Is there any convention for pronouncing proper nouns?

Question

Is there any convention as to how proper nouns with origins outside English should be pronounced? I have heard claims to the effect that "a proper noun can be pronounced however you wish"; is that correct?

I work in an international environment, and it is rather common for me to have colleagues with foreign names. Actually, I'm not a native English speaker either. I go by the rule: "pronounce as it would be pronounced in its original context or language".

A few examples:

1. The letter J is pronounced very differently in English, Spanish, or Dutch. For example my Spanish friends use ja ja to denote laughing in instant messages; the Dutch pronounce ij like the vowel sound in hay (e.g. [rij] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rij).

2. The vowel sound represented by oe in English is pronounced as in toe, but it is often used to approximate the German ӧ sound (e.g. Schrӧdinger). In Dutch, this same combination of letters represents a vowel sound similar to the English word loop.

3. Sometimes it is not even possible to accurately represent a sound in English, instead it is replaced by some approximation. As examples you could consider many of the Hindi or Bengali names (or names from any other Indian languages for that matter).

I found this question earlier, but I think it does not answer my question as it seems to address how English names are to be pronounced by non-native English speakers.

Edit: To clarify some of the doubts expressed in the comments; I am primarily interested in personal names although a more generic guideline would be helpful. I'm an aspiring Physicist, and I often encounter standardised terminology with non-English origins.

Answer 1

It's not entirely clear what you are interested in.

With personal names (first and last name/surname), you pronounce it the way that person does. That's why you have to listen carefully when they introduce themselves. There's a lot of variation there. For example, I've met women whose name is TAmara (on the 1st syllable) and whose name is taMAra (on the 2nd syllable).

As for other proper nouns, such as place names and what not, there are dictionaries for that. The general rule is to try to get as close as possible to the original (foreign) pronunciation, applying rules of English phonetics.

Answer 2

There is no convention - or rather, there are multiple conventions: partly national, partly social, partly personal.

Some people try to render the sounds of the original language, others are unaware of the phonology of any other language and make no attempt to render a name as non-English.

And in some social contexts, it would be regarded as pretentious to try to render the foreign sounds.

My personal bugbear is BBC announcers who appear to be unaware of the possibility of making a distinction between '-a', '-r' and '-er', and '-ah' (so for example the two names of Muqtada al Sadr are often perfect rhymes, and Tahrir Square comes out homophonous with the phrase "to rear"). The BBC are usually very careful about how their announcers pronounce foreign names, so these particular examples irk me.

Answer 3

If you are concerned about individuals' names, the convention is to try to pronounce it as closely to their desired pronunciation. That is the most polite.

Of course, the person with the name can't force non-native speakers to have the same phonology. Usually some give and take is necessary and if the speaker's native phonology just doesn't allow an acceptable sound (or only provides a jarring sound or an unfortunate taboo occurrence to the name-holder) the name-holder may just choose a compromise sound (or even an entirely new name).

For names of famous people (or places), there is some attempt at getting as close as possible but often convention trumps that, even when the sounds of the name-holder are realizable in the speaker's language.

For example, 'Einstein' is pronounced 'eye - en - st-eye-n' in American English, even though the original German 'eye-n - sh-t - eye-n' (pardon the American spelled-out pronunciation) is perfectly doable in English.

Orthography tends to outweigh the original language pronunciation only because the written version is more likely to be seen well before a pronunciation is heard, and only the effort of scholarship or community for understanding the orthography of multiple other languages would help with individual names.