(no subject)

[bluegenedream.livejournal.com]

I have a last name pronunciation question. I have an awful tendency to pronounce any French name I see with a French accent. (I used to confuse some people so badly when I said 'New Orleans') How would you pronounce Foucault or Feucault (the person has awful handwriting) correctly in English?
Would you pronounce it the French way? Fu-Ko (Foucault). Or Feu-Ko (Feucault). I don't even really know how to correctly write out the French pronunciation for "feu" in English but yeah... Any help?

And another more, what do you think, type of question.

Does a name own a person or does a person own a name?


Ok, that wasn't terribly eloquent so I'll try to elaborate.

Of course a person isn't always defined by their name but I was wondering how much you guys let your impression of a name affect your impression of a person. Like, you know, when you hear things like "She just doesn't look like a Jennifer, she looks like an Evelyn instead." Does it take a while for your preconceptions of a name to settle with a person? Are there some names that you feel need a certain personality or flair for someone to "own" it properly?

And then of course, on the other spectrum is a person who owns a name so completely that you can't ever think of it without that person. Like...for me it'd probably be...Ariel. I always think of The Little Mermaid. No questions asked. And when I finally met an Ariel, who was not little mermaid-like in any way, (he was actually a boy) I couldn't stop imagining him with flowing red hair and a tail. What are some names that are already so owned by a person you can never shake off the connotations?

Basically, I thought it'd be interesting to hear some of your thoughts. What sort of names etc...etc

Comments

[krosp.livejournal.com]

Bit of a pointless post because I don't actually have answers to your specific questions lol... but here are my comments


I have the same thing with French sometimes! French isn't my native language, but I learned it for 5 and a half years and really loved it, and there are a fair few words (or names of people or places) that I learned first in French, then saw in English. When that happens, I just can't get my brain around how I should say it in English, and I feel like people must think I'm really pretentious because I'm a native English speaker claiming to only be able to pronounce it the French way lol


My thought about names is that the vast majority of names are ordinary, and could belong to anyone, although there are a few that are exceptions to that. But to me, when I know somebody with a name, somehow in my mind, I conceptualise that name and that person together in such a way that I end up only thinking of that person with that name... hard to explain, but what I mean is that I might know five different people called Anna, but when I think of each person, I think of the name "Anna" in a very different way, such that I may not even realise for some time that actually, Anna B and Anna M have the same name! I don't even realise sometimes when I'm talking about other people called Claire, that I'm actually saying my own name... because when I say "Claire" referring to another person, the name just becomes that person and doesn't mean anything else at the same time.


Man that's hard to explain lol.

[bluegenedream.livejournal.com]

Haha, yeah I worry about that too. People accused me of being pretentious all the time back when I took Spanish and pronounced everything with a French accent. But I had a completely valid excuse. I lived with my grandfather in Paris from age 2.5-5 and spoke fluent French. I lost most of it after I moved back to the US and resolved to never speak it again in an effort to rid myself of my French accent after kids teased me about it. But I guess the pronunciation still stayed in my head subconsciously? I just can’t imagine how else to pronounce Foucault/Feucault….

[th3-unicorn.livejournal.com]

I'm positive it was supposed to be Foucalt, as in Michel Foucault ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault

It's pronounced Foo-COH

The english sound that comes the closest to the french "eu" is the short "i" in "first" or like the vowels in "search".

About the other question, it happens to me rarely that I think a character/person owns a name, I'm more likely to see a name like a dress and rather ponder whether it "fits" the person and how the person "pulls it off".

[bluegenedream.livejournal.com]

I was guessing Foucault, but you never know sometimes. It was a very badly written O, if it is Foucault. Would most English speakers pronounce it the same way it is in French as well?

I love the dress comparison as well. It's a very good way of illustrating what I was trying to say with the Jennifer and Evelyn thing up above.

[th3-unicorn.livejournal.com]

I guess an english speaking person might manage to say Foo-COLT at the worst.

Feucault would be a total mouthful in french too, so that's why I'd strike it out. Whereas Foucault is a known last name.

