One thing I noticed recently is that American's pronounce certain names and words strangely, which is understandable. I first noticed it listening to an old RT Podcast where they were talking about Sunshine with Cillian Murphy and I want to say it was Burnie who said his name but whoever it was pronounced his name as 'Sillian' which I found a bit strange and today I was watching a video on Machinima where they were reading fan mail from a guy called Cian and they did the same thing, pronouncing it 'Sian'. Both of which would have been pronounced as 'Killeeun' and 'Keyan' respectively.
Being Irish these are common names to me so it really stood out when they were pronounced like that. Another example I could see being pronounced the same is Kieran. In Irish that name would be spelled Ciarán( pronounced phonetically = Keyrawn), would someone who saw that name in Irish pronounce is Siaran?
Can anyone else think of some examples like that or examples from the other side?
My name is Ferdia, type out how you think that would be pronounced :P
Yeah I started listening to the podcast recently too and I noticed the same thing. (I'm also Irish) It happens a few more times in later episodes too. Glad I wasn't the only one who thought this weird, but also acceptable as I can imagine they might be odd names to people who never seen them before.
I don't think it's an uncommon problem with some Irish names (my family are Irish and it took me a while to learn how to say Cillian correctly). The issue with names like Cian is when you think of words like Cyan which are pronounced with an 's' sound.
Can you imagine trying to pronounce names like Aoife, Saoirse or even Siobhan if you didn't have prior knowledge of the names. Unless you've met/heard of someone with that name there is no way you'd know how to say it.
Plus they tend to have the Americanized versions of some of the names like Sean/Shawn (Sean could be interpreted as sounding like 'Seen').
Yeah it really stood out for me, I had to rewind and make sure I wasn't hearing things :P I can totally understand it though, some of those names would be totally foreign to a lot of American/Canadian people.
That's a pretty good point, never really thought of words like that. To me though I pronounce Cyan the same way I would Cillian, K-eye-an or something like that. Haha I got thinking of that and started to think of friends I have with would be confusing names like Caoilainn (Key-linn), Triona(Tree-oh-na), Ruairi(Roo-ree, Irish for Rory) or Roisín(Ro-sheen, Irish for Rose)
They are applying English rules of pronunciation to Irish words. The reason is because they think we are all using the English alphabet, we're not, this is the Greco-Roman alphabet, and it has different rules of pronunciation for different languages. Chinese words written using this alphabet are pronounced differently than how we would read them. For example where they use the letter Q we would use the letters CH. So Qiang, I would have pronounced that Kee-yang, but it is actually pronounced Chang.
Everything above is all good points. But I was when i was thinking about it I then realised now I've a lot of Polish friends and when I try pronouncing their names at first I had a bit of trouble with that and that couldn't understand why I couldn't get it. So yeah, it all comes around.
I also pronounce Siobhan the same way Aidref does.
Yeah I came into that problem in college and took me a while to understand that. A lad in my course had that name. He eventually started spelling it Chang and then we all copped on. A course wide blonde moment.
Don't forget that he chased out all the snakes from Ireland.... because of course that would be the reason there aren't any. I find it funny that he was teetotal and yet people celebrate him by getting trashed, regardless of nationality.
