How to Pronounce Your Favorite Director's Name

[Mathew2468]

Mel-YES. or technically Mayl-YES. In most words you don't pronounce the last letter but names are unpredictable.

[Matt]

Yeah, the accent grave over the second E indicates that the S is pronounced. Mail-YES (or Mayl-YES, as above) is about right.

[Mathew2468]

To be sure I had to friggin' look it up in the one place I remember hearing it: Godard's short shorts wearing librarian in JLG/JLG says it. But yeah, I can't think of any words that end on a pronounced è.

[Tommaso]

Thanks for the clarification, guys!

[Mr Sausage]

Yeah, the accent grave over the second E indicates that the S is pronounced. Mail-YES (or Mayl-YES, as above) is about right.

Ah, shit, that's right. My elementary school French is fading pretty bad.

[MichaelB]

I've always pronounced it "Mayl-YES", and I've uttered the name in front of French people on many occasions, without them noticeably flinching.

And Serge Bromberg, who is undoubtedly French, would appear to feel the same way - "Méliès" is the first spoken word in this interview.

[HistoryProf]

Pierre Etaix anyone? I know Pierre of course...but I polled some coworkers and none of us had a clue how to take on Etaix. Just something like "Eh-Tie?

[Mathew2468]

Ay-tay but french-like.

Étaix. The É is pronounced Ay, if it was Etaix it'd be Euh-tay(?).

Wha, wiki says Ay-teks. I was thinking of 'paix', but with this name apparently it's different. Iunno.

[swo17]

Just a tip: With Chinese and Korean names, you can usually tell the family name from the given name based on the placement of the hyphen (i.e. the family name doesn't have one). Names from these countries should generally always list the family name first. With Japanese and Hungarian names, it is acceptable to list names the American way, even though they reverse it natively.

[Michael Kerpan]

Then again, in Japanese, very occasionally a hyphen is used simply to indicate two short vowel in succession (rather than a long vowel, which can be transliterated by doubling the vowel in question). Example, Kore-eda (variously, Kore'eda, Koreeda). Kore'eda is Hirokazu Kore'eda's last name. ;~}

The best practice for East Asian names -- putting the family name in ALL CAPS (at least when the person is first introduced in a written piece).

OZU Yasujiro
Akira KUROSAWA
LEE Chang-dong
ZHANG Yimou
Maggie CHEUNG Man-Yuk (western personal name, then given name, then Chinese given name).

[Lemmy Caution]

Hyphens are used to romanize Korean names, but not Chinese.
Park, along with Kim and Lee, are the most common Korean surnames:



Percentage of family names in South Korea
Kim
Lee
Park
Choi
Jung

Korean and Chinese names should have the family name first, but there is a recent trend for some Chinese, especially celebs, to invert the order in the West, which I find a bit confusing.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

The clearest tipoff is that Korean and Chinese surnames almost never have two syllables. There are only a tiny handful of surviving two-syllable surnames in Korean and Chinese, and the number of people who have them is similarly tiny. Speaking anecdotally, I've lived in China for over five years and have never met anyone with one of these names. I can't think of any reasonably prominent film figures with a disyllabic surname either, except Ma-Xu Weibang (who combined his wife's surname with his own) and a couple of Szetos in Hong Kong.

Of course this is no help when both names have only one syllable, which is rare in Korea. It is common in China (about 15% of the population, including Gong Li, Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, etc.), in which case you'd best check Wikipedia if you're uncertain. Some local jurisdictions in China actually require newborns to have polysyllabic given names to cut down on the number of people sharing a name, so names like these will become less common as time goes on.

[Lemmy Caution]

I know a couple people with the surname Ouyang, which I think is the most common two-character Chinese surname. But you're right they are fairly rare. A few of the two character Chinese family names were originally official titles. Sima = Master of the Horses and the family name was granted to them sometime back in history (at least 2500 years ago as one of Confucius' disciples had that surname). Pretty neat if you can trace your family name back to a decree from the emperor. And actually the Sima's moved up and became emperors themselves of the Jin Dynasty (265 - 420 CE). Redirecting back to film a little, in Chinese Tv dramas, they often give the male lead the family name Ouyang, as it's considered distinguished and adds a bit of flair.

I prefer when Chinese names are written with every character starting with a capital letter, such as OuYang or Mao ZeDong. Makes it easier to pronounce and clear where the character break is (though usually it's easy to tell). Last decade there was a big trend for one character Chinese given names, which were for some reason seen as modern and fashionable.

[andyli]

The trend of using two-character family name (compound surname) in Chinese dramas can be traced back to the tradition of Wu-Xia/martial art literature, in which masters of certain martial art disciplines are often given compound surnames because they sound rare and mysterious. It has become a cliché and often joked about.

On a side note, almost all Hong Kong/Taiwanese/Korean/Vietnamese family names share the same origins with their Chinese counterparts. For example Cheung, Park, Kim, Lee, Nguyen are Zhang, Piao, Jin, Li, Ruan in China. The different spellings arise from different romanization rules established by authorities from these countries, but in character they are exactly the same (if you disregard the simplified/traditional Chinese discrepancies).

[TMDaines]

I've always found the trend of East Asians taking a Western given name a rather curious phenomenon. It's not as if the majority of Chinese, Korean or Japanese names are difficult to pronounce. It's rather strange to know and live with people who would refer to themselves with one name when with Westerners and another name when with other diaspora. It always comes across as a little fake to say your name is "Sally" when you're telling me in broken English. It's not as if this happens to any great extent with people from South Asian, West Asian or Eastern European cultures. What's the origin of this behaviour and why is it so prevalant with East Asians, particularly with Chinese? Does the reverse happen in China with Westerners adopting a Chinese given name?

[MichaelB]

I suspect Hong Kong's British ties throughout most of the last century played a role here.

[Lemmy Caution]

I've always found the trend of East Asians taking a Western given name a rather curious phenomenon. It's not as if the majority of Chinese, Korean or Japanese names are difficult to pronounce. It's rather strange to know and live with people