Conference thebay::joyoflex

    Where I come from (western Montana), it would be War-zjin-ow-ski
    or War-zjin-o-wicjz.  
    
    I'm not quite sure how to represent the way the mostly southern
    and eastern European immigrants pronounce the 'z' after the 'r' --
    it sounds like sort of a voiced 'j'.  (Sorry, my linguistics
    background isn't quite up to describing it, except that it doesn't
    exist in the American English sound set.
    
    Or is this a trick to try to figure out what the company's surname
    is, as opposed to the surname of the individual who appears to
    have lent his or her surname to the company? 
    
    --bonnie

Okay, I'll bite.

War (as is the big one, WW2)
Zinn (as in Howard)
Ow (as in what you say at the dentist's)
Its (as in "It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to")
	    ---
I couldn't guess which syllable gets the accent.

Now that I've answered your question, plaeas answer mine.

Why?

Curious_in_Vermont

    Well, where I'm from (the Connecticut river vally, home to lots
    and lots of Polish people), it probably would be War zinn ow its
    with the the accent on either the second or third syllable.
    
    BUT, if it were to be pronounced *correctly*, the W's should be
    pronounced as V, the proper Polish pronounciation.
    

            I'd pronounce it:
            
            	war ZHIN you Witz
            
            
            Based on pronunciation guidelines I read about in an
            article that talked about pronouncing names...
            
            					andrew

    It's a long name that looks pretty intimidating at first sight, but the
    only real problem is the WRZ. If, as bonnie suggested, the W is the end
    of the first syllable rather than the beginning of the second, you're
    left with RZ as the problem. It looks to me as if those two consonants
    are an Anglicization of a consonant sound similar to the one in the
    middle of the name of that composer who wrote the New World Symphony,
    whose name seems to be beyond the capacities of my keyboard (unless
    maybe there's some trick I cd play with the `Set-Up') - a sound that
    doesn't trip off the (habitual English-speaking) tongue, but if you can
    imagine a [zh] sound (like the one in `measure') with a sort of
    guttural grating sound superimposed on it, you might recognize it.
    
    What happens to it in the Melting Pot, when it's attenuated to suit
    the habitual speech sounds of other speakers of English as a second
    language, I've no idea.
    
    b
    ps - I know the composer and the concrete mixer don't come from the
    same part of Eastern Europe, but speech sounds don't care much
    about national boundaries.

    re: .5
    
    Right!  That's the consonant sound I'm trying to describe!
    
    --bonnie

    The Czech "trilled r", written as an "r" with a hachek over it
    is the simultaneous articulation of an apical trill and the voiced
    palatal slot siblent ezh.
    
    hachek: a diacritic like "^" only inverted to point down.
    
    apical trill: tongue-tip tapping against the ridge behind the
    	upper teeth in a very fast manner, like the Spanish "perro",
    	or the Arabic "darrasa".  Written in IPA as "r" (not "R").
    
    ezh: like the English "sh", only with voicing to be "zh" as in
    	"Zhivago" or "allusion").  Written in IPA as either "z"
    	with a hachek or something very like the number "3".
    
    			-John Bishop

After consulting with our resident expert on things East European, he took
one look at the name and said Polish ... he then described its pronunciation
which went something like this .....

Vahv jeen o vitch  with the j slightly slurred towards a sh sound

mapping the syllables as follows

Waw rzyn o wicz

rz indeed producing the slightly slurred j sound
the y is a European long e
w is definitely v
and finally cz being closest to tch



How's that ?

Stuart

wEll!  I guess I got alot for my money!  All proposed pronunciations appear to
culminate in Stuart's  "Vahv jeen o vitch", complete with apical, sibilant and
hacheked support from John Bishop.  Thanks all.

Bonnie,
> Or is this a trick to try to figure out what the company's surname is ...
and Curious_in_Vermont,
> Now that I've answered your question, plaeas answer mine.  Why?

No underhanded motives.  When I (on occasion) wear this baseball-type cap,
the reactions are almost invariably (in succession):
    - wrinkled forehead evidencing great effort in scanning the letters
    - "I LOVE it!"
    - "OK, how DO you pronounce it?"

Now, especially if I use terms already referenced above, I may be able to
impress somebody.  And that, after all, is the main benefit of $0.25 words,
right?

Jon

PS  Nobody has accepted my suggested pronunciation of "mangrove throat warbler".

    I'm curious about the "v" pronunciation of the "w" -- I've been
    around long enough to be aware that generally the Polish w is
    pronounced as a v, but I didn't hear it pronounced that way when I
    was growing up. It was a "w" sound.  
    
