Why for some it's not easy for some to pronounce KAMALA! 

Apparently the galaxy far, far away is somewhere near Tijuana

The "taco treatment" is how Harrison Ford pronounced "Han" in the original film, thus establishing its pronunciation. Billy Dee was probably imitating how he heard the British production crew say it.

That's one for the quotation dictionaries.

I mean, he's not wrong, and it certainly is a great quote, but it's also true that there is enough of a German influence on American English that we are familiar with the German name Hans. Also, Hans Gruber and the SNL body builders Hans and Franz came about long after A New Hope, but that is the way I've heard those names pronounced all my life (I should note that I grew up in South Dakota which had a significant amount of German immigration).

Hahn, my bookie!

This is very interesting, thank you. Can I ask, in you experience is there usually a stress put on the name anywhere, like "come-UH-laa" or "COME-uh-laa"?

@@Snow-Willow I was going to make a similar comment, as someone born in the US to Tamil-speaking parents. Everyone I've known with this name has pronounced it something like "cummel-la" rhyming with pummel, so stress on the first syllable and potentially eliding the middle syllable entirely to "come-la" as swatiparasnis pointed out.

Thanks, since he said it was Indian, I was wondering about Indian pronunciations.

I speak Hindi and I'm used to Kamala being pronounced as Kuh-mul (/kə.məl/)

@@Snow-Willow I'm an Indian American, and I've heard my parents say it closer to "COME-uh-laa". Just don't spend a long time on any of the syllables if you want to sound authentic.

Now, think for a moment the problem Italians have. When you're used to an in between sound (both hearing it and producing it), it's very hard to tell the difference. Remove vowel length that isn't a thing in Italian, and you get Italians who have an hard time telling different English vowels apart, and Englishmen getting rid of a think accent when speaking Italian.

As a Russian, I could not hear the difference between the long and short I (as in live-leave) until my first year at university. Any recordings we used, things I watched (not that many), nothing. My moment of revelation happened while I was watching Doctor Who and Matt Smith said, I think, the word "listen". I just paused and said "so that's what they've been talking about!"

Ə

Those "between" vowel sounds are probably a big part of why people find other people speaking in a different accent so striking. Whether the difference is perceived as positively or negatively depends on a lot of other cultural factors, but the ability to consistently and systematically use an alternate set of vowels draws attention.

It’s the examples that Geoff Lindsey uses that perfectly nail it, with precise clips, that make the videos so engaging.

Ruki.. like 'rude-key' without the d? rhymes with pookie?

@@ttt5020sorry mate, you’ve been sayin’ y’name wrong all this time, innit 😹

​@@ttt5020 rookie?

@@davidkumarmahto8187 no, rue is different from the oo in rook. Like Nuke vs nook, Luke vs look. Ruke-ee.

@@ttt5020 there's now way rookie is pronounced like that

that's. . . that's not the line?

or, come-a come-a come-a come-a come-at your convenience (AM radio quality)

There’s a t-shirt I’ve seen at a few conventions (I think from Snorg Tees?) that’s a picture of 5 commas and a chameleon! 😂 ,,,,,🦎

@@kendrama1 😆

This video is how I found out. I thought he was just taking a long time to say chameleon.

Even funnier since oodles of Americans say "gala" with the same relative vowel as the English do.

@@Eronoc13 And many more say gayla.

I've heard it pronounced gah-la, gal-a, and gay-la, but years ago I got a job where we hosted charity galas on a regular basis, and everyone at my office (in Texas) said gay-la, so that's how I say it now.

@@stevenjlovelace I wouldn’t pronounce it “gay-la” _except_ when saying “gala event.” Maybe the long _a_ sound helps the phrase from merging into something like “galavant” (with a “vent” last syllable)? Obviously, I'm no phonetician.

@@OldWhitebellyIndeed!

Same here in Canada!

Same here in South Africa!

Same in Northern Ireland lmao

same in ireland lmao

And a whole host of features and sounds entirely your own!

I'm not sure if that's correct. On the one hand, pretty much every news source (like NBC, NYT, WaPo, Time, Politico, etc) has stated that her name means "lotus". But then again Kamala herself doesn't pronounce her name as either ka-ma-l ("lotus") or k-uh-mlā ("Lakshmi") but rather as kāh-ma-lā so I don't know what to make of it. Her maternal relatives probably know what it means.

​@@abhishekmhatre1554they probably doesn't understand it well. I'm from India and I can tell you it's far more common for people to name their daughter as Kama'la' than Kamal. Kamal has a bit of masculine sound to it. So it is kind of gender neutral name. Another thing to know is it's quite common for a girl to be named after one of many names of Goddess Lakshmi.

@@abhishekmhatre1554 Most Indian-Americans know how to say their own names authentically. They have to affect a different pronunciation so that other Americans don't keep messing it up

​@@abhishekmhatre1554 Political correctness. Look what Vivek Ramaswamy had to go through. They will definitely underplay anything related to a Hindu Goddess.

Am I wrong? I am sure कमल in sanskrit is pronounced as Kamala but in Hindi it is Pronounced as Kamal. Kamal in Sanskrit is written as कमल‌्. Isn't this one of the basic differences between Sanskrit and Hindi?

Phonetics and linguistics are _never_ boring because they are both incredibly diverse subjects!

Right? I always thought it weird that a and o so often represented the same sound; now I know why.

@Xubuntu47 Do they really sound the same to you? The “a” in father is higher in my mouth than the “o” in bottle. They sound similar but distinct to me.

