It's interesting that the effective lottery Apple runs (race to get through to the server) has no such burden, even though they could in theory game their servers to treat a given country or company unfavorably.

I assume we're talking about the same thing — a free lottery that anybody can sign up for, to select who gets to buy a ticket.

My original simplistic thought was that there are two cases: one where people invest the effort to get a thorough understanding of a language's pronunciation, and an ad hoc case where an American reporter who hasn't invested this effort gets coached on how to pronounce a person's non-English name. I glossed over the issue of unfamiliar phonemes, but as you point out it can't really be ignored.

Common practice in the languages I can think of is to bend the pronunciation of foreign words to fit the native set of phonemes. In computer programming terms, it's like lossy conversion from one string encoding to another. For example, in Mandarin what we write as "r" is not really an "r"; it's sort of between an "r" sound and a "zh" sound. But for English-speaking purposes, the "r" sound is close enough, as for example when we say "Renmin University". (By the way, the "Ren" is not pronounced as in "Ren and Stimpy", but as in "Run DMC". It's all so confusing!)

One "tricky" phoneme in Lu Lingzi's name is the "zi". An American reporter could easily learn that the Mandarin pronunciation is not at all like "zee", but pretty close to "dzuh" or "dzih", like in "pizzicato". That shouldn't take more than a few seconds to learn, as there are no unfamiliar phonemes in that syllable.

Another tricky phoneme is the "u", which in this case is pronounced in Mandarin like the German "ü". French has this sound too — we mispronounce it all the time when we say "déjà vu" like "day zhah voo". I think it would be okay for an American reporter to perform the same "lossy conversion" and pronounce "Lu" as "Loo". Thus: "Loo Ling Dzuh". And again, I wouldn't expect the reporter to try to get the tones right — that's a whole separate problem from the phonemes.

In the pronunciation classes that I proposed, it would make sense to teach these acceptable "lossy conversions".

There's at least one more issue I didn't consider when I wrote this post, which is the wishes of the person whose name we're pronouncing. I don't know how Lu Lingzi preferred to be addressed or how she would introduce herself. I've only read a tiny bit about her and seen a couple of video news clips. She seemed like a very nice young woman, and I can only imagine the heartbreak her family is suffering.

[Disclaimer: I'm not at all fluent in Chinese, but I don't think I'm too far off here.]

The sounds that make up spoken languages are called phonemes. Linguists have organized all the phonemes of all the known languages of the world into a sort of periodic table. Different languages use different sets of phonemes. (Apologies if you already know all this; I didn't learn any of it until I took a psych class in college.)

For example: English has both an "L" sound and an "R" sound. Japanese doesn't have either, but does have a sound in between them. Because of this, native Japanese speakers have a hard time with "L" and "R" sounds. When they try to make either sound, it comes out as the in-between sound.

Here's the crazy part: input and output are affected equally. That is to say, not only is it hard to make sounds that are outside of your native language, it's also hard to perceive them as distinct. The words "rock" and "lock" will actually sound like the same word to a native Japanese speaker.

My last name is spelled (in Arabic) راغب. People often ask me how to pronounce it correctly. I honestly have no idea what the correct answer is, because the غ represents a sound not in English, which I cannot reproduce, and I'm not sure I really get the difference between غ and خ. And this is my own name!

So consider that those who are butchering these names may literally be unable to hear the difference, or even if they do, may require a lot of practice before they can get it right.

I don’t care whether you are left-, centrist- or right-wing oriented, or a saneoid or nutjob from any ideology. Can we just agree on one simple thing:

As a nation, we should be graded with possibly a D+ for our attempts to pronounce not only the names of a lovely young Chinese citizen who died so horribly a week ago, but also the names of her (alleged) attackers who appear to have been Degestani immigrants to this nation?

Can we at LEAST come together across the aisles and agree that perhaps ANY required four year English curriculum should include a smattering of time spent towards getting the pronunciation / spelling of foreign names and states correct? If not part of the legally required curriculum (which I see might offend the right-wing a bit) then perhaps just occasional “advanced” spelling bees where every word is a foreign name or state which must be spelled correctly by the player AND also also pronounced correctly by the judge or announcer.

Can we agree on at least this ONE idea, or are we going to continue to be that callous in our posture towards the rest of the planet?

http://www.notesfromandy.com/2013/04/23/idea-for-a-pronounced-improvement/

Yes. [however pronounced like “yesz” since I •really• agree with the sentiments.]

I have also been known to correct gringos in pronunciation of hispanic names for cities and streets in the southwestern USA for the past couple of decades. I was born and bred in NYC and even Boston-folk tend to exhibit better pronunciation skills when their hispanic community is even smaller (percentage wise).

I’m willing to forgive on the long-standing debate on how to pronounce “Aguello St.” in San Francisco, but I will not yield in certain other areas.

Con respeto,
— Me llamo Pablo