c4countdown

So I've been having this discussion with a Swedish colleague at work, which has quickly spread to other British and non-British (including Polish, Danish and Canadian) colleagues, and the general consensus is that British people are mental. I'm finding it hard to disagree with this conclusion, and I'm not even sure whether I want to argue against it or for it. I am hoping you guys can chime in with some interesting points, examples, and opinions.

I think it stemmed from me referring to Ibiza by pronouncing it as "Ibitha". But basically we British people do this for tons of Spanish places - e.g. we'd feel terribly basic if we pronounced "Sevilla" as "Seviller" as it is written, we know we got to go for "Se-vee-ah".

This extends to nearly every Spanish place, and seems to be based in several factors that I can perceive, including but almost definitely not limited to:

• the person's actual knowledge of the proper pronunciation
• some kind of sliding scale relationship with how poncy it might be perceived to be to pronounce it properly
• a similar sliding scale in terms of how "common" it might be perceived to be to pronounce it incorrectly

Zaragoza - do you go for "Zarragotha"? Barcelona is an odd one, why does it feel less bad to pronounce the C as a C rather than "Barthelona"?

We do it for a lot of Spanish places but not many others. In France I guess you could say we do it with "Nice" as "Neece" but we never say "Paree" for "Paris" unless we're doing some campy "city of love" thing.

It seems to be only British people who try and pronounce the place names like this, and we almost exclusively do it with Spanish place names. No other country represented by my colleagues does it. They all pronounce foreign place names in their own localised accents without consideration of the foreign/proper pronunciation.

I'll add to this thread with more evidence, examples, thoughts, but very much looking forward to what you lot think.

I think we'd say "Seville" anyway rather than "Sevilla" (other than you football people).

I'm going to hijack this thread to ask a related question - with country names, we don't generally go for the native spelling or pronunciation - e.g. Italy, Spain, not Italia, España. Except that if you ever say "Ivory Coast", someone might correct you with "Côte d’Ivoire". Why is that?

If you look at the Wikipedia articles, it says their official names, which seem to be in English other than Ivory Coast - is that just their official English names or their overall official names? Italy, Spain, Ivory Coast.

There's a Spanish basketball player called Sergio Llull. Never quite sure what to go for there so I've always gone for Yooey.

This is an interesting question and to complicate matters further, I'd like to suggest that there's also an age-related thing that goes along with it (i.e. older English-speaking people are more likely to pronounce non-English names and places exactly as they are spelled, whereas younger people are more likely to use the native pronunciation). I wonder if this is anything to do with the boom in package holidays in the 1970s and 1980s?

MORE THOUGHT REQUIRED.

I rushed this thread out very quickly and then had a chat to Heather about it on the way somewhere and realised I'd missed quite a lot of salient points out - one thing we discussed was the rise in package holidays Jim!

Will try and add some notes to this later.

Mark Deeks wrote:There's a Spanish basketball player called Sergio Llull. Never quite sure what to go for there so I've always gone for Yooey.

Though I (nearly) always try to use pronunciations as close to the native ones as possible, I think I'd pronounce this one as spelt just for the llullz.

I'll pronounce a 'j' in Balkan place names as a 'y' (i.e. correctly) because try saying Ljubljana with the j's, but pronounce Spanish/French places wrongly because I sound like a dork when pronouncing them correctly.

A related issue with this is the different pronunciation of Js in Portuguese and Spanish - it never seemed to be a problem before Mourinho, but nowadays, the pronunciation of Jose seems to rely on pot-luck.

I've thought about this kind of thing before, without reaching many definite conclusions, other than I pronounce all foreign place names the best I can, until or unless someone who knows better (i.e. a native speaker or an advanced non-native speaker) corrects me. Otherwise one runs the risk of trying a bit too hard to be correct and actually being wrong. This is an interesting blog piece about the pronunciation of Barcelona / the Spanish 'lisp': https://www.hudin.com/blog/going-to-bar ... arthelona/

What about British place names, I don't hear you ask? I tend to stick to using my own (Home Counties / Estuary English) accent, e.g. I pronounce the H in Hull and Huddersfield, and I say Barth for Bath and Newcarstle for Newcastle.

