On pronunciation
Due to pronunciation and writing challenges, non-English words need only reasonable approximations in English.
I asked myself a simple question recently - how should we pronounce, or write non-English words when we’re using English? The simple answer might be that we should pronounce or write them as they are said in their original languages. Superficially this does seem like a commendable, polite or even respectable idea, but there is a problem. In fact, there are roughly 1,000 problems – as this is the number of sounds, or phonemes, that people are using across the 7,000 or so spoken languages, and while English has more phonemes than most languages at 44, that’s just 5% of all the sounds that people are making in all their languages, and that’s only the first 1,000 problems. There are many more, because when it comes to writing systems, according to the Unicode standard, there are about 150,000 symbols in use, this includes all the Chinese characters, Hindi letters and everything else, while in English we use roughly 100 of those symbols, that’s 0.07 percent. So if you thought that the answer was ‘as the locals use or write them’, I commend you on your optimism, but importing words and replicating the native use is an insurmountable task and that’s before we even get to how different they might be from English.
First, let’s look at the native language of Nelson Mandela, Xhosa, of South Africa which includes 3 different clicks. In fact, their word for their own language begins with ‘the horse riding’ click. To my ears it sounds great, and after having practiced saying ‘Xhosa’ with the click for a few minutes, which is fun so give it a go, I suspect I can vaguely replicate the pronunciation. However, I am not a madman - I’m certain I do not pronounce it like a native speaker – and while it is conjecture on my part, I have to say that if anyone were to argue that all speakers of non-click languages should be expected to get this consistently correct, they would be misguided at best. Now, moving linguistically much closer to home to the Netherlands, we get 'Van Gogh,' which Wikipedia tells me is pronounced something like 'fan hok' but that the pronunciation is very definitely not 'Van Go'. I personally find pronouncing Van Gogh1 correctly slightly easier than Xhosa with the click, and even though I like languages, and I happily spent a few minutes imitating recordings of Dutch people, and comparing my attempts to them, and actively tried to improve, I’m certain I won’t be convincing any Dutch people I’m a native Dutch speaker anytime soon. So as success is unlikely even in a very limited case like this, we must accept a reasonable compromise between the Dutch pronunciation and what is plausible for the vast majority of English speakers – and using the sounds we have at our disposal that best approximate the Dutch by saying 'fan hok' seems quite obviously it. Thinking about this problem in general, what I think really clinches it, is that we can reframe the question ‘should English speakers be expected to pronounce foreign words as they are in their original languages?’ to ‘should speakers of English be allowed to have accents? I’m sure you know the answer to this question, but to eliminate all doubt – where there are non-native speakers there are always accents. There is also a related question: how to write foreign words? Which when we look at Москва́ (Moscow in Cyrillic), አዲስ አበባ (Addis Ababa in the Geʽez script) and 北京 (Beijing in Chinese characters) – of course we write these things down using our Latin script – it’s inconceivable for anyone to learn and use all 150,000 symbols from all the writing systems.
Are there exceptions? Well, some cursory digging indicates there are no jurisdictions in which one is obligated to speak multiple languages: the technical answer is no, although of course in many places it’s very useful – for example I once arranged to hire some donkeys in the Sahara using rudimentary German. In other cases, it can be very political – in some quarters of New Zealand there is the strong opinion that Maori words should be pronounced in Maori. Of course, I have no issue with aligning English pronunciation with the Maori - for example, there is a city in New Zealand generally called Tauranga (tow-ronga) whereas the Maori pronunciation would be something like 'Toe-runga' 1 with a rolled 'r.' So how should New Zealanders whose English generally does not include a rolled r, among other things, say the name of this place? Well, I would say we should use English sounds that closely approximate the sound of the Maori – thus Toe-runga. This seems clear cut to me, but there is another question people might raise as Maori is an official language of New Zealand: Does that raise an obligation to be fully bilingual? Well, no - being an official language of New Zealand means there is the right to use Maori in legal settings, but it does not mean there is a legal requirement to learn or speak Maori, thus there can be no official requirement for New Zealanders to use the pronunciation from Maori. However, should New Zealanders do so anyway? I would say the answer is very simple: if they want to and it is clear. For an example from Italian, there would be minimal confusion in saying Milan or Milano, but Firenze, the actual Italian name for Florence, instead of Florence would not help someone communicate in English. Back to New Zealand, another two examples are: one, the word ‘Maori’ itself. On occasion you can hear ‘Maari’ and to me this is lazy, ugly and wrong, then there is Maori with English phonemes (mao-ree), and then the pronunciation from the Maori language, and two, the town of Taupo, generally pronounced to rhyme with cow-snow, but which really should be toe-paw (which you can hear with the Maori accent at the link). In both cases there is a good option and no obligation.
Lastly you might have noticed I have typed Maori without the macron over the a, that is without a line above it as per ā – and that’s because we don’t use macrons in English, just like we don’t write Zurich with dots above the ü (umlauts), or in an extreme case: 東京 for Tokyo. In the case of macrons or umlauts, a word will still be clear to English readers, so whether someone uses them or not isn’t of great concern, but the obligation to do so does not exist, and it could be easily argued that it is in fact incorrect to use them in English, because at the start, and end of the day, they don’t mean anything in English.
1. vɑŋ‿ˈɣɔx
2. ˈtaʉɾaŋa