@@silver.shoelaces Some American accents retain the distinction, but they are exactly the same in the "default Hollywood" accent. I too only learned that there was a difference through one of Dr. Lindsey's videos (probably the one with American actors that he mentions in this video)

@@silver.shoelaces Depends on the US dialect, I think.

@@silver.shoelaces I can *hear* the difference now that it's been pointed out. But tbh I never noticed the difference before. They are the same vowel in my dialect; we say them even if we hear the difference.

Yes! The same for a Greek native speaker 😅

This is one of the big challenges of learning English for Spanish speakers, as coming from Spanish’s 5 vowels to English’s 15-25 is a big shift- both in identifying them and producing them.

Que Mala.

indeed! As a linguist I'm sadly aware of whats happening in the phonetic level, but I just gave up about it and I simply keep the focus on the grammar and pragmatic levels haha

​@@946towguy2Kemala suerte 😢

eyyyyyy

Kamalahahahaha

I'd be happier if we never heard her name again.

@@mattblack118 That is possibly why the video has that strange title "Why for some it's not easy for some to pronounce KAMALA!" .....for some........for some.....

a lot of Asian people don't mind, people can never get it right, it's not always the way it's spelled

How exotic it is has nothing to do with why it’s being weaponized, it’s more of a “pronouncing it different than she does, on purpose” thing. Same principle as calling the opposing party the “Democrat party” which is only a weapon because it’s not the accurate name, not because it’s inherently a bad name for a party.

I was going to say, I've lived in Canada my whole life and have never heard anyone pronounce those words like that, but I'm younger and my grandparents are immigrants and not native English speakers.

@@sambartlett1435 I have modified my comment. It’s a subtle thing: Canadians have lost their Britishness slowly. I mainly heard this from people born before 1920 and those with British parents. Here’s a good example Christopher Plummer’s accent in 1971. A viewer describes it as a posh Canadian accent in the comments. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-4v9uV3W0HLg.htmlsi=oaTybGsogeXg-1nN

Dr. Lindsey could do a whole study on the accents of Son of a Critch, particularly how the very different takes of the two English actors playing Newfoundlanders - Malcolm McDowell uses a sort of pan-Celtic accent while Benjamin Evan Ainsworth sounds like he could be from Toronto or LA. The real Mark Critch plays his own father with a stronger Newfie accent than he himself has (when not amping it up for comedic effect); it's said to fade with every generation like every North American regional accent but this shows it in accelerated form with Ainsworth in particular taking his verbal cues from local kids his own age rather than what a Gen-X teen in the '80s would've had.

I am a younger non-native English speaker and of course I mostly get American English. I still lean towards shorter vowels in those words. Maybe it's because they are loan words in Swedish too? If I say nazi with a long a it sounds like I say it in Swedish

Terrible example. He was in character, acting. I have seen a lot of his movies and his pronunciation changes. He was an actor!

Seems accurate though 😆

Fitting

Que Mala. It describes her accurately.

@@12SPASTIC12saw that one coming lol

Rip 😂

People who aren't autistic just don't care, and it's better that way.

​@@carlpanzram7081 Is that based on data or just how you feel? I'm very cautious about people attributing things to autism, it edges far too often into stereotypes. And even 'positive' stereotypes are harmful. The broad language of "people who aren't autistic" is wild to me. Do you truly think that every single non-autistic person are unaware of linguistic biases? Do you then think that all autistic people care specifically about linguistic biases?

@@carlpanzram7081 You're probably trying to be funny but that's one of the stupidest things I've read.

@@carlpanzram7081 autistic, neuro-divergent, adhds are the new nerds. they can seemingly do tasks unfathomable to "normal" people. they are keen, insightful and very much detailed oriented. they are also very good observants, hyperfixate and solve complex problems. /s

@@emperordragon1794 Lmao do you mean /srs because /s is usually understood as /sarcasm😭

Considering Geoff Lindsey's videos on aspiration, North American and British English speakers don't really distinguish plosives by voicing, but primarily distinguish them by aspiration. Trying to say "pot" without aspiration will just sound like "bot". "gite" and "blay" are thankfully not recognized words, so they're less likely to be misunderstood, but it will take extra effort to understand them without the aspiration, but there are plenty of other worlds with initial plosives like "pot" that outright become different words when the aspiration is removed.

Yeah, if you want an unaspirated stop in the onset of a syllable out of most dialects of English you have to shove an s on the front to suppress the aspiration... or pretend it's voiced. (spot is unaspirated, while pot is not, bot also isn't. nominally the b is voiced, but in practice the voicing starts so late in the sound in most dialects that you don't so much end up with a voiced consonant as a lengthened following vowel).

Languages in southeast Asia also use aspirated and non-aspirated K, as well as aspirated and non-aspirated P, and T. That's why you'll see there are times to use kh and times to use k, or to use ph or p, or t or th (ht in Romanised Burmese, because there is also a th sound like in English). In Burmese they also have the hard G, so you have K, KH, and G, each written with a different character.

The first four letters of the Hindi alphabet are K KH G GH. Not only do they have aspirated consonants; they have more than English does! Not sure about Tamil or other Indian languages, though.

@@artugertTamil and almost all other Indian languages have this 4 way voicedness/aspiration distinction. Don’t quote me on this, but I believe it started with Sanskrit and was borrowed as a sort of areal feature into the surrounding languages.

is your first name where the Lotus in your username comes from?

@@Mullkaw yes! Also the terrible - a Finnish friend told me Kamala means horrible/terrible in Finnish !

I thought it was "comma chameleon" too. I think it sounds that way to Americans.

