Timeline for Is the mispronunciation of foreign words especially likely in English?
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| Feb 26, 2017 at 18:21 | comment | added | J. Taylor | @ Andy ....of course. I hoped I could make a point about how little agreement there is among English speakers as to how a series of such letters might be pronounced.. But, beyond that, "K" is not really a "Roman" letter, and the Latin "R" wasn't much like the current English "R" or like many other European language "R"s. | |
| Feb 26, 2017 at 16:44 | comment | added | Andy | Those spellings are not really English so much as transliterations into the Latin Alphabet. Often such transliteration systems are unambiguous, but you have to know their own rules, which differ from English, to pronounce them correctly. For example you can learn to pronounce Chinese words spelled in Pinyin fairly well, but letters/digraphs such as Q, X, J, E, SH, CH, ZH represent phonemes not found in English. | |
| Feb 24, 2017 at 21:14 | comment | added | J. Taylor | @ Chaim---could be. Some speakers of Modern Hebrew might do much better, as the sounds, the difficult sounds ( "K" or "Q" and "R" in English transcription) can be very similar in their language.. The problem with a single word, like "Koran" is that it is not pronounced the same by all people who use it. I cannot much deeper into this as "comments" do not allow a lot of words. You have asked me a Final Examination question that I fear I cannot answer here.I did like your question. | |
| Feb 24, 2017 at 19:56 | comment | added | Chaim | So would it be fair to say that speakers of some other languages -- other than English or Arabic -- make a better job of pronouncing Koran correctly, based on their own transcription of the word? Which languages, and why? | |
| Feb 24, 2017 at 19:46 | history | answered | J. Taylor | CC BY-SA 3.0 |