"I sing, i sang i sung. You win, you’ve won.
Sung won.
SANGJWINN?" -proZD
Funnily enough, Shawn is the anglicisation of the Irish name Seán, so spelled for the reasons outlined in the OP.
I’m a super white lady living in a pretty multicultural area. Sadly I feel like I mostly experience the opposite here from my non-white friends. Those with names from their ancestral culture (is that a good way to put it? Not sure) either ignore our mispronunciations or simply adopt western names. I had a coworker from Shanghai whose name I always said wrong because of the inflection. It makes me sad that they kind of give up trying to teach people to pronounce their names correctly, but at the same time, I get it. It’s a lot of constant work and some of us white people, or other non-whites from different cultures, just aren’t going to try or see why it’s important. I probably wouldn’t force the issue either if it were me, but man, what a constant way to feel othered.
Ah, see, here’s the problem; I’m not Shawn either.
after a lifetime of “fatty patty boom bah laddy” taken in good humor i’m not feeling the rage here
Ok, but x sounding like sh is not ok. We need to normalize spelling stuff like it’s pronounced. Otherwise every language is going to become like the English.
I have bad news for you. Spelling like it’s pronounced is heavily subjective and opinion based. Virtually every single language in living use has deviating pronunciation to some degree.
I disagree. X is a useless letter in English; it’s always copying other letters or combinations of letters. Meanwhile, there’s a special rule where putting an ‘s’ and an ‘h’ together makes a different sound. Why not have a single letter for that?
Because a diphthong is fine. Taking a already used character and assigning a new sound to it is going to make things hard.
Also I need you to argue not just from the English point of view, but all Latin alphabet using languages, in particular those with strict rules of pronunciation like German.
“Eichhörnchenschwanz” is spelt exactly like it’s pronounced. Does this help you pronounce it?
Yes, but only because I’m familiar with German. And I’d still mess it up when trying to pronounce it.
familiar with German
Exactly. Different languages have different phonology that you have to be familiar with, there is no one way to “spell it like it’s pronounced” (except IPA and even that can be tricky).
Bad take. You don’t shame people for being unable to make sounds that aren’t in their native language. If someone spoke Mandarin all their life and learned English, but had to approximate the “L” sound with “R”, you wouldn’t have this reaction claiming that allowing that approximation is turning everything into Mandarin
It doesn’t really sound like “sh” though, it’s a different phoneme. You place the tip of your tongue in the centre of the gum ridge behind your bottom teeth, rather than the top one. They have that noise as well, and - unsurprisingly I suppose - it is written “sh”. The former is a totally unfamiliar sound to a native English speaker, most people need that kind of specific coaching to produce it. Pinyin isn’t perfect, I agree, but it primarily exists to be used by Chinese people who already know how their own language sounds.
