(no subject)
Jul. 29th, 2019 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellwayMy discourse-o-meter pings this post as "moderate: post publicly on a non-viral medium". I think this is because the person immediately before me in the reblog chain is likely to respond well, but OP is probably hostile (and 28k notes is not *quite* enough to be confident that they've stopped paying attention).
[cw: discourse, ableism, arguably racism]
[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
sleepbby; in response to maryellencarter)
Part of the process of language-learning is learning which distinctions *not to make*, which phonemes can be treated as interchangeable. After a lifetime of this, people usually *literally can't perceive* the difference between phonemes their native tongue uses interchangeably.
Ever tried to pronounce a distinction you can't perceive? I have. (Speech disabilities aren't *always* another kettle of worms: plenty of people have by nurture the same issues that I seem to have innately, right down to being able to perceive eths at the beginnings of words but not the ends†.) You *might* be able to accomplish it with outright speech therapy (and then you'd need more speech therapy for the *next* name your language didn't have the right distinctions for), but it's generally not something you can just casually pick up.
(I never actually got speech therapy. Apparently I sometimes stumble into pronouncing thorns by accident, but I don't know how to replicate it.)
(My Punjabi-speaking co-workers mispronounce my name. I demonstrated when I first met them how to pronounce it, and when their syllable stresses and vowel lengths were off I accepted that they were doing their best. Furthermore, a little while later two of them came up to me to ask for clarification: is it pronounced like this, or like this? And *both options sounded identical to me*. The distinction *they* were worrying about was something I couldn't even hear, and meanwhile they were clearly failing to make distinctions I *did* have. Accents are like that.)
Make a good-faith effort. Have others do the same. And when someone's good-faith effort to pronounce your name falls short, accept it in the spirit in which it was intended, and forgive them as you would have them forgive you. We are all in this together.
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†Well, almost: for eths that are *syllable*-initial but not *word*-initial (like "brother"), I can hear the difference if I pay attention (though mostly don't pay attention, and am honestly unsure which pronunciation I tend to use myself), which is apparently a bit more than people from th-fronting dialects are usually capable of.
(For a long time, even after learning about thorns (which I had thought at first were simply a fancier way of spelling effs, the way some words use "c" or "q" instead of "k"), I was under the impression that English simply didn't permit eths at the ends of syllables. When I first learned that the name of the archaic letter was "eth", I tried to wrap my mind and tongue around the name and could not do either. I was relieved when I learned that th-fronting extended partly to eths: it was permission to approach the name in a way I could actually comprehend ("ɛv").)
[cw: discourse, ableism, arguably racism]
[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by
Part of the process of language-learning is learning which distinctions *not to make*, which phonemes can be treated as interchangeable. After a lifetime of this, people usually *literally can't perceive* the difference between phonemes their native tongue uses interchangeably.
Ever tried to pronounce a distinction you can't perceive? I have. (Speech disabilities aren't *always* another kettle of worms: plenty of people have by nurture the same issues that I seem to have innately, right down to being able to perceive eths at the beginnings of words but not the ends†.) You *might* be able to accomplish it with outright speech therapy (and then you'd need more speech therapy for the *next* name your language didn't have the right distinctions for), but it's generally not something you can just casually pick up.
(I never actually got speech therapy. Apparently I sometimes stumble into pronouncing thorns by accident, but I don't know how to replicate it.)
(My Punjabi-speaking co-workers mispronounce my name. I demonstrated when I first met them how to pronounce it, and when their syllable stresses and vowel lengths were off I accepted that they were doing their best. Furthermore, a little while later two of them came up to me to ask for clarification: is it pronounced like this, or like this? And *both options sounded identical to me*. The distinction *they* were worrying about was something I couldn't even hear, and meanwhile they were clearly failing to make distinctions I *did* have. Accents are like that.)
