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I hate westernized and Anglo pronunciations of Slavic/Eastern European names (rant) (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Kirbywithwhip1987@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml

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While Anglos and Westerners usually at least try to pronounce, say, Japanese names right, they don't even bother with Slavic/Eastern European ones, especially the ones with Cyrillic letters in them, which means that they end up writing the names ending with 'ić', as 'ich', and pronounce it with K. For example, if the last name is 'Jovanović', they'll write it 'Jovanovich' and pronounce it 'Jovanovik'.

There are names such as Ivan, Bela or Vera, which get pronounced as Ajvan, Beyla or Veyra instead of properly and of course Stalin being pronounced as Stalin instead of Staljin.

Then DimitrescU, if I have to hear it pronounced without U one more time, I'm going to lose it... They keep saying it without U, which just makes it sound French almost as if it's Dimitresque, how hard is it to pronounce it with U?

Then the last name Ćertić, they write it as Certic or Sertic, which is completely wrong.

And the one I saw most recently, Miloch or Milosh instead of Miloš, it's one of the most common names in Serbia and I see it frequently written like that for some goddamn reason.

So, why is it so hard for Westoids to at least try to pronounce and write Eastern European names correctly while being able do it accurately for Japanese ones which are miles harder?

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[–] signofzeta@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 1 month ago

Part of the issue is most keyboards in America don’t have keys to add accent marks. macOS has Option keys, iOS has the long-press popups, and Linux has dead keys, but on Windows (the vast majority of the market), you still have to bang open Character Map or memorize numeric codes to get accented letters. Sure, you can get an international keyboard for your desktop, but most people won’t, and if you have a laptop, swapping the keyboard is significantly harder.

I wanted to correct someone’s last name in our system, changing Munoz to Muñoz. It took me a good minute to get that ñ in there. Not that most of my coworkers know how to pronounce that, mind you.

I studied Spanish in high school. That has relatively few accent marks and diacritics compared to the Eastern European languages, which was not an option at all in high school and still something I barely know.

Now, enough ranting. Are there any quick videos or tutorials for learning how to pronounce some of these letters in the various languages?