… i thought it was comma comma comma comma karma chameleon

Until now I thought it was (be)come a, come a, come a, chameleon

It's like Alderaan the planet from Star Wars. People from the UK say it different. Especially with the a sound We say al der ron in 'Merica you the UK say all der anne (like the name anne)

@ajs41: You mean "differently from" Americans-but oh wait, you're British, aren't you?

Try karma-la

@@maueflcoach1506 Try watching the video

@@everydayispoetry haha

Speaking for myself and what I’ve noticed many Indian-Americans do (including Kamala herself), most foreign people here automatically americanize the pronunciation to make it possible for others to get close enough phonetically. For example, her “comma-la” pronunciation isn’t authentic/accurate but it’s the closest Americanized pronunciation. So I do find it can be rude imo when someone still won’t put in the effort to learn even the easier/nativized version.

Right it's s not lack of effort, we want to get your name right but there is a big thing called not being familiar with the entire phonology of your language, unfortunately some people are of the disposition to assume malicious intent. Many immigrants don't even have perfect English pronunciation themselves, not for lack of trying.

Yes! A friend of mine was dating an Indian man named Ajay, and he HATED the American pronunciation of his name. The "J" in particular (as far as I could tell from his instruction) is much softer in Hindi -- something between an English "J" and a French "J". The final syllable, also, was not AY, but something between a short "A" and a short "E" (as in "eh"). I could be off in my memory (it was 15 years ago). What I told my friend is that she should explain to Ajay that *it's hard to stop in the middle of an English sentence and pronounce a word with different rules.* Similarly, I live in France half the year, and my name - Laura - is pronounced quite differently in French: the "L" , both vowels, and *of course* the "r" are quite different. But it would be weird to expect my French friends to pronounce my name in the American way.

​@@himani8927 to me the comma is weird, especially living in the south where there are definitely two m's with a gutteral stop between them. com-ma la.

​​​​​​@@LauraMorlandInteresting example. There is the fricative j in the middle of some words, like the way some English speakers pronounce "Beijing" (Also at the end of syllables like "Taj Mahal", "The British Raj" etc) but it would be wrong to expect it in the middle of "Ajay". To that point, it doesn't help that the nickname "AJ" is not uncommon.

Yeah, to my ears from Southern England, I hear the Tamil newsreader at 9:03 say something that sounds like /kʌməlɑː/ in terms of my own English vowels. So if I wanted to call the American army Humvee vehicle by it's nickname of "hummer", I could call it a "hummer car" and that would rhyme with what I'm hearing there for Kamala! But it seems interesting that for the public discussion about pronunciation options, it's concentrated on the first two vowels: the final vowel is forgotten. Maybe this is another example of Americans ignoring vowel length in their language!

But IIRC, Alastair doesn't have that vowel in his usual accent, and would use [ʊ] in “come”.

@@lamudri No he wouldn't. He does use the strut vowel in done, come, judge, etc, if anything tending in the direction of a schwa rather than a put vowel.

⁠​⁠@@ayy232Everyone has a STRUT vowel in “done”, “come” and “judge”. What you mean is that he pronounces those words with [ɐ~ə] and not [ʊ].

I had a section on that but I can't cover everything alas.

The rain from the plane falls mainly into Spain? Or was that the planar rain? Shouldn't there be a train? Or was it just a training montage?

Just needs a good ol' British "By George, she's got it!"

Did Geoff suppress a bit of the audio to turn “I think she’s got it” to “I think he’s got it”?

@@q-tuber7034 Yes. Weak H-Drop means that we normally link 'he', 'him', 'her' etc. to a preceding word without the /h/ (give 'im my regards), so simply removing the 'sh' of 'she' does the trick.

And the ending! I adore your sense of humour

_"For me, it’s a sign of respect to use the pronunciation people ask you to use..."_ How moral of you, as if we don't all do that.

It would be unreasonable to expect any English speakers to pronounce my native name according to its native pronunciation. Besides the quality of the vowels being outside of the normal English set (American or British) there is also a rolled R, which I've found many English speakers seem completely unable to pronounce. I use an Anglicized version just to make things easier.

@@hadayimosi We definitely don't.

@@hadayimosi not only do many people not do it, some people are literally incapable of doing it

@@hadayimosi not everyone does. Trump and most of the GOP seem to intentionally mispronounce her name, likely as a not-so subtle dig to imply she is "other."

everyone does that here, people can never say it right with Asian names

Hello, Indian with knowledge of Sanskrit. You're wrong. The final vowel is an open vowel, the first two are schwa.

@@bletwort2920 there is no schwa in Indian languages. There short ‘a’ - अ and long ‘ā’ - आ. Short ‘a’ abounds like the ‘u’ in “run” and long ‘ā’ sounds sounds like the British pronunciation of ‘a’ in the word “bath” . All the ‘a’s in the word “Kamala” are short.

And the tragedy of it all is that a person with seemingly little knowledge of Indian languages, including Sanskrit, is analyzing a name that an audience including potentially 1.4 billion native speakers would know how to pronounce. That's the arrogance of the ignorant. Instead of asking a native speaker how the name should be pronounced, there are assumptions based on assumptions.

Y'all she is not pronouncing her own name wrong. Pronunciations get English phonology in the speaking of English by an English speaker to an English audience.

yes!! this is a phenomenon i would love to see properly documented. one way: the spanish influenced chicano accent influenced the california accent which then influenced all americans accents through movies!

But the Spanish influence on US English hasn't helped with pronouncing Spanish vowels has it? Consider how US English pronounces taco and salsa. See the video at 7:09 where he spliced an actual Mexican woman's taco vowel into the middle of "spectacular" as spoken byut Southern English woman. Yes, British English short /a/ is very close to the Spanish vowel. There is an influence in vocabulary, sure. But I can't hear Spanish influence on US English phonetics.