With the dress comparison, I've never actually gone as far as "renaming" the person in my head, I think I have a hard time imagining a person with a different name from their own, even when I think it doesn't suit them.
I guess I lack imagination :P

[lilacmermaid.livejournal.com]

I have this problem with my own last name, which is French. I grew up in an area with a large francophone population, and so have gotten used to the French pronunciation of my name, and that is generally what I use myself. When I visit my Dad's family, however, they all use a heavily anglicized pronunciation of the name. It doesn't bother me, but it used to. I still get annoyed with anglicized French words in everyday conversation though, particularly as they are usually pronounced the French way here but the English way in a lot of the media.

Anyway, all that to say that it should be foo-KO. In the case of this name I'm not really sure how you would anglicize it that it would sound significantly different than that. If anything I think it would be a change in the second syllable, perhaps including the pronunciation of the L.

[0o-faerie.livejournal.com]

I've never understood why anglophone people (generally) pronounce foreign names in such an English way. Why? I'm not talking about an English accent...I probably have an accent when I speak English as well (I'm Dutch). I'm talking about messing up a -for example- French name entirely, pronouncing it as if it were English. It just doesn't make sense. That said...Foucault should be pronounced Foo-KO.

And I love the name Ariel! Haha. It always reminded me of the little mermaid as well, until I started watching the show 'Medium' and there's this beautiful little girl called Ariel (Sofia Vassilieva). Now it reminds me of her.

I think people own a name more than the other way around...I used to hate the name Amanda until I met 2 nice Amanda's, for example.

[aquilinum.livejournal.com]

I've never understood why anglophone people (generally) pronounce foreign names in such an English way.

Because most English speakers don't have to learn French. Americans, for example, are FAAAAAAR more likely to learn Spanish. Remember that people living on the European continental landmass are, by necessity, going to come in contact with each other by staggeringly higher rates than somebody living in, say, Kansas, who could travel for literally thousands of miles before arriving in an area that didn't speak exclusively English.

Britons live on an island, of course, which also has obvious language segregation results.

Finally, remember that English has in many ways become the pop culture language of Western civilization. The internet, movies, songs — all are certainly available in whatever local languages apply, but English speakers will encounter non-English media exponentially less than those of other European or Latin American areas will encounter English media.

Americans and Britons have a reputation (more often stereotype, really) for being unable to think outside the English box. It's somewhat deserved, but I refuse to accept that they should be vilified for this somewhat obvious result of the way language and culture has spread across the globe.

[0o-faerie.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry if I came across as vilifying anglophone people, I didn't mean to.

Your arguments make a lot of sense. Of course Americans are less likely than Europeans to encounter other languages/cultures. Still -this might also be stereotypical- it sometimes seems to me as if English speaking people just don't care that they pronounce things incredibly wrong. I'm really not saying that everything should always be pronounced correctly - I screw up English words or names sometimes as well.

One of the replies to this post was from someone who said only pretentious people care about pronouncing a French name (in this case Foucault) in the right way (I replied to that). I guess that's what I was getting at when I posted my comment...I sometimes feel that some Anglophone people don't care if they pronounce it rightly or not.
I realize now that's in large a pretty stereotypical image, so thanks for making me see that.

[krosp.livejournal.com]

I have noticed amongst some people I know, they just freak out and can't cope when faced with a word that is spelled in foreign way, and inevitably pronounce it in a really terrible way, whether they try to get it right or not. I don't have that problem as much, and I think it's because I learned other languages since I was a child. What I have learned when I studied linguistics and psychology, was that there is a critical age of language development (one for learning any language at all, and then a later one for learning second languages). If you don't learn any other languages before that age, then your brain develops in such a way that you can actually not hear sounds that don't exist in your own language. So even if people say "no, say it like this..." they'll really struggle and not be able to do it, and they'd take a really long time to be able to master a new set of sounds from a foreign language. Plus, some people are just naturally better with sounds and language than others, which would be a factor in this. It may be like how some people have a really good ear for music and others just don't. So, I think that when people aren't exposed to other languages from a young age, they may completely lose the ability to hear how it "should" sound in the other language (without heaps and heaps of exposure and teaching). So, to cut a long story short, I agree with aquilinum on why English speakers can't pronounce other languages correctly :p

As I said before, I learned other languages from a young age and find this somewhat easier than other people I know. But my husband is Chinese, and I was only exposed to a lot of Chinese in the last 5 years or so. Interestingly, although I am not too bad at producing the actual sounds (phonemes) that exist in Chinese but not English, I absolutely CANNOT hear or produce the correct tones. I was not exposed to any tonal languages when I was young, and I don't know if I'll ever be able to do it without a really long time of total immersion in China or something.