Make a good-faith effort. Have others do the same. And when someone's good-faith effort to pronounce your name falls short, accept it in the spirit in which it was intended, and forgive them as you would have them forgive you. We are all in this together.
---
†Well, almost: for eths that are *syllable*-initial but not *word*-initial (like "brother"), I can hear the difference if I pay attention (though mostly don't pay attention, and am honestly unsure which pronunciation I tend to use myself), which is apparently a bit more than people from th-fronting dialects are usually capable of.
(For a long time, even after learning about thorns (which I had thought at first were simply a fancier way of spelling effs, the way some words use "c" or "q" instead of "k"), I was under the impression that English simply didn't permit eths at the ends of syllables. When I first learned that the name of the archaic letter was "eth", I tried to wrap my mind and tongue around the name and could not do either. I was relieved when I learned that th-fronting extended partly to eths: it was permission to approach the name in a way I could actually comprehend ("ɛv").)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-30 04:09 am (UTC)Huh. I wonder... I have a much longer and more rambly thinky response to this post, which may never get written, but I wonder if I ever picked that up, and if not, why not? Because I literally can't think of a time, with Dari Persian or Portuguese or any of the other languages / accents I've interacted with at some length, where I couldn't *perceive* a difference someone else was clearly perceiving. There are vowel diphthongs in Welsh that I've never managed to... file, to tie to their spellings in a way I could remember or recreate, but I can tell they're *there*. The difference is more "this is a spectrum from e to i and I don't have labels for these points on it" rather than "Those both sound like the same ei". And I wonder -- I imagine that has to be something unique to me and my upbringing? Or not universally unique, but rare. Influenced by factors like "learned Latin from age 7" and "learned tengwar from age 10" and growing up with a surname Nobody Could Pronounce... I think I mentioned at some point that on DS9, Odo is the only person (including Lwaxana herself) to pronounce Lwaxana's name very carefully correctly, and while the Watsonian explanation is that Odo is a very precise person, I am absolutely sure the Doylist explanation has to do with René Auberjonois growing up with that surname and developing a specific consciousness of "you are mangling my name", because that's part of where my feelings about this whole topic come from. Because my surname wasn't ethnic, but it was long and unique and it scared people who tried to read it phonetically (even though it was in fact phonetic by English rules).
I don't know. Like I said, I'm rambling. But I could definitely see me having perceptual... differences that make this... *pulls hair incoherently* Like how I can read Shakespearean English pretty much as if it was fully modern English, translating in my head, and
So. Yeah. That was already pretty long and rambly. I guess I have two feelings at once? One, I guess I can see how someone would just not be able to perceive the ways in which they're mangling a name; my ear for all languages is probably much more unusual than I think it is. But two, I feel like there's... a major difference between someone who is honestly making a good-faith effort to the best of their ability versus someone who is being An Racist and refusing to try, but having been a very well-meaning racist and homophobe, I also feel like there may be a significant range of people who... tell themselves they're making a good-faith effort when they could in fact do much better? I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong, or even just behind the times. Do racists bother to pretend good faith to themselves anymore? :P
(This comment probably does not have anything like the tone I'm trying to have, because I'm typing with one finger on a very small screen while having another conversation... :P)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-30 03:18 pm (UTC)Makes sense. My condition seems like the sort of thing where you'd expect the opposite condition to also exist.
(Also, and I didn't really talk about this because I was focusing on the more-strongly-supportive-of-my-argument (and also pretty common, to be fair) perceptual problems, there are plenty of phonemes (generally ones where the native tongue doesn't use them *at all*, rather than using them but treating them as interchangeable with something else) where people without a lifetime's experience can generally *hear* them but have a hell of a time wrapping their mouth around them.
