Marta Balcewicz has an amusing NY Times piece (archived) on why people have finally stopped butchering her name:
There was a time when I regularly guided people to pronounce my surname like that of David Berkowitz, also known as the Son of Sam. The worst part wasn’t pinning my identity to a serial killer but that our names in fact sound nothing alike, making the whole effort doubly pitiful. Berkowitz, being a person of notoriety, just provided a useful shortcut. He spared me from needing to explain the Polish rules of Bahl-TZEH-veech — the “C” and “W” reading as “Z” and “V,” the stress on the penultimate syllable, the final digraph possessing the gritty “ch-” of “churn” and not the soft one of “cheese,” an exquisitely subtle distinction most English speakers may not even recognize.
I have never gone out of my way to teach people around me how to properly say my name or to correct them when they butcher it; the task always struck me as Sisyphean. So a little while ago, I was startled when a bookseller in Toronto named Kyle got it right on the first try. I thanked him. But what could explain his flawless delivery? As my partner and I walked home debating the question, an epiphany came my way: “Kyle said he was a huge basketball fan!”
North America’s National Basketball Association has recently become unprecedentedly international. The league’s efforts to expand its brand began in the mid-1980s through broadcasting and merchandise deals (I lived in Europe as a child and distinctly remember N.B.A. team logos being the hot items to stick on school binders), and then, after it sent its best players to the Olympics in 1992 and opened basketball academies around the world, the fruits of this globalization slingshotted back into its home country. Today many of the N.B.A.’s top players were not born here. Giannis Antetokounmpo and Victor Wembanyama, All-Stars hailing from Greece and France with Nigerian and Congolese backgrounds, have names that challenge English-language conventions of which letters should appear where. Eastern European draftees include the Serbian three-time M.V.P. Nikola Jokić and Luka Dončić, from Slovenia, whose trade to the Los Angeles Lakers was front-page news.
More and more these days watching a basketball game, I hear parts and variations of my “unpronounceable” Slavic appendage easily spoken. All those unwieldy S’s, J’s and C’s, the peculiar graphemes, the tongue-twisty polysyllables from the region where I was born, are enthusiastically and correctly shouted by announcers on prime-time TV: “Dončić, Dončić, Dončić,” ending in “chich,” not “sick”; “Jokić, Jokić, Jokić,” pronounced “YO-kitsch,” not “Joe-kick.” When sportscasters call out Nikola Vučević of the Chicago Bulls, I feel myself praised by his name: I launched the alley-oop, it sounds like; I drew an offensive foul. All the while, Spike Lee and Timothée Chalamet sit watching, courtside. If asked, they could probably say “Balcewicz” the right way. […]
I, like many with non-English names, had felt doomed to a lesser identity than my peers. People with unfamiliar or difficult-to-pronounce names are often judged as less capable, studies say; our achievements and applications are more likely to be passed over. Repercussions are doubly harsh for people of color or those with strong accents. But pop culture has been slowly shifting the currents. In a nation whose defining metaphor is a melting pot, it has taken a comically long time for diverse names to bubble up and not be shortened, anglicized or outright changed to be more palatable to the English tongue. I cheer for famous “unpronounceable” comrades like Kumail Nanjiani, Ego Nwodim or Lupita Nyong’o, whose names when gushed by “Saturday Night Live” announcers and scores of admiring fans give me a therapeutic sense of peace.
But I still wasn’t clear on how she said her own name; fortunately, there’s a YouTube video where she introduces herself at the start: it’s /ˈbælsəvitʃ/ (BAL-sevich). I guess there’s only so far you can take authenticity.
I read the article yesterday and was struck by her remark that most English speakers won’t recognize the difference between the ‘ch’ sounds in ‘churn’ and ‘cheese.’ I sure don’t, and would love to be enlightened.
The latter is palatalized (said further forward in the mouth, close to the position for y).
I have said ‘churn’ and ‘cheese’ one after the other, repeatedly, and while I can tell that my tongue ends up in a slightly different position (to prepare for the oncoming vowel), I honestly can’t detect any difference in the ‘ch’ sound itself.
I understand that I am most likely not the best judge of the sounds I make, but still.
Yeah, it’s hard to hear nonphonemic differences in one’s own language.