[0o-faerie.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting. I believe someone told me something similar before (I believe it was about Chinese people being unable to pronounce the 'r' correctly...in Dutch, at least, I'm not sure about the English 'r'). I had completely forgotten about that. Thanks!

[perfectcherry.livejournal.com]

Being an American, I would probably pronounce it like "Foe-cault," which is how the only Faucault family I've ever known has said it, but they were from up North somewhere; I live in Louisiana, so if I ever meet a family with that name here, it would be pretty safe to assume that they would use the French pronunciation.

I'm from New Orleans; where are you from and how were you pronouncing it?

[fleckerbug.livejournal.com]

I never heard to pronounced any way but Fu-ko, though it tends to sound more like Fuh'ko on an American tongue. You are however working with a fairly renowned name and other less well-know names might be less likely to be pronounced properly. There are some names that I prefer the French pronunciation of, such as Genevieve.

I'm too tired to answer the rest of your question-- maybe I'll edit my answer after I sleep ;). I will say I was really thrown by my husband's name when we first met-- it (Ted) struck me as such an odd name and I couldn't get it out of my mouth. I think I finally explained it recently to him as being because it struck me as a stodgy old-man name-- like Bill, or Fred, or Richard; I've grown to like his name though, and my husband admits it can seem stodgy, but he thinks it's rather unique-- I agree that although it is not original, it is quite unique, with recent name trends anyway.

[http://users.livejournal.com/__recidivist/]

Anyone who is talking about foo-coh is going to pronounce it foo-coh ("foo" as in "Foo Fighters", "coh" as in "co-op"), and probably mee-shell. There will probably be a slight lyrical quality if they are saying the full name. Because who talks about Michel Foucault? People pretentious enough to want to get it right.

[0o-faerie.livejournal.com]

Or people who are not American. Or people who've taken philosophy in high school. Or people who have taken genderstudies in college.

Not all people who want to pronounce a name correctly are pretentious.

[trishy-h.livejournal.com]

Hey, now! Some of us are just nerdy sociologists.

[kittybrat.livejournal.com]

Fou-coh, I believe. From what I've seen, anything in French that ends in a T just ends in not actually finishing saying what the word says. I don't know how else to say that, sorry if that wasn't a real sentence, lol.

I think a person does own their name. For instance, I like to find out how people spell their names, because I find it insulting when people spell names incorrectly. For instance, my name ends in a Y. First of all, my name is a real word (not just a a name) and it's a word that a lot of people know. Why on earth would you end it in an IE or EE or EY? I was born in 1981 - people weren't "creative" with spelling baby names by that point. /rant

I do have that issue with associating names, though. I try to break out of it though. For instance, if I think a name sounds kind of ugly, I try to incorporate it into stories or drawings (since I write and draw) and name beautiful characters with those names. I've successfully made my brain stop thinking that all Ambers are airheads (I met way too many...), which is nice because I really like that name. (Mostly because I like amber, because it's a pretty.)

[duckduckcaboose.livejournal.com]

Ugh... Okay. Here's my example re: French pronunciations.

I live in Atlanta. We have a Ponce de Leon Avenue. It is not pn'd "pawn-say day lee-au" but rather "pawnse duh lee-on". Basically, if you want to pronounce foreign names in an English way, just pronounce every letter. It sounds dumb though.

As far as names being attached to people... I grew up all my life with a cousin named Evan, but when I met my best friend Evan 6 years ago, he kind of became my "standard" for that name. When I hear Evan he's always the first person who comes to mind. Even at family events when I know it's my cousin being discussed. Same with Kylie. Most people think Kylie Minogue, I think of my other best friend.