Golf Channel Pronounced Muni (Lily) He's Last Name Incorrectly

[nevets88]

With the ubiquity of translation tools, get your pronunciation right, broadcaster. I dunno if USC golfer here doesn't mind the mispronunciation, I don't doubt people pronounce it hee all the time and she's like, whatever, but 沐妮何, her surname sounds like this. The link will expire soon so this.

 

[rehmwa]

Heck of a player.  Hope she makes it to the big stage.

There are a LOT of annoying name pronounciations (and mis-pronounciations) on the GC....gotta live with it.

[iacas]

Steven, I appreciate the annoyance… but they don't have her Chinese character name, and are just going by "Lily He," and it's asking a bit for them to do a bit more than that.

But hey, they've said my name correctly every time they've said it, so…  I'm biased here.

Yes, it'd be nice if they pronounced her name properly. As she gets onto the LPGA Tour, they'll have a pronunciation guide for her name.

[Golfingdad]

More so than name pronunciations, I’ve never understood why we choose to alter the order in which we say people’s names, most easily noticed with Koreans.

We swap the order in which we say the names to more match our own customs (Park Chan Ho for example is know here as Chan Ho Park) ... but they’re names; so why don’t we say them exactly as they say them?

[billchao]

11 hours ago, Golfingdad said:

More so than name pronunciations, I’ve never understood why we choose to alter the order in which we say people’s names, most easily noticed with Koreans.

We swap the order in which we say the names to more match our own customs (Park Chan Ho for example is know here as Chan Ho Park) ... but they’re names; so why don’t we say them exactly as they say them?

That bothers the hell out of me, but I'm biased.

I don't care so much if people mispronounce a name. I'm not going to pretend that I can pronounce every name I read on a piece of paper correctly, either.

[boogielicious]

21 hours ago, billchao said:

That bothers the hell out of me, but I'm biased.

I don't care so much if people mispronounce a name. I'm not going to pretend that I can pronounce every name I read on a piece of paper correctly, either.

Agree. It is a sign of respect to pronounce names correctly. Now there are more difficult names like many Thai names and Eastern Europeans. It is understandable that some can struggle with those. But it is an announcers job to get it right. Her name should be easy.

Even my last name can be pronounced two ways, Curry. I pronounce the C-u as in cut not ker.

[billchao]

1 hour ago, boogielicious said:

Agree. It is a sign of respect to pronounce names correctly. Now there are more difficult names like many Thai names and Eastern Europeans. It is understandable that some can struggle with those. But it is an announcers job to get it right. Her name should be easy.

Even my last name can be pronounced two ways, Curry. I pronounce the C-u as in cut not ker.

The problem is the 26 letters of the English alphabet do a poor job of showing how something should be pronounced. There's pretty much nothing we can do about that. Plus, sometimes names are spelled phonetically and sometimes they aren't, but you don't need me to tell you that since you're from the Boston area 

Chinese names can get particularly weird because of dialects. There is one (technically, two) written language but many dialects and people's names in English are written phonetically (and there are multiple systems for that as well), so you can get two people with the same surname in Chinese have different names in English because one's name is derived from Mandarin and the other's from Cantonese. My name is weird because it's written using the Wade-Giles system which is stupid IMO.

[Golfingdad]

2 hours ago, boogielicious said:

Even my last name can be pronounced two ways, Curry. I pronounce the C-u as in cut not ker.

You remind me of the "debate" I have with my (NY born) wife about how Mary, Merry and Marry are all different sounding words.  (Out here they are not ;))

51 minutes ago, billchao said:

... and people's names in English are written phonetically ...

Right, and this is where I understand the problems when you're translating across alphabets.  A good example of this one is Gaddafi, Khaddafi, Quaddafi, and how none of them are really right or wrong.  They're all attempting to translate the guys name to our alphabet phonetically.

What I don't get are things like "Moscow."  In the Cyrillic alphabet it looks like Mockba and if I recall correctly it is pronounced Moskva (Mo as in most, not mock) ... so either way you look at it, there's no "cow" portion.  So where does that come from?  Country names too - why Germany and not Deutschland?

Edited December 8, 2017 by Golfingdad

[colin007]

From the Free Beer and Hot Wings Show

"Bury Barry Berry"...

[Papa Steve 55]

With brand being so important you would think agents and the like would spend the time to make sure the announcers have a pronunciation guide. The NCAA should do the same, for many of these players this will be their only time in the lime light, at least get the names right.