So is the idea that Kyle in Toronto learned so much about Polish names as a basketball fan—there have been five Polish players in the NBA, according to various Web sources, and I supposed there have been more in college—that he could pronounce a Polish name he hadn’t seen before? I have trouble believing that. Maybe he knew something about Polish from some other source.
But I agree that American sportscasting ahs gotten better with foreign names and has had a good influence on American pronunciation.
Maybe sportscasters, unlike newscasters and politicians, are less likely to be accused of snobbishness if they pronounce foreign names correctly.
BTW I know David Berkowitz (not Son of Sam but a distant cousin of mine in NYC), and he’s regularly contacted about book or show deals by people believing that he’s his infamous namesake. How they believe that their hero is capable of exchanging electronic messages from jail is beyond me, but almost all of these stories are truly hilarious.
“I, like many with non-English names, had felt doomed to a lesser identity”
Speaking as someone with a Russian surname that is pronounced in different ways inside Russia, I am reminded that surnames only became popular in the latter half of the 19th century because they were mandated to strengthen state administrative and social control, not because of some fantasies about “identity”.
As I understand it, left to their own devices, people were quite fluid with names.
To my L2 ear, cheese with a postpalatal ch is permissible, but churn and church with a prepalatal one are not.
“Chuck E. Cheese” might be a good way to demonstrate the contrast, for those familiar with the institution.
Of course the actual phonetic difference is much greater in Polish than in English, and of course it’s a lot more reliable.
Jerry Friedman, maybe he at least pronounced “wicz” as “vich” instead of “witz”, and that was enough to impress her?
“Chuck E. Cheese” might be a good way to demonstrate the contrast
It all sounds the same to me
the actual phonetic difference is much greater in Polish than in English
I was in Krakow for a week last year, and my attempts to pronounce street names and a few other words were met with polite amusement or blank incomprehension. Lovely city and people, though.
Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz
Speaking as someone with a Russian surname that is pronounced in different ways inside Russia, I am reminded that surnames only became popular in the latter half of the 19th century because they were mandated to strengthen state administrative and social control, not because of some fantasies about “identity”.
As I understand it, left to their own devices, people were quite fluid with names.
See this LH post from a couple of years ago.
Surnames among the Kusaasi are only a generation old, if that. The usual convention is for people to use their actual Kusaal name as a surname for official purposes, and to give a baptismal or Muslim name (or just an English or French name the bearer took a fancy to) as their personal name for external use. It’s only in the past generation that children have taken to using a parent’s “surname” as their own.
I recall a Malaysian girl of about my own age who I met in Moscow in 1973 who had only one name. She told me she used her grandfather’s personal name as a surname when one was required for filling in forms.
These days many in smaller South American tribes use the tribe name as an official surname.
@Y: “Maybe sportscasters, unlike newscasters and politicians, are less likely to be accused of snobbishness if they pronounce foreign names correctly.”
My understanding is that broadcasters have a consensus that professionalism includes getting the players’ names right, which for this purpose is defined as how the player wants their name pronounced. This is facilitated by the broadcaster having direct access to the player. Part of the pregame routine is going and asking any players whose names the broadcaster is unsure of. Doing this has practical advantages for the broadcaster. It helps avoid stumbling over the name while on the air, the broadcaster can use it to deflect any commentary from the fans about the pronunciation, and it helps establish good will for getting interviews.
Is there a readily-accessible resource on these “ch” allophones in AmEng?
I don’t think I palatalize my ch before front vowels in English; in contrast, I can easily produce palatalized and unpalatalized versions in other languages. I wonder if this is a dialectal variant in English.
I just tried about ten repetitions of “chump/cheese” to see, or more aptly, feel any difference in the placement of lips, tongue or other bits of anatomy. To my surprise, the points of contact between tongue and roof of mouth were ever so slightly different. I couldn’t detect any difference in the ch sound produced for the two words, but I don’t trust final edits of my writing to the author.
For what little it may matter, I speak native American English, and have spent most of my adult years in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and for the past half century in Connecticut and Maine.
ETA: I just tried the same exercise with Spanish words, churro and chispa with similar results.
Yeah, it’s natural for consonants to be affected by following vowels. I shouldn’t have said the ch was palatalized, which has a technical meaning, but rather that it was produced farther forward on the palate.
Alan Cruttenden’s 8th edition of Gimson’s Pronunciation of English does not mention any such variation.