    I grant that most of the immigrants I talked to had been in the
    country for some time and their pronunciation had smoothed out
    some.  But the Poles I've spoken with since I moved East have
    retained this 'v' pronunciation even on their English.  
    
    Are there regional dialects of Polish that pronounce it as "w"
    rather than as "v"? 
    
    --bonnie

    Authorative answer , the 802.8 is as correct as one can get in trying
    to represent Polish phonetics in English. 

    re : -1 , the "w" in Polish sounds always as English "v".
    
    Dialects usually have different vowel sounds ( 'oo' instead of 'o',
    etc.) and some funny deep belly "h", incidently, this is how I
    pronounce it and some people find in funny ( my mother comes from South
    Eastern Poland).

    There is an "w" sound ( like in war) in Polish, it's an 'l' with a '~'
    on top of it or an "\" straight through it. This particular letter
    ( and few others) don't exists in a standard Latin alphabet.


    But, we are missing a point from the base note.

    Should a Polish name be pronounced in a Polish way when the designated
    person is an American ? Mr. Wawrzyniak or Mr.Szczerzulski have been
    living in US for generations, their names a no longer Polish but
    American . It doesn't make sense to force then and everybody around
    them to pronounce the names in a way that is totally foreign to their
    mother language, the American English .I would go even further, when
    Mr. Joe Wawrzyniak goes to Poland, Poles should rather try pronounce
    his name in American the polish way. Out of courtesy and pure
    efficiency, he might not recognize his "real" name !

    Mind you I'm living this dilemma every other day.

    I'm called by a diminutive of my first name , Wlodek.
    The second later is this "l" with and "~". So, the real pronunciation
    is "Vwodek" ( is there any English word with 'vw' combination ?).
    My wife calls me "Wlodek" or tries to call me "Vwodek" , which confuses
    my little daughter.

    loop :

    "Daddy, what is your name, really ?" 
    "Well, both of them ."
    "No, it can't be"
    "Why? Your are Niki and Nicole."
    "It is not the same, are you Papa Wlodek "?
    "Yes"
    "And not Papa Vwlodek"
    "This also".

     goto loop 

    re: .11
    
    Okay, thanks.  I'll presume that either my childhood memories are
    a little fuzzy around the edges or that the names had been
    Americanized.  
    
    --bonnie

    I think that my .5 may have been mistaken to mention Czech, which led
    John (.7) to mention `apical', which caught Jon's (.9) fancy. I fear
    that there may be nothing apical about the Polish sound (for the
    uninitiated, `apical' - like `apex' - refers to the tip of something,
    in this case the tongue: it's the Spanish apical s that's so often
    `heard' as a sh sound).
    
    I think the buzz-word you're looking for, Jon, may be `uvular'
    (pertaining to the uvula - that little wiggly thing so prominent at the
    back of cartoon characters' mouths, often mistakenly identified as the
    tonsils) or even `pharyngeal' (pertaining to the pharynx); it all
    depends on which bit of the (Polish) mouth does  the vibrating -
    Wlodek?
    
    b

    There are labial trills, apical trills, tongue trills, and
    uvular trills, but no pharyngeal trill that I know of.  It
    sounds painful!
    			-John Bishop

�    is "Vwodek" ( is there any English word with 'vw' combination ?).
    
    Reservoir.

    OK, thanks, from now on , I'll say :

    "It is pronounced Vwodek, just like reservoir "

About the "w" sometimes pronounced as a "w" in Poland: my wife *thought*
(but wasn't sure!) that in "Kaszuby" they pronounced it that way. Kaszuby is
a region near Gdansk.

Well, even if it's true, it may not count: they have a language that is
mixed Polish/German......

Arie
(sam nie za obeznany w jezykiem Polskim....)

    	An official moderator's apology for having dragged Wlodek (however
    that is spelt or pronounced) into this since I know he is up to his ears
    in tortoises and network security, but I thought we should have a really
    authoritative opinion.  Thank-you...  but you will still owe me a beer
    if I locate the 5.whatsit security policy before Linda ;-)
    
    	D�w

>>Gdansk.

    And how does one pronounce the name of this city?  In Polish or
    in American?
    
    --bonnie

    	If you have the knowlege to choose, then as Wlodek indicated with
    the hypothetical example of an n'th generation emigrant returning to
    Poland you choose the pronunciation most comfortable for the audience -
    this is politeness, not correctness.
    
    	For correctness, with place names you have to assume the local
    people have it right (anyone from Gdansk in the conference), and the
    owner of a name knows how he wants it pronounced - if some clerk
    somewhere doesn't have enough letters on his typewriter to spell it
    then it is the clerk's problem.

