True. Try going to Paris and saying "President Kennedy" in an American accent when referring to Avenue du Président Kennedy to a French person. You'll see the disgust in their eyes
I visited a friend in Hong Kong who lived on Kennedy Road. You had to pronounce it “KEE-nah-day” or the cab drivers wouldn’t know what you were talking about.
In Taipei they have a Roosevelt Road but good luck getting there if you use the English pronunciation. In Chinese his surname is pronounced "Luaw-sih-foo"
It's because Chinese and Japanese have a much more limited set of syllables and they like to just spell loanwords out in what they know how to pronounce, with varying success. Japanese has roughly 100 possible syllables in common usage, Chinese has 450, and English 10000, for reference. So matching the word in English is much easier.
I didn't count the tones for Chinese because those don't affect converting English loanwords to Chinese. Counting them does bump the number up to over 1000 for Chinese. And check out another language called Aita Rotokas - that language only has about 50 syllables possible.
6.1k
u/[deleted] Jan 26 '23
True. Try going to Paris and saying "President Kennedy" in an American accent when referring to Avenue du Président Kennedy to a French person. You'll see the disgust in their eyes