@@modo2213 Mexico is a very large country, with quite a few accents, and it's not the only Spanish-speaking country that people in the US come from... If you can't hear it, I would suggest you're not listening too well. But I'm just a native Californian living in a place where many people speak Spanish as their first language, so what do I know, right? My downstairs neighbor comes from Mexico city, and his wife doesn't speak English well. The "a" vowel is brighter than some might think but nowhere near the way most English people say it. __ By the way, around here, you don't pronounce "balm" to rhyme with "bomb". "Balm" rhymes with "palm" in / around the SF Bay area (same consonant cluster as you would use for an elm tree, in case I need to elaborate). Nor does "calm" use the same vowel as "comma" (same consonant cluster as elm, again). Bother and father don't quite rhyme to me when I say them but it's close enough you might not be able to tell from hearing me, similar to how if I say "clothes" really fast it might sound like "close". Closing with that song, too...when I was a kid I didn't realize he was saying the word "karma", and it just sounds like some filler before the word "chameleon" the way some songwriters do stuff.

@@modo2213 Dr. Lindsey almost always overexaggerates American vowel qualities, moving them further from those of the "foreign" words he claims that we "don't nativize" (which is an outsider's perspective, anyway; as far as we're concerned, at least us younger Americans, we're using _our_ native pronunciations, not performing a "strategy"). Look at the chart at 11:25, which records exact vowel qualities: While it's true that the pronunciation _Dr. Linsdey_ gives for standard American differs a lot from the Italian pronunciation of pasta, the graph shows the majority of the American speakers falling within the range of the Italian pronunciation- in fact, a greater proportion than of British speakers (I think! I'd love to see a formant-to-formant statistical analysis, because though I disagree with Dr. Lindsey on experience, it'd be cool to see clearer data and its analysis- he's the Doctor, not me). The same is true of "taco". The English /æ/ is not as closed (or fronted, often) as the American one, true, but the American /ɑ/ is more closed and fronted than the British, which makes it, in the realization of a lot of Americans, closer to the /a/ of a lot of Spanish speakers than the English get with /æ/. And I'm sorry, but why would this not be true? Despite being far from the border, I buy my taco ingredients _from Mexicans_ at my local, common, Hispanic market, and I've worked with Mexicans and Central Americans my whole working life; I'm very familiar with their pronunciation. Hispanics are the largest ethnic minority in the States, and they've been with us since just about the very beginning. 9 states - that's 18% - have Spanish names. Dr. Lindsey has a lot of good videos, but about this, he seems not only a little underinformed, but also biased.

@@modo2213 Perhaps it depends on what variety of US English you're hearing. To my ear (and where I live and have lived), American and Spanish pronunciations of taco and salsa are very similar to each other. In any case, it's a known phenomenon that it's difficult to hear phonemes that aren't a part of your native phonetic space.

It's a short I in Hindi.

Sussy Sunak

Rashee Sanook

I'm American and I can't remember ever having heard anyone pronounce it with the /i/ vowel. I've only ever head it pronounced the second way, with the /ɪ/ vowel. Granted, maybe I somehow avoiding hearing any Americans other than myself pronounce it? I do mainly read things, and a lot of the voices I hear online are from the UK.

@@Lizard-813 I realized what this is. They're remembering the 1960s celebutard guru Maharishi Maheshyogi. And in that name, it's Sanskritized, and Sanskrit is different. It has [i iː], short and long tense vowels, and this distinction evolved into a lax/tense distinction in Hindi, [ɪ i]. The funny part is that Maharishi's name is WRONG in Sanskrit. Mahā has sandhi with the syllabic R in rshi promoting it to vrddhi grade so the correct "great teacher" is Mahārshi, pronounced [mahaːɽʂi].

I'm in the Northeast US, never took Spanish, and I *still* aim for the MS pronunciation.

But it's just wrong? Spanish vowels are pretty consistent, and they're never "tah-co"

Not just Spanish, sometimes it is French because of historical influences

@@adamcetinkent Most spanish speakers would say it as the guy from 0:59

​@@ahab1976I'm Spanish, and that's not true at all, that's just not what "a" sounds in Spanish.

Right? That's what I always do when I encounter the written name of an unfamiliar figure, and it wounds my heart every time a pronunciation is not listed.

How would that help? The vowel they're trying to say does not exist in their dialect.

@@EdwardLindon I am quite sure that something like a schwa does exist in any dialect…😃

​@@chrst7346 but "something like" isn't good enough. All of the pronunciations people pick are "something like" the correct one. The issue is that the actual correct one doesn't exist in some people's dialects.

Because it doesn't matter? You'd have to be a REALLY obnoxious and self-important person to demand people speak some foreign word in YOUR specific foreign tongue. Why? Why would that be reasonable? Do you apply that standard at ANY other level? Like dialects for instance? Do you go around and correct everyone's dialect? How do you feel about AAVE? 😂 Can you cope with that but not with someone saying "kamala" in a way that makes SENSE? I'm German, and I can tell you that I've not heard a single American pronounce ANY German word correctly, even tho your language is FULL of them. I don't care. Nobody who is at all reasonable cares. Imagine you'd do this the other way around. Go to Australia and tell EVERYONE that they are not pronouncing your name right 😂

Oh wow. Thanks for this. We don't often have what other languages have--stress on the last syllable. Elite comes to mind, but that's one of only a few words. And in three-syllable words, I can't think of any where the last syllable is emphasized. I love linguistics. It's all so fascinating.

As an Indian myself, I thought of the same thing and am glad you put it out. It's Perfectly described, if anyone is interested to learn the original pronunciation.