I looked through the memorabilia I have left from my days in Personnel
Administration in the U.S. Army, and I found a copy of AR 600-2013,
Pronunciation of Surnames.

In para 6.2-3a(4), it says:  "Any surname which contains more than four
letters from the last five letters of the alphabet (V, W, X, Y, and Z)
(repetitions all being counted as separate occurences) may be pronounced
as the name of the first letter in the surname followed by the word
'alphabet'.  However, officer personnel have the right to have their
name pronounced in any way they wish."

Thus, in Basic Training, a person with the illustrated hypothetical name
would be called "Double-you-alphabet" (or "dubbaya-affabet"), and
possibly this would be shortened to just "alphabet" if there were no
other difficult names in the group.

In Digital, this name could be rendered (in writing, but not in speech)
as W10Z.

:-)

Dave C.

        With Kaszuby and Gdansk we enter an interesting story .

        Until 1945, Gdansk was truly Polish and German city, whatever
    	current Polish and German mythology says. 
    	There are probably numerous books about the period, the one that
    	comes to my mind in the "Tin drum." by Gunter Grass.
    	So, one could call it Danzig as well , when talking about the
    	historical town. Now it is just Gdansk, the "n" is like the
    	"n" in Spanish "manana" . ( 'n' with a "~", in Polish it's "'").


    	Kaszuby doesn't speak Polish or German but their own language,
    	it is slavonic . That is all I know about it, even if I new few
    	songs from Kaszuby as a kid. If you really insist, I might sing it 
    	one for you, but pay the beer in advance!
    	Again, current mythology is that it either Polish or German.


    	Of course on should try to pronounce names of "real" Poles
    	as close as possible to the original .
    	( The "real" in quotes, it is almost an expression in Polish,
    	meaning , a narrow minded Catholic with settled views in issues
    	like Russians, Jews, Germans, Jehovs witnesses and football.)

    	So, the most twisted  name recently, Solidarity leader's Lech
    	Walesa.

    	The "l" is the famous "w" , the "e" is a diphtong (sp?), sounds 
    	like an "en" in "entry" but slightly deeper . Got it ? Easy ??

    					w-alphabet !
    	

    re .19 (etc.)
    
    �And how does one pronounce the name of this city?  In Polish or
    �in American?
    
    I know next to nothing about Polish, only as much as cd be gleaned
    at a primary school where 40% of the pupils had Letter-alphabet
    names; but I'm sure it's not `Ger-Dansk', as everyone on the
    meedjer calls it.
    
    We anglophones are not good at consonant clusters that start
    syllables unless one of the consonants is a sibilant or a liquid
    (like R or L); or a glide vowel (like W, which is often called a
    semi-vowel - which sort of implies that it's a semi-consonant
    too). That doesn't mean we  can't articulate them, but it makes me
    fear that the ingenious  Wlodek/reservoir analogy won't convince 
    the young lady in question because the VW sound in `reservoir'
    doesn't happen at the beginning of the word.
    
    Incidentally, I suspect that Angela Rippon - a newscaster who
    prided  herself on pronunciation of foreign names - consistently
    got `Zimbabwe' wrong. She said ZEEM-BAHB-WEH; but I imagine - on
    the basis of names like Nkruma and Nkomo (which the newscasters
    nearly always mispronounce as Ner-Kruma and Ner-Komo) - that the
    local pronunciation would be more like ZEE-MBA-BWE.
    
    To say GDansk (guessing now, informed about phonetics but not
    about Polish) get the G (hard palate) and D (blade of the tongue
    behind the front teeth) closures both ready; then, with a single
    buzz from the larynx, in a single explosion of air, let the
    consonants sound. Simple physics will ensure that the G sounds
    (momentarily) before the D - the closure's further back, so the
    rush of air bursts through it first). Wlodek has already said
    what happens to the -ansk bit. 
    
    b

    Ger-Dansk, horrible.

    Actually, sticking "ee" or "e" or "a" between G and D doesn't 
    sound bad. It is as if somebody was talking slowly , sort of 
    "eh..eh " . 

    Ge-dansk.
    Gee-dansk
    Ga-dansk.


	But the "r" changes the Gdansk beyond recognition.
    		

    					Riovreser.	

    					( will this take VW to the beginning ?)

    Re .11 etc.
    
    I suggested in .something that maybe Nicole wouldn't think much
    of `reservoir' as an analogy, because the [VW] doesn't come at
    the beginning of the word. If not, maybe another word borrowed
    (but more recently) from French might do the trick - `voyeur'.
    
    (But, as a father, I'd probably try `reservoir' first.)
    
    Of course, there's always Polo, Golf, Scirocco, or Jetta.
    
    b