Why don't most English speakers think that non-English names are pronounced differently?

[Anonymous]

They have a strange belief that every name must conform to English pronunciation rules, as if it hasn't even crossed their mind to find out how something should be pronounced. Why is that? Do you enjoy butchering every single name that doesn't look English?

Updates

1 y

I'm fine with incorrect pronunciation😊, but their lack of curiosity about the original surprises me.

[abc3643]

Let me ask you something...

What is 1+1?

You'd answer "2" and that's the right answer of course.

Now, let me ask you this:

What is NOT 1+1?

You are puzzled but answer "3". Technically, that's right; 3 does not equal 1+1. However, the answer I was looking for is 784891.286199994318, so you got the answer to my question wrong.

Now, why am I bringing this up?

You know arithmetic and know how to add - that is, you knew the rules of arithmetic - so, you could easily answer the first question.

But, knowing the rules of arithmetic doesn't help you much with the answer to the second question other than you know that "2" is not a correct answer to it.

Instead, you answered "3" but got it wrong since I was looking for the 784k number...

Why didn't you get it right?

Because you didn't know the rules for how to get the answer I was actually looking for...

The same can be said about language.

Any speaker of a language is naturally going to use the phonetic rules of the language he (or she) knows. If he doesn't know the other language well, he's not going to know the phonetic rules of that language either or will be rusty at applying them. So, he will often mispronounce because he is only applying the set of phonetic rules that he knows.

Here's an example.

In school year 2008-2009, my wife and I hosted an exchange student named Brice from France. Of course, the people here initially called him "Brice" as in "rhymes with "rice". This is because most Anglophones would pronounce "rice" with a long-I as they do with most other words that rhyme and have a similar spelling.

I knew French though so I knew that the "i" in romance languages like French is pronounced like a long-E in English. So, his name, phonetically, is "Breece".

Now, Brice himself made similar errors. For instance, when we were "going back to the house", he would say "owse" for "house" - the h is silent for him. Why? Because in most French words starting with h, the h is silent. So, he was mispronouncing "house". I taught him about that, but, at the same time, it didn't bother me because I knew French and I understood that he was applying French phonetic rules to English since that was only natural for him.

[Maybe_Maybe_not]

Very interesting analogies about phonetics, however I feel this urge to fix one thing lol
Brice, in french, is not the equivalent of Breece, it is said with the shortest possible "EE" sound, as in pitch or inch

[abc3643]

@Maybe_Maybe_not
Regardless, the point is that what I wrote is, in essence, the origin of accents - particular for people speaking a second language (their non-native language). In these cases, people have an almost instinctive nature to apply, to so extent, their native language phonetic rules to the rules of the second language.

[Maybe_Maybe_not]

Preaching a converted, I do have these efforts to make, daily, to switch to English rules, from a French background

[abc3643]

@Maybe_Maybe_not Very good!

[abc3643]

Brice corrected us to pronounce his name as "Breece" with a long-E. Maybe this is an intra-France accent issue. He was from Rennes, the capital city of Brittany in the northwest.

[DryGermanGuy]

If you specifically mean US-Americans, they have no clue about or interest in foreign languages. A majority of them has never traveled outside the United States and if they do it's often to Canada or a closed-off English-speaking resort in Mexico.

[Asker]

Not only Americans. There seems to be a lack of curiosity in most native English speakers.

[bowenw]

I suppose it is because we do not know any better and have to be told the correct pronunciation.

[abc3643]

Exactly.

[Astarlessnightsky]

If its the language thing you know, its hard to pronounce it differently.

And offcourse the first instinct is to pronounce words the way your native language would pronounce them.

[strateguy632]

Because that is what is familiar and expected like sound "abe Lincoln for japanese abe".

[Still-alive]

Don't act like non English native speakers don't pronounce English names differently lol. common everyones guilty of this.

[Maybe_Maybe_not]

Yep, as a french I can confirm that, overall, we don't really care about how things are supposed to be pronounced in other languages lol