As a Malayali, that's a good description. Kamala herself is mispronouncing it from a Sanskrit point of view. kaah-muh-la sounds more like lust than lotus. Of course, in Malayalam the la in kamala is always short rather than long.

The reason adding h is helpful is because without the h it can be reduced to schwa when unstressed. Adding h precludes reduction by normal English spelling rules, even though the h is not pronounced.

@@paradoxmo 👍👌

If you want to indicate how something is pronounced, use IPA ... rather than some Latin-alphabet letters that are probably pronounced differently by other humans.

​@@halfsourlizard9319 I would, but I get drunk if I "use" too much IPA. 😉

​@@kennnesbitt lame pun. Though puns might not exist if we weren't allowed to say lame things.

​@@halfsourlizard9319 zɔɪs, not sus. Better? 😋

I remember once encountering the name "Suess Glacier" in Antarctica and was disappointed it wasn't named after Dr. Seuss. The glacier is named after a Swiss geologist pronounced like "Süss".

Yes, I thought the two men discussing how to say it and dismissing it as something Americans do were missing the point. SHE says it that way.

this was my gut feeling on the matter. like meeting an irish dude and calling him kay-lum instead of kallum. or trying to get the R right in the spanish Borja. The bond point threw me for a loop though. like in american english, unequivocally the way to say the name is how she says it herself. but in tamil, presumably the way her mother says it is the correct way. so, in british english, do you aproximate the american of the person in question, or the tamil of her mother? if she was ur friend, or someone you met, u obviously just mirror the sounds u hear her say. as a public person you hear about second and third hand? i think karma beats out comma

@@profeseurchemical There's the added problem of your position. If you're Joe Blow reading the news, you look at a name, and pronounce it whatever way you think when talking to the people around you. When you're Johnny Newscaster, though, you have a duty to make a good faith effort to say it properly. What is properly? When you're talking about someone's name, it's the way she says it. You should be trying to get what you say as close as possible to that.

She's also a politician with fear that if her name is not simple enough to people she may not come as relatable...

In general, I agree, but at the same time there has to be some room for dialectal accommodation. For example, I'm going to Americanize the pronunciation of an English "Grant" [gɹɑːnt] or "Charles" [ˈtʃɑːɫz] into [gɹẽə̃nt] or [ˈtʃɑɹɫz], adjusting for the regular phonetic correspondences between British and American English, even though it's not the closest I could get to their pronunciation of their own name using the phonemes available in my dialect.

No one pronounces their name wrong.

@@EdwardLindon I guess you only speak English.

@@EdwardLindon but many - especially Americans - spell their names wrong… 🤣 or at least those who name their kids in just any random ‚fancy‘ style

I'm one of the people that does this (although my name technically isn't actually South Asian in origin). I also tend to anglicize almost all foreign words (ie. word that stray outside the American English phonetic inventory) to some degree if I'm speaking in English, even if I know how to pronounce them properly. It's just because switching to a drastically different phonetic inventory mid-sentence sounds too jarring to me. And it can be confusing to the listener if they aren't used to hearing those phonemes. Also nobody has any idea how to spell my name if I don't anglicize it.

​@@lorscarbonferrite6964 Valid point. Can you share your name if you don't mind?

I think the stress should be on the second syllable if it's the French way. In German, for example, you say "pah-REESS"

@@allesindwillkommenIndeed, but the stress could’ve shifted to the first syllable over time, as has it in other Norman/French borrowings.

Possibly, but the word has of course shifted along with English phonology; going through the great vowel shift and other large changes to English pronunciation over the centuries it has been a part of the language.

Funnily enough, when speaking English, Germans tend to 'overcorrect' how they say Berlin -- they pronounce it "BURR-lin", with a heavy long first syllable. When asked, they proudly say they do this to 'sound English', when precisely no English varieties pronounce it this way.

​@@allesindwillkommen French has no stressed syllables within words, only within sentences or phrases (where the stress then falls on the final syllable). As you mentioned, while German (and also American English) speakers will stress the final syllable within French words, British English speakers stress the first, but neither is actually "correct", i.e. closer to the original French.

@@halfsourlizard9319 You got me.

effecting not affecting - affect pertains to sensory (ie hearing - one of the 5 senses) while effecting is executive

Even further, almost everything your brain does you don’t know about. And if we’re talking an emergent property of a huge amount of human brains? Even more so.

@@dereckhasken9055 Actually, "affecting" is the correct word. "To affect" means "to influence; to have an effect on", while "to effect" means "to cause". (There are other meanings, but those are the most relevant here.) Just look them up if you don't want to take my word for it. It's a very confusing pair of similar words, because their meanings as verbs are not connected to their meanings as nouns in a straightforward way.

if you have Chinese students, Wang and Zhang etc are more like Wahng and Zhahng (like gong or long)

Eke

that is the right way, it's not comma or karma, people are overthinking it

Just because American doesn't have phonemic vowel length, doesn't mean that phonetically their "ka" in "Kamala" (when stressed) isn't longer. It clearly is, as you can hear in the video.

Good point. Especially in MLE (Multicultural London English), the vowel in "cut" can be almost identical to a general American "cot"/"father". But for some accents of Northern England, the "cot" vowel can be open enough to be close to the American pronunciation.

“comma-la” (too rounded), “karma-la” (too long), “cumma-la” (too short).