I've thought about this kind of thing before, without reaching many definite conclusions, other than I pronounce all foreign place names the best I can, until or unless someone who knows better (i.e. a native speaker or an advanced non-native speaker) corrects me. Otherwise one runs the risk of trying a bit too hard to be correct and actually being wrong. This is an interesting blog piece about the pronunciation of Barcelona / the Spanish 'lisp': https://www.hudin.com/blog/going-to-bar ... arthelona/

What about British place names, I don't hear you ask? I tend to stick to using my own (Home Counties / Estuary English) accent, e.g. I pronounce the H in Hull and Huddersfield, and I say Barth for Bath and Newcarstle for Newcastle.

Heather Styles wrote:What about British place names, I don't hear you ask? I tend to stick to using my own (Home Counties / Estuary English) accent, e.g. I pronounce the H in Hull and Huddersfield, and I say Barth for Bath and Newcarstle for Newcastle.

I've discussed Newcastle with people before. Someone was saying you should pronounce it the northern way, but I think that's taking it a bit far. And Melbourne in Australia "should" be "Melb'n", and Toronto "should" be "Tronna".

The way I see it, make an effort to pronounce people's surnames correctly and in their own tongue, but not places, because people have feelings and auditory senses and places do not.

Gavin Chipper wrote:

Heather Styles wrote:What about British place names, I don't hear you ask? I tend to stick to using my own (Home Counties / Estuary English) accent, e.g. I pronounce the H in Hull and Huddersfield, and I say Barth for Bath and Newcarstle for Newcastle.

I've discussed Newcastle with people before. Someone was saying you should pronounce it the northern way, but I think that's taking it a bit far. And Melbourne in Australia "should" be "Melb'n", and Toronto "should" be "Tronna".

My mother insists on saying 'DonCAHster' instead of 'Doncarster' (and correcting those who don't), but doesn't bother doing this with any other northern place name. Absolute freak.

Some things

Not just spain
We might not do "Paree" but Amiens, Lille, Marseille, Versailles, Nice - we do all these Frenchly.
Bruges (complicated for multiple dialect reasons but whether we're using Bruges or Brugge we never pronounce as is.
And I loved Jen's Ljubljana example.

Double place names, Anglicised/Westernised options
Things like Warsaw where this is our own version of "Warszawa" - so it's never on the cards we would ever try and pronounce "Warsaw" with Polish localisation. Same with "Venice" and "Florence", we'd never try and make them sound Italian, but would naturally expect more effort to be made with "Venezia" or "Firenze".

Spanish dialects
Obviously tons of dialects in any country but Spanish has big splits between its own main dialects. Neither "Barcelona" or "Barthelona" can be called definitively Spanish or non-Spanish since they are both used by Spanish people themselves.

Embarrassed about language
Part of the reason we probably make more of an effort to try and pronounce place names in their local dialects than other countries might is because we have a terrible history with languages and we’re pretty embarrassed as a nation about how bad we are at speaking languages other than English.

That's part of some stuff lifted from email at work. The prick responded with this:

All of this overruled simply by the fact that you’re inconsistent and have chosen a few places where you use a local pronunciation, which is our point. Think about it:

- Where are you going?
- On holiday to IBITHA
- Where’s that?
- In Spain

See how weird it is? If you want to be consistent, this is what you do:

A
- Where are you going?
- On holiday to IBITHA
- Where’s that?
- In España

B
- Where are you going?
- On holiday to IBIZA
- Where’s that?
- In Spain

As Robin said, there are two people in the world. People who say “Chorizo” and people who say “Choritho”.

Fucking stupid Swedish pricks.

Matt Morrison wrote:Same with "Venice" and "Florence", we'd never try and make them sound Italian, but would naturally expect more effort to be made with "Venezia" or "Firenze".

Most Brits would be confused if you said you were going on holiday to Firenze. This reminds me of the time I looked up how to pronounce Sigur Rós, learned the correct way, started referring to them as such, and had to revert back to Anglicising it because people didn't have a clue what I was talking about.

