The hill I will probably die on: Every name is a noun. That is, first and foremost, a word, an utterance, in one specific language. There is no such thing as an omnilingual name.
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When you criticize people for not "correctly" pronouncing a word from another language, that they do not speak, with phonetics different from the language they are speaking, that is an act of gatekeeping, and reflects poorly on you, not the object of your ire.
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No one is obligated to learn all of the languages in the world. Not TV announcers, and not schoolteachers. Shout at the television if you must (I do) but don't tell people off for not speaking a language that you know and they don't.
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Agreed, but for this reason I wish that databases (e.g., of athletes) included a pronunciation guide provided by the person themselves. I presume that teams already provide the Romanizations; I'd love it if they included a Wikipedia-style English respelling too.
My undergrad institution did this before the graduation ceremony, and I thought it provided a lot of meaning for the amount of effort involved.
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And unlike "just say it the Right Way(TM)", it let people who knew that the "proper" pronunciation of their name by an English speaker would be horribly butchered give their preferred English pronunciation.
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The databases are in most cases matched to the machine-readable area of the athlete's passport, so the romanization is just the one used for international travel, not the one used by the athlete or their country — and that's not even getting into multinational athletes.
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Yikes, that really sad. Although I think that's not universal: one of the British pair in men's 10 m synchronized diving is listed as Matty Lee when Wikipedia seems to think that his legal name is Matthew Lee.
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It just occurs to me what's bugging me about this reasonable-seeming suggestion: it still centers English. Which, yes, is the working language (along with French because de Coubertin) of the IOC and the IFs, but would it also include respellings for Chinese, Farsi and Portuguese?
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If we’re going to change the database systems, I’d advocate strongly for allowing any number of respellings in various languages. In practice I’d imagine most people would only include them for major broadcast languages (which I think would depend on the sport).
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