That may just mean it’s too small to be worth mention. Mainstream German /l/ varies similarly; the front end of the allophone range is identical, as far as I can hear, to the Polish l, but the back end (as in… ulr, with the tip of the tongue a few mm farther back than at the front end of the range) still sounds far fronter than any /l/ in, say, Russian (velarized) or very northern German (apical). Likewise, /x/ does not simply have two allophones for me, but two allophone ranges with a gap between them; the [ç] in Milch is in front of that in Mönch, which in turn is in front of that in ich.
It’s just odd that Balcewicz fixated on a distinction apparently so marginal as to be rarely discussed in standard accounts of English pronunciation. Are there other languages where the same distinction is phonemic?
She didn’t “fixate” on a marginal distinction, she was pointing out a feature of Polish pronunciation (ć vs. cz) that doesn’t exist in English.
>The latter is palatalized (said further forward in the mouth, close to the position for y).
I seem to say y in yes relatively farther back. If I try to move my tongue forward, I sound like I’m speaking with a Slavic accent.
I think I need a tongue coach. Linguo-physical therapy.
Could some of these things be pragmatic? If you say church and chips with the same initial ch, some people will ask you “what is a chup?”.After a while you migrate the ch closer to where the i is, so it sounds clearer.
She didn’t “fixate” on a marginal distinction, she was pointing out a feature of Polish pronunciation (ć vs. cz) that doesn’t exist in English.
Indeed. Polish doesn’t have a /t͡ʃ/, as such (like English does), it has a /t͡ɕ/ (usually spelled ć) and a /t͡ʂ/ (spelled cz). The English approximations given by Wikipedia are “cheer” and “child” respectively.
I’m not sure I’ve heard an actually retroflex one; but it’s definitely a bit backer than /t͡ʃ/ ever gets in English.
when i say “churn” and “cheese” (or “Chuck E. Cheese”) I feel like my /tʃ/ in “cheese” is definitely further back — which, looking at IPA vowel diagrams, makes no sense. But vowels rarely make sense to me when i try to drill down into the phonetics.
And then i said it so many times I’m starting to doubt myself, but if go back to saying a full sentence (“will you pass the [churn|cheese], please”) I really do think it’s closer to velar in “cheese” for me.
> If you say church and chips with the same initial ch, some people will ask you “what is a chup
In “chips” however I feel my tongue going farther forward (really pretty much alveolar) on /tʃ/
I grew up somewhat more recently in California, so perhaps the California Vowel Shift is playing havoc with my intuitions of vowels here. I don’t know, the more I try to read about CVS — or worse, watch demonstrations/phonological recordings on youtube — the more confused I get.
Also like all the Americans in this thread i can’t hear any difference in the sound /tʃ/ between the words, I’m just trying to sense by feel where my tongue is. Maybe it’s my proprioception of my tongue that is doubtful.
> The latter is palatalized (said further forward in the mouth, close to the position for y).
oh maybe this is the problem — consonantal “y” (IPA /j/ ) is further back in the mouth for me than any of my points of articulation for/ tʃ/ …and hey, the IPA chart backs me up on this one! so this description of palatization sounds like a paradox to me. That said, I’m probably misunderstanding something. (Palatalization is another phonological concept that has confused me for a long time)
EDIT: Oops, just saw that the later comment where LH corrected ” I shouldn’t have said the ch was palatalized, which has a technical meaning, but rather that it was produced farther forward on the palate.” — so, I’m still confused, but maybe not about palatalization in the technical sense. Thanks!
EDIT2: “cheer” and “child” (suggested by January First-of-May and wikipedia, also thank you!) maybe work for me?? it’s close enough that i’m not sure, BUT “child” probably has the furthest back /tʃ/ for me yet.
Another test I do for myself is to say “Cheech and Chong” and then “Chong and Cheech”. In the former, I use the fronter alveolar pronunciation for both. In the latter, I use the backer, postalveolar for “Chong” and the fronter for “Cheech”. But they are not that far apart.
How does that work for you, sarah?
Yet another sound slightly divergent from the “ch” in “cheese” is “j”. A cheesemaker acquaintance of mine used this to advantage on a bumper sticker, “What a friend we have in cheeses.” I’ll see myself out.
https://memes-4u.com/cheese-focused-church-mice-humor
Blessed indeed are the cheesemakers.
