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.
Conversation
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.
1
1
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.
3
Replying to
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.
3
Replying to
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?
1
1
Replying to
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).
1
I think the respellings would still be useful outside those markets, though! Maybe the broadcaster speaks at least one of the languages and can do a best-effort attempt in whatever languages they’re presenting in?
1
Replying to
I mean, nothing is going to help for Japanese, and it's highly unlikely that most athletes will have a preferred Japanese pronunciation or even know about Japanese phonotactics.
1
And there's already a bigger issue with mandatory gender marking in Slavic languages: women who were born with masculine-marked names outside Slavic countries *will* get their names forcibly regendered by media within those countries.
1
1
Replying to
I agree that perfection in every language is way too much to ask here. Probably most people don’t care how their name is said by a broadcaster in most languages, but at least this lets them provide a version they like if they want to.