I would like to point out that your "English phonetics" aren't universal to all speakers because I don't pronouce ANY of the vowels you stated the way you described them. Either that, or you're not using the best words for examples 81524

​@@xeji4348 If you know IPA I think it would be something like 'kɐ.mɐ.läː

You can find the pronunciation at 9:04

As in cup, mother and car in whose accent? There is not one single way of pronouncing any of these sounds in English so at the very least you’d need to specify which accent you’re comparing to

Instructions unclear, can't stop saying Kumalar now.

In Hindi both the middle and final vowels are dropped. A long a vowel was added to distinguish between masc Kamal and fem kamlaa.

And it's much easier to say! I will adopt this approach.

​​@@capitalb5889 Some English speakers also drops schwas for example in veg(e)table and comf(or)table. Hindi has a severe case of schwa deletion which is not indicated in writing.

I usually Google the pronunciation of names I’m not familiar with, but she’s so famous that all I get is news about the pronunciation and mispronunciation of her name!

the Brits are overthinking it, it's not comma or whatever, they see the K and get confused

Totally agree. This video is kind of hilarious.

I think the point of the video is that even after you hear VP Harris pronounce her own name, it can still be difficult to match that pronunciation. Not every language, and not every dialect within a given language, has the same sounds to reproduce Kamala the way that she pronounces it.

and the frickwad never pronounced it the Indian way, although he links to an Indian newsreader (a pretty one, to boot) saying it.

Yep. Californian -- Hair-iss

Is Hæris allowed in your phonology? It's not in mine, and I don't think I've heard many Americans who say any words like that. That would just make it a distinction we've lost and they haven't.

​@woodfur00 Well by "in your phonology" do you mean can you physically say it? Because I can physically say Harris with an ae, fairly easily in fact, but that's not how I would normally say it, it just feels like doing an accent. Like I can say "car" in an Irish type accent with an ae too but that's even more cringe because obviously literally no american does that 😂

Some people have more vowel distinctions before -r than the sixish in Generic American (nurse, hair, ear, fur, oar, tour). For instance, the marry/Mary/merry split. I tend to associate it with New York City and New England. They do it with "Harry" too, pronouncing it differently from "hairy" which I tend to notice. Some NYC people, especially older ones, even have a split in "oar": so if Donald Trump calls Stormi Daniels a horrible whore, the vowels don't match.

Pretty sure this is related to the Mary/marry/merry merger gradient. Can’t remember if he has a video on it, but it’s one of the bigger east-west dialect differences in American English that a lot of people don’t pick up on if they’re from somewhere that’s partially or fully merged the three vowels

Interesting! Thank you

Original sanskrit pronunciation has been reconstructed tho

No, kamalatmika is derived from "kamal", which was borrowed into sanskrit from Dravidian

​​@@speedwagon1824 not the tamil supremacists again. And wtf is a Dravidian? Dravid itself is a sanskrit word

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-WddjZyfivHI.htmlsi=vaz3t6sDjEOGaFpS This song will tell you how pronounce it, its very catchy.

("wovel" sounds?)

Peterson is Canadian. Like most Canadians, he uses the same rounded vowel for "bomb" and the "father" lexical set. Boston-area accents often have that same rounded "bomb" vowel as Canadians, but more traditional R-dropping Bostonians merge the "balm/father" vowel with "arm/farther". Pittsburgh accents also use the rounded vowel for father/bomb like Canadians do (check out Pat McAfee for an example).

Yep, this is really the only correct answer when it comes to proper nouns. It's disrespectful to insist on any other pronunciation. Same goes for transliteration.

@@chegeny I also saw that episode of Star Trek. 😉

Good catch

Be a chad and keep saying it how you like

Oh such an Ohio skibbidy Sigma you are ​@@bird4816

Re the “intrusive R”. This is mainly a southern English thing rather than “British” in general. So much so that we Scots find it weird that southern English people can find our “rolled” R exotically amusing yet seem incapable of pronouncing R when it appears in a word (it becomes a strangled “ahw” sound), but instead add it to words in which it doesn’t. IDEARR? Just bizarre (with two rolled Rs).

This has reminded me of another linguistic example. In 1896, a British music journal included a joke about a choir singing the word "Alleluia", and the conductor telling them not to linger on the "lu". This only works as a joke if it's a pun on "loo", and thus is an early example in print of that particular slang word.

OK. So, how is it supposed to be pronounced?

​@@mvpfocus Kumlah, with stress on the 'lah' is the most acceptable pronunciation in Northern India. The similar sounding Kum-uh-lah is the classic pronunciation is even more accurate especially since Harris's mother is of Tamil Brahmin origin, which is closer to the original Sanskrit pronunciation

@@mtarkes Kamal?

@@mvpfocus kumla

@@mvpfocus If you are talking about my name, basically, say the ‘a’ as short as possible. Think about how you would pronounce kml.

Thank you!

I mean I think that's just because Brits have been aware of him longer than US fans of British comedy. I'm British and my ethnicity is Indian. Ramesh a very common name in South Asia, it has a Hindu religious meaning to it, I even have an uncle named Ramesh and can name a few Ramesh-es off the top of my head. Romesh Ranganathan is the first Romesh I've personally ever known, but that spelling apparently is more common in Sri Lanka and West Bengal (in the latter's language, 'a' sounds are replaced with 'o' in most words). But because of the population disparities between India and Sri Lanka, you're much more likely to meet a Ramesh than a Romesh.

I love this, it's kind of the "well it sounds like this to us in Spanish, so it must be the same in all languages".

Interesting! In Norwegian we pronounce it as though they were Norwegian words spelled "bøngalåo" and "tøpperwer"/"tøpperver" (although many pronounce it in a non-Norwegian way, with an American English r at the end). Seems similar to the Swiss.

