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0 pointsvetinari2y ago0 comments

Being written in Latin script is not a guarantee on correct pronunciation; languages have wildly different ideas how to pronounce written text.

Paradoxically, Serbian belongs in the group "write as you hear"; the mapping between writing and pronunciation is quite simple and uniform in slavic languages. It is English, that you have to learn twice -- first time to speak, second time to spell.

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the_af2y ago· 2 in thread

> Being written in Latin script is not a guarantee on correct pronunciation

Yes, I understand this: being a Spanish native speaker, I had to learn the rules of pronunciation of the English language. Spanish is also pronounced as written, mostly.

You can figure it out, so it's still better to spell English names in English, Serb names in Serb, and so on. The only concession I will make is leaving out extraneous accents and glyphs in informal writing (e.g. written accents; I will accept if they are omitted and substituted by the closest glyph in your language).

"Translating" names is something I really, really dislike. In this particular case, it's extra silly, since everybody who cares already knows who Woz is and will read his name correctly, Serbs included. This is not some random person whose name they just heard for the first time.

mc322y ago

If my name were John and I moved to Brazil should I be mad if people call me Joao, or if Sebastian, Sebastiao?

It’s no big deal.

There was a Mexican dude whose parents named him Joe, but they pronounced it something close to /Dzoe’/, so neither /Dzou/ nor /Xoe/. I think he was better off going by Joe over here.

the_af2y ago

Mad is up to you.

But John and Joao are definitely not the same name. If someone asks you "is your name John or Joao?", even in Brazil there's only one right answer. At best you can say "both names can trace their origin to the same root name", but they are not the same name.

The Mexican guy's name or your anecdote is named Joe (but pronounced like he or his parents wanted it). There are no two ways about it.

In Argentina and Uruguay some people are called "Jonathan", only pronounced "Shonatan" (or in some Spanish pronunciations, "Yonatan"). That's the way it is.

Finally, phonetically spelling the name and surname of a known celebrity, as in Wozniak's case, just seems silly to me.

Is the president of the US You Baiden? That's a phonetic spelling in Spanish, after all! (Silly, right?).

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