Martin L.: A cheesemaker acquaintance of mine used this to advantage on a bumper sticker, “What a friend we have in cheeses.”. I’ll see myself out.
No, please stay. That’s brilliant.
Since I speak Chinese, I am quite conscious of the pronunciation of qi the palatalised sound. Of course, the contrasting sound in Chinese is ch, which is pronounced like the ‘tr’ in “tree” in most varieties of English. But still.
Mongolian names are a problem, not just for the pronunciation, but also for naming practices. I’ve seen an English-language website that lists surnames from around the world and for some reason gives Mongolian girls’ personal names as “surnames”. That’s not how it works.
Since the Soviets abolished ‘clan names’ as being feudal during the Communist era, and (I believe) destroyed genealogical records, many people don’t know their clan name. So when the Mongolian government reintroduced clan names some years ago, many people just adopted Borjigin, which was Genghis Khan’s clan name, as their own “clan name”. But nobody uses clan names anyway, so they are basically irrelevant. Instead, people go by their father’s name (genitive form) — in other words a patronymic — and then their personal name.
So a woman who has the personal name “Möngöntsetseg” and a father called “Baatar” will be called “Baatar’s Möngöntsetseg”. If she marries someone called “Chinzorig” and they have a son together, whom they call “Dorj”, the son’s name will be “Chinzorig’s Dorj”. In other words, the so-called “surname” changes with every generation. Lttle Dorj’s passport will list эцгийн нэр (“father’s name”) in Mongolian, and “surname” in English. So little Dorj will have the surname “Chinzorig”, even though his son will eventually have the surname “Dorj”.
This practice caused me problems in Australia when I had my son’s Mongolian vaccination record translated into English. The document gave his personal name “Dorj” (to keep up the previous naming), and his “father’s or mother’s name”. In this case the document happened to give his mother’s name (Möngöntsetseg). The translator very helpfully gave his his name as “Dorj” and his surname as “Möngöntsetseg”!
I disputed the translation since the surname in his passport was my surname (“Bathrobe”), not “Möngöntsetseg”. The translator said that the name “Bathrobe” didn’t appear anywhere in the vaccination record, so she couldn’t give “Bathrobe” as his surname. I had to fight tooth and nail to get her to amend “surname” to “father’s or mother’s name” — which is what the document actually said in Mongolian! (I’ve discovered that certified Mongolian translators in Australia, who have passed a government exam to have the right to do officially-recognised translation work, don’t have very high standards. It’s not that much better in Mongolia, but at least there is no “goverment accreditation” they can stand their ground on.)
The way I read it, probably from you, local communists abolished the clan names and burnt the archives; after it was all over, the new government first tried to dig up the clan names, but so many of them turned out to be things like “Thief” and “Family of Seven Drunks” that they gave up and allowed people to pick their own preferences, and now half the country is called Borjigin.
…except no genitive ending is actually used, is it? I’ve met Chuluun Minjin and his daughter Minjin Bolortsetseg; another colleague is named Perle Altangerel or maybe the other way around.
No, there is usually a genitive ending in Mongolian, although not English. Eg Энхбаатар gives Энхбаатарын. Etc.
but so many of them turned out to be things like “Thief” and “Family of Seven Drunks”
I looked up “Family of Seven Drunks” on Google, and found what might be the original version of that story, published in the Guardian in 2004.
(Google also finds a bunch of other paraphrases of what appears to be the same article; it’s possible that there’s a pre-Guardian version that Google doesn’t happen to know about.)
[EDIT: This version from the Seattle Times, from the same day [24 October 2004], goes into much more detail; it was syndicated across several other US newspapers, apparently originally appearing in the LA Times on October 23rd, and probably one of these versions – most likely the LA Times one – was the source of the brief Guardian note.]
@bathrobe, dm
I suppose for a man named Davaa, his child would have the “patronymic” Davaagiin (with genitive ending). There may be no ending for genitive in the other quoted names.
As a side point, does Minjin have a brother Whinjin and an uncle St. John?
EDIT: Ninja’d by Bathrobe
This version from the Seattle Times, from the same day [24 October 2004], goes into much more detail
Good article (and the link still works after all these years!); I like the ending:
C’est d’la triche !