I think the "tacko" part was a bit of a stretch. Every single mexican person I interact with calls them "TAH-CO" not "TACK-O"

Well her mother's side is of Indian Subcontinent ancestry. Her father's side is of the Jamaican part of the African Diaspora due to enslavement and the slave trade. Her father is an emeritus at Stanford so South San Francisco Bay area. Probably pretty cosmopolitan though I think her parents are both first generation immigrants.

Actually on second thought, this clip might be him trying to put on an American accent. This is the kind of (incorrect) modification that Canadians would usually make when impersonating certain American accents.

Or because he's an older speaker (b. 1935 and recently deceased)?

Are you a younger speaker? I agree with rp1692 that there have tended to be a lot of shifts in Canadian accents in speakers born since the 1980s.

@@WolfdogLinguistics Yeah born in the early 80s, but I'm not just referring to my own peers.

​@@rp1692 ​Yeah, I'm thinking that as well. He would have grown up in an era when Canada wasn't quite as saturated by mainstream US audio-visual culture and it would have been less influential on his speech. I went to watch a clip of him from the 1980 film Ordinary People and he definitely had the accent you often hear from older Canadians.

I love the movie clips!!

It's always cool to see some of my favorite creators in the same place. D&D worldbuilding was my gateway to linguistics, so it's kinda a fun connection

I think the reason America pronounces Tokyo that way is at least in part because there's no native use of the "ky" consonant cluster, so the default reading is to assume the Y must be a vowel. There's lots of examples like that at the end of native words, like lucky or picky. Americans might be convinced to get the vowels right (if not the stress) by re-parsing it something like "toke-yo" - but that's still quite unintuitive as a native speaker.

Americans don't even know _how_ to observe a vowel length difference without a perceived syllable or word boundary, it doesn't matter how many extra letters you write it with. You could maybe exploit the syllable boundary thing with semivowels, "silent" h's, or apostrophes. Towokyo'o

English doesn't allow the ky consonant cluster except in the GOOSE and CURE lexical sets such as the words "cue" and "cure". Many early sources spelled it "Tokio" and people naturally read that as three syllables as [tɔwkijɔw] The difficulty in differentiating short and long O in English is why Hepburn Romanization uses a macron: Tōkyō.

English speakers (or maybe just Americans) have difficulty with y in unfamiliar positions. Spanish "tiempo" is "TYEMP-o" but in Americans' mouths it becomes "tee-YEMP-o, and likewise words like "ciencia" ("see-ENCE-ya" come out as "see-ENCE-ee-ya". Tokyo and Kyoto are the same, three syllables instead of two.

I only recently found out that British people don't merge caught with thought. And I'm a USAn with a cot-caught split.

Agreed - I’m Canadian, and I never hear anyone pronounce those words like Sutherland in the clip, except for maybe the odd 70 year from a small town, or someone doing a hillbilly type voice as a joke

I think, at the very least, it is reasonable for Americans to pronounce the in "Melbourne" even though Aussie's wouldn't.

Simple: the same way Americans pronounce the Melbourne on the Space Coast. And Cairns is not pronounced "cans". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne,_Florida

@@hbowman108 Melburnians (yes, the “u”, rather than the intuitive “o”, is somehow the orthodox spelling for reasons lost to time) will fight you if you attempt to pronounce the name of their beloved city in any way other than “Mel-b’n”. Any American pronouncing Cairns as “cans” is probably responding to Australians “correcting” them, and attempting to approximate what they hear Australians doing. The American “cans” is phonetically closer to the Australian “cairns” than the American “cairns” is, because of the non-rhoticity of Australian English and the fact that the American “a” leans closer to a long Australian “e”

Wouldn’t it be ridiculous for f you had to mimic an Australian accent every time you said the name of any Australian geographical location? Then you would have to do the same for other countries too. That would be crazy.

That Kamala has different origins(maybe Urdu / Persian/ Arabic) than Kamala Harris name which has Sanskrit origin.

Biden is a rarer name than Harris or Bush though.

I live in Surrey and I’ve ever met a Biden in my life

​@@Aurora_AnimatesI haven't met one either, but it has a British feel to it.

He claims to be lrish.

@@valeriemacphail9180 you can be Irish and have an English surname - it just means that you have relatives from multiple countries. Edit: ten of his 16 great great grandparents were Irish. The Biden surname comes from an immigrant who landed in 1820 from England. And also, Biden isn't Irish - he's American, as are all Americans.

I don’t understand why the pronunciation isn’t “correct” in schwa deletion languages if the word is native to that indic language. In Hindi/marathi, the pronunciation is “cum-lah” (with the L doing a retroflex lateral flap in Marathi), and you’d be amiss to say hundreds of millions of people are saying a word incorrectly. Language at its core is made up anyways. Would you say all languages that are not Tamil or Sanskrit are “untrue” because they are different from the original languages?

Lindsey covered the "can"-"can't" pronunciation distinction in another video, which I found quite interesting: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qlbGtEg68x4.html

American accents can be wild! I pronounce "can" like "kn" usually in normal speech. "I kn getchu at eight"

sometimes i even soften it to a g sound "awggn getchu addeight"

Lindsey's "can" and "can't" video says English speakers tend to unstress the positive words and reduce the vowel, whereas in the negative words they don't. I think Americans do that too. (I'm American.) (And "can't" can't be reduced because it would sound like an offensive word.)

I think Geoff has a video on that somewhere. It's more than just the vowels, Americans often drop the t in can't as well! Something like "I can't help it" will come out like /aɪ kaːn hɛlp ɪt/ - the only way to tell that it's "can't" is that "can" would be reduced to /kən/.

