers say it? That's again an "S" sound. How the majority of the people in the country who legal sovereignty over that region say it? Then I guess you'd go with the "TH" sound.

The most logical rule, to me, is to pronounce it however the person you're speaking to will most easily understand it. In English to another English speaker, that almost certainly isn't going to be the "th" pronunciation.

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Look ma, a cunt

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"Foh" and "foe" both read as the same pronunciation to me. What's the difference?

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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