Yes; I didn’t know that lots of people already had the same clan name, but that had to be expected… the article doesn’t say it was Borjigin, but…
The claim of a Chinese imperial decree from 2852 BC, however, is obviously mythical. Wikipedia, “Chinese name”:
If you are in doubt about how the “hard” ch = č sounds, you can listen to the former prime minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, who noticeably pronounces his CH’s in such a way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5mpKEuVdsM
He is almost incapable of producing a “soft” ć
I didn’t know that lots of people already had the same clan name, but that had to be expected… the article doesn’t say it was Borjigin, but…
It might not have been Borjigin, though that was probably a common one if all the male-line Genghis Khan descendants had it; I get the impression that there were multiple clan names that were common, much like how most Koreans are named Kim but also a lot of them are named Lee or Park.
I also thought that 2852 BC was a bit too far off; that’s well into Xia Dynasty or even past it. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if there is indeed such a decree among the many variously-mythical things the pre-Xia and early Xia emperors are claimed to have done.
[EDIT: I figured out where 2852 BC came from. It’s, um, roughly the Chinese mythological equivalent of the Awakening of the Elves. I didn’t realize it was that far past the Xia.]
That’s a great way to put it; I shall steal it promptly.
The traditional Mongolian method of avoiding inbreeding, as I understand it, was the custom of taking a bride from a different part of the country. That would probably hold for rural areas but not for the big city, though.
The Russians, as I understand it, had it in for the descendants of Genghis Khan and went out of their way to slaughter them. But this is just hearsay on my part. One of our learned readership could probably find a source to confirm or disconfirm it.
I doubt the Russians cared much about the descendants of Genghis Khan; I imagine it was the local mini-Stalin Choibalsan who made sure they (along with many, many others) were slaughtered.
I think Anna Akhmatova used to report the family legend that the ancestors she took her nom de plume from were ultimately descended from Genghis Khan.
I doubt the Russians cared much about the descendants of Genghis Khan; I imagine it was the local mini-Stalin Choibalsan who made sure they (along with many, many others) were slaughtered.
I really don’t know for sure, but I doubt the Russians, who were not exactly enamoured of the Golden Horde, would have looked kindly on any lingering attachment to Genghis Khan, including temples to the Great Khan (which were destroyed)* and the existence of people claiming to be part of the Golden Lineage (who, by so doing, were claiming aristocratic status). The local Communist leadership was beholden to the Russians and pretty much had to toe the Russian line on all things. Towards the end, said Choibalsan was pushing for the unification of Mongol lands (Buryatia, Mongolia, and Inner Mongolia) into one greater Mongol entity, which understandably gained no traction with Stalin (at Yalta he specifically ruled out such an outcome). Choibalsan eventually died in the Soviet Union, where he had gone for treatment for cancer. The NKVD were active in Mongolia and Stalin also had a habit of murdering Mongolian leaders he didn’t approve of, so I’m just a little suspicious of glib generalisations about “local mini-Stalins” being responsible for everything. But as I said, I’m really not sure about the murder of people claiming descent from Genghis Khan.
* I know that temples to Genghis Khan existed in Mongolia but were destroyed during the Communist period, but it’s hard to find such information on the Internet. That’s what happens when you don’t keep track of information sources you’ve encountered over the years.
If you can’t be a maxi-Tito, you have to be a mini-Stalin, I guess.
I really don’t know for sure, but I doubt the Russians, who were not exactly enamoured of the Golden Horde, would have looked kindly on any lingering attachment to Genghis Khan
Oh, I don’t know either, and I’m sure the Russians wouldn’t have approved of attachment to Genghis Khan — I’m just guessing that they didn’t care as much as the Mongolians. But what do I know? Nothing, that’s what!
> How does that work for you, sarah?
Sorry for the delay! “Chong” is definitely the furthest back for me than any of the others.I don’t think swapping around the order of the names makes a difference for me?? Part of the reason it took me so long to response was that I’ve been trying this out over multiple days to see if I change my mind or can get a clearer sense….. I think I’m pretty sure now that “chong” is furthest back and “churn” has the furthest forward point of articulation for me.
@zyxt — I tried to listen to Turnbull but I haven’t found and /tʃ/ followed by a vowel yet, but it’s making me notice how many other sounds (/t/ and /tr/ and /dʒ/ and more) he articulates differently from me. Australian English!! It sure is different from mine 😛
Have you got a boyfriend, sarah? :)
(I’m probably way too old for you, but you sound like a lot of fun.)