Although I've never personally heard the reasoning for it being related to German, I can confirm, anecdotally, that a lot of Danes (including my own partner) say "hay-gun" rather than "hah-gun".

I suspect the "hah-gun" pronunciation of Copenhagen is more recent than the "hay-gin" pronunciation. My guess is that people have borrowed it from the pronunciation of Häagen-Dazs.

@@wlogan2000 That occurred to me, too, _except_ that there’s the musical number “Wonderful Copenhagen” from _Hans Christian Andersen,_ with the “hah-gun” pronunciation, which precedes the popularity of Häagen-Dazs by more than two decades. (The pseudo-Scandinavian name _Häagen-Dazs,_ dreamed up by Jewish-Polish immigrants from Brooklyn to give the ice cream a kind of Danish panache and meaningless in any language, except possibly that of marketing, is a linguistic story in itself-and, of course, gets the same kind of taco treatment. Come to think of it, maybe the causal relationship goes the _other_ way.)

@@IsaVarg I found just a few vague comments online so it’s good to get some real-world confirmation, even if only anecdotally. 👍

no American pronounces it "hah-gun" with a straight face unless they've never heard somebody say the word. It's pronounced 'hay-gin' (hard G) more accurately in American English

Yes in most Indian languages and that's the Sanskrit pronunciation.

/ɑ̈/ would be a better vowel to use because we're talking about an American English speaker's name, but if /ɐ/ is closest for you then that works

@@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410 Yea, as a Lithuanian speaker, /ɐ/ is a sound I'm better familiar with.

The Mandarin pronunciation of Taiwan is more like /an/, which is not a terminal sequence in English phonology. /ɑn/ is closer and is the standard American English pronunciation (LOT) and also approximately the SSB pronunciation (PALM).

@@paradoxmo I would argue that the fronted LOT [lät] with the "German A" is more generically American than [lɑt] which is more East Coast or Canadian. This is final in "neutron" or "Klingon". Putonghua -an final is more fronted, like British TRAP vowel followed by N [an]. Strong contrast with -a. Our closest approximation to that would be with our TRAP vowel [æn] like "man" or "Japan".

@@hbowman108 I would argue that it’s more important to have the same level of openness than the same approximate level of frontedness, as far as differentiating the vowels goes. I don’t think most mandarin speakers would identify /tʰaɪwæn/ as 台灣 (Pinyin taiwan), it would sound more like 泰文 (taiwen). But /wɑn/ or /wän/ really could only be interpreted as 灣 (wan).

You’re saying Taiwanese pronounce the country’s name with an “ash” sound? I think it is a more open vowel, but it may become more near-open sometimes by some speakers, somewhere in between the two, but not quite an “ash” sound.

I can't speak to Hokkien but Mandarin /a/ is definitely more like [a] or [ɑ] than [æ] or [ɛə̯]

I remember it -- "KAMALA! - A Randy Rainbow Song Parody" -- and it is brilliant.

Nope, haven't heard of Randy Rainbow.

@@sluggo206 He is incredibly talented. And Rainbow really is his last name.

And the Trump clip repeated in there proves that he did pronounce her name correctly at least once.

I agree. It’s much closer to Harris’s own pronunciation of her name than any of the alternatives. “Cumma-la”

@@ela83a yes I don’t think it would be proper to call her Kamala.

@@StormyDay It would depend on context; informal fans would still say Kamala (as informal fans of Trump would say Donald).

God forbid.

Tyrant is even easier to say

Except in French HORS D' OUEVRE is pronounced "or diov" or something

@@VivekNa ho always makes an "o" sound, r is r, s at the end of a word is silent (unless the word comes from a different language or something but its rare), d is d, œu always makes a french "e" sound, v and r are normal and e at the end of a word is never pronounced unless theres an accent on it. if you know french prononciation rules you literally cant mispronounce it. you cant do that in english

@@samylemzaoui2298 "If you know french prononciation rules you literally cant mispronounce it." This is true by definition: if you know the rules of anything, you can follow the rules of anything, English pronunciation included. (It's just that the rules might be incredibly complicated.) But I suspect you're making a point about relative phonetic consistency, and it's always been my impression that French is only moderately phonetically consistent, less than Spanish or Italian or Greek, but more than English.

@@EdwardLindon well, what’s different from French is that English pronunciation rules are actually several different sets of rules, one for English/Germanic words, one for Latin/Greek words, one for French words, and one for modern loan words (as described in this video). also, spelling was frozen in the Middle Ages. French by contrast has kept their spelling reformed so that for most French words, there is at least a one way mapping from orthography to pronunciation. Unfortunately the same phonemes can result in a ton of different possible spellings, but it’s still miles better than English where even which phoneme a letter represents is often in question.

@@EdwardLindon here the main thing is that French lacks both lexical stress and long vowels, so French speakers don’t need to ask themselves how “Kamala” is pronounced, only one single option exists

Japanese American?

@@Ts-fp5sd I am, yes.

I think you should get as close as you can to the way a person pronounces their own name using the sounds you're able to reliably pronounce. If you're having to concentrate on pronunciation every time you say a name, that adds social friction which isn't helpful. But you should try to get reasonably close to the correct pronunciation and not just give up because a word is foreign. The American way of pronouncing foreign A sounds really irritates me because it can come up with a pronunciation that's unnecessarily far from the original. See also Beiden's pronunciation of Rishi Sunak. Sunak grew up in the UK, his name already has an anglicised pronunciation which is the one he uses and isn't at all difficult for English speakers to say. There's no need to deviate from that just because the word is unfamiliar.

You should try to say someone's name the way they say it, if you're reading it then it's fine to guesstimate