I think the speech-therapy thing still applies here, though: I do think there has to be *some* level of effort that is possible-but-supererogatory, and it's mostly to do with how scaleable that effort is. It's easy to *feel* alone and icebreaker-ship-like when most people you talk to mispronounce your name, but in a lot of cases they're also interacting with other people with, as the OP puts it, 'different' names: just not the *same* 'differences' as yours, so a lot of the lessons learned for one don't cross-apply. A level of effort that's reasonable with a single 'different' person may become overwhelming when applied to everyone you meet†, and there's often no principled way to decide which phonemes get your budget of learning effort (though I expect there's plenty of unprincipled ones, and even more that could be *spun* as unprincipled by the people left out).)
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>>Because my surname wasn't ethnic, but it was long and unique and it scared people who tried to read it phonetically (even though it was in fact phonetic by English rules).<<
Huh. I've *seen* your birth surname, and it did not strike me as especially difficult. I guess the transition between the second and third syllables might be a little tricky if you were talking fast (and, admittedly, I am pretty much always talking fast).
(People (of my and closely related dialects) are usually pretty good about *pronouncing* my surname--though I did have someone at the blood-donation clinic once who hesitated, trailing off in order to allow me to fill in the rest and thereby demonstrate--but god, they *cannot* spell it.)
---
I agree that there *are* definitely people who could stand to be trying harder††, but I also feel--and I know this is kind of a recurring theme with me--that the backlash has been too strong. I see stuff like the OP, going around encouraging others to assume bad faith when people fuck up *in a domain where good-faith actors often fuck up*, which seems like a good way to make a lot of enemies you really didn't need to make, to perceive yourself as being surrounded by hostility to a much larger (and possibly somewhat self-fulfilling? people tend to get pissed when you are mad at them over something they can't help, and also often don't react well if you are mad at them for no apparent reason) extent than true.
and the perception of being constantly surrounded by racists will encourage them to be more activist-y, what a conveniently useful outcome for activism to achieve---
†When I think about this I get a memory of my citizenship ceremony, where they called up each person to come and receive their papers and gifts, and out of three-ish dozen people we were the only ones with Anglo names. And yeah that's not a great example in some ways--not everyone is expected to be capable of running citizenship ceremonies, "must be able to pronounce a wide variety of things" can simply be made a job requirement--but OTOH when you're *not* in a citizenship ceremony you're still living in the same community as all those new citizens (and yet-to-be citizens), still interacting with them.
††Though even this can't always really be placed firmly under "racism", like the people who pronounce Clara Oswald's name the American way and don't even try to use the British form of "Clara" (as she does). (Maybe *some* of those people would try harder if she were a real person, but I bet not all of them would.)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 04:27 am (UTC)This is valid. There's a guy at work named Andrés, whose name makes a pretty good example for some more rambling about this whole topic: roughly three-quarters of the people at work call him "Andreas", three syllables, with or without the Spanish trilled R depending on their accents. A few of the other Latinos and approximately two of his non-Latino work friends pronounce it correctly. For some reason my accent wants to make it "Ahn-drezz", accent on the first syllable, even though that also pings my ear as mangling it? :P I asked him one evening how to say it (two syllables, stress on the second syllable, trilled R, soft S), and a friend who was with me said "not undress but on-dress", which is honestly close enough? Like a good-faith effort as you said, getting everything right except that trilled R which English-speakers don't really have experience with.
'there has to be *some* level of effort that is possible-but-supererogatory'
I mean, yes, being fair, this is also me being supererogatory as usual. ;P It would probably be perfectly acceptable for me to take the "on-dress" route, instead of wrestling with that -ndr- particle and trying to get the R trilled, which usually happens at the expense of the soft S -- it comes out "on-drezs" most of the time. (This is what I mean about tengwar, though. My fingers are twitching here because English doesn't have two different letters for the trilled and untrilled R, and if I was writing in tengwar to someone who understood tengwar, I could indicate what I meant without having to say which R all the time. I suppose I could figure out how to code IPA symbols, but I'm not... fluent in IPA the way I am in tengwar. *frustrated sigh*)
Where was I? Right. Partly, yes, it is me having supererogation issues. Partly it's just that trying to wrap my mouth and brain around strange new phonemes is fun for me. That's probably a beta-brain thing too. (I still cannot get a glottal stop consistently for the life of me, but I keep trying, and my Portuguese vowel diphthongs are apparently quite acceptable.) Fun, and a little bit of a showing-off thing? People with Difficult(TM) names are consistently impressed when I get them right.