Jennifer Steadman wrote:My mother insists on saying 'DonCAHster' instead of 'Doncarster' (and correcting those who don't), but doesn't bother doing this with any other northern place name. Absolute freak.

I'm with your mum here. Saying Don-car-ster and Lan-car-ster is ridiculous.

Jon O'Neill wrote:

Jennifer Steadman wrote:My mother insists on saying 'DonCAHster' instead of 'Doncarster' (and correcting those who don't), but doesn't bother doing this with any other northern place name. Absolute freak.

I'm with your mum here. Saying Don-car-ster and Lan-car-ster is ridiculous.

Why? If you say 'cast' in a southern accent normally, why would you pronounce it any other way in a place name?

Jennifer Steadman wrote:

Jon O'Neill wrote:

Jennifer Steadman wrote:My mother insists on saying 'DonCAHster' instead of 'Doncarster' (and correcting those who don't), but doesn't bother doing this with any other northern place name. Absolute freak.

I'm with your mum here. Saying Don-car-ster and Lan-car-ster is ridiculous.

Why? If you say 'cast' in a southern accent normally, why would you pronounce it any other way in a place name?

I didn't realise that Lancaster was so named for the historical tradition of throwing Local Area Networks around??

I think "Doncarster" sounds OK, but not "Lancarster". So there you go.

Doncaster rhymes with Lancaster. But it's Barth (at a pinch).

It gets me that people will go to great lengths to pronounce foreign place names 'correctly' but don't make the slightest effort to get Welsh names right.

Jennifer Steadman wrote:
My mother insists on saying 'DonCAHster' instead of 'Doncarster' (and correcting those who don't), but doesn't bother doing this with any other northern place name. Absolute freak.

I know what you're saying here, but doesn't CAH rhyme with CAR? qv FAH, FAR

Ian Volante wrote:

Jennifer Steadman wrote:
My mother insists on saying 'DonCAHster' instead of 'Doncarster' (and correcting those who don't), but doesn't bother doing this with any other northern place name. Absolute freak.

I know what you're saying here, but doesn't CAH rhyme with CAR? qv FAH, FAR

Erm, yeah actually, you can read it as such. I literally can't think of a better way to transliterate it. I suppose I should've done the second one as 'Doncaaster'.

Still not sure why 'Lancaaster' would be wrong if you're from the south though. I mean, Northerners aren't exactly going out of their way to say 'Baath' correctly.

Jennifer Steadman wrote:Northerners aren't exactly going out of their way to say 'Baath' correctly.

It would seem a bit daft to pronounce the place differently to the water-tub thing though, wouldn't it, when both are spelled the same?

I'm from Doncaster, by the way, and your mam's right.

JimBentley wrote:

Jennifer Steadman wrote:Northerners aren't exactly going out of their way to say 'Baath' correctly.

It would seem a bit daft to pronounce the place differently to the water-tub thing though, wouldn't it, when both are spelled the same?

I'm from Doncaster, by the way, and your mam's right.

If you're from the North and naturally pronounce 'Doncaster' in the 'native' way, I understand it. But I don't really see why someone who would naturally pronounce it differently would force themselves to speak differently when no-one is getting confused by me pronouncing it in my natural way. It's not a LUHJUBLUHJANA situation where people are going to get confused by not pronouncing it in the native way.

Where are we standing on 'Mousehole', btw? Meant to be said "Mowzul", not Mouse-hole. I think I'd pronounce it correctly in Cornwall or while talking to someone who was quite familiar with Cornwall, but incorrectly if talking to a total noob. (A la Sigur Rós.)

Jennifer Steadman wrote:Where are we standing on 'Mousehole', btw? Meant to be said "Mowzul", not Mouse-hole.

I thought it was more like "muzzle"? I may have been misinformed though.

Bruges is an odd one. The British tend to go for the Frenchy "Broozh" pronunciation, but it's in Flanders and the local Flemish would call it Brugge, pronounced "Bruggeh".

Of the approximate five million times I've heard reference to Barcelona it's been pronounced Barthelona about 4 times and Barselona the rest.

Does anybody pronounce the city name Bath differently to how they pronounce the water tub?