(There is also the aspect that I do live in a place where mastering the Spanish trilled R *is* going to have applicability to more than one person's name. Once I finally get the hang of "Andrés" I might start tackling "García", I can trill my R okay between vowels but you get another consonant in there and things go haywire.)
'I've *seen* your birth surname, and it did not strike me as especially difficult.'
Right?! I mean, it's completely phonetic. And yet nobody could seem to either spell or pronounce it correctly. The most common error in writing was conflating it with a much more common and similarly spelled name, which I can see, because most USians seem to have terrible reading comprehension. But people who *did* seem to be making a good-faith effort to sound it out would always get letters switched around and make a horrible kludge of it, even if one tried to explain by breaking it down into its component syllables. (People who were making fun of it honestly had to put in some work to be as creative as those who were honestly confused, although one this one twentysomething college guy who was coaching my sister's soccer team came up with an impressive mess which was definitely on purpose.)
'even this can't always really be placed firmly under "racism"'
That's one thing that growing up with my particular surname did kind of cement in my mind: that people or at least USian people are, in general, really bad at Unfamiliar names, whether racially/ethnically coded or not. It's not necessarily racism or bad faith, and yet there's this very strong feeling of *frustration* that if they'd just make a *little* more effort -- or if they could just point that effort in the right *direction*, like the people who got all the sounds right but in the wrong order.
'people who pronounce Clara Oswald's name the American way and don't even try to use the British form of "Clara"'
Huh. That actually kind of circles back around to the beginning of what you said, because there are names, like "Clara", where I can perceive that there are two different ways of saying it but I can't seem to wrap my head around the idea that they *matter*. Like, Leah versus Leia, I can see. Andres versus Andreas. ...huh. It can't be as simple as "they're spelled the same way", I don't think? Knowing the way my beta-brain works, it might be. O_O
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 01:44 pm (UTC)Not sure I've encountered that regional variation myself. Where I was growing up, those were homophones. (What is it, do some Leahs do the "e" like this?)
(Ah, apparently it's because I was growing up around Jews using the original Hebrew pronunciation, not the English version. And yes, the English version does long-e.)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-31 02:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-30 08:14 pm (UTC)I have! it's hard
'v' vs 'b', for instance, which is not a distinction that exists in Spanish but does in English. I *think* I can pronounce it now, at any rate my lips do different things when I use one or the other, but I can't really hear the difference.
English vowels are a mess and have waaay too many subtle distinctions for comfort, too. every once in a while i read native English speakers talk about how you're supposed to pronounce [word1] to rhyme with [word2] and not [word3], and they're all things are pronounce the exact same way. It's very frustrating.
On the subject of names, I haven't actually ever tried to get a native English speaker to pronounce my name correctly (they tend to pronounce it like the analogous English name). I don't know if it'd be hard for them or not, and it's not like I particularly mind.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-02 08:16 pm (UTC)*researches*
Is it just a difference of which syllable is stressed, or are there other aspects I'm not picking up?
no subject
Date: 2019-08-02 08:52 pm (UTC)So, no, it's not a difference in emphasis, to the best of my knowledge we put it on the same syllable. The way native English speakers pronounce it has a slightly different vowel on the 'So' syllable and if I was more confident with IPA I'd illustrate it with that but I am not.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-02 09:47 pm (UTC)---
You might be able to demonstrate with a voice recording, but I don't know how comfortable you are with your voice.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-02 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-06 01:04 am (UTC)(I can't do metre either, except in as much as it registers as *very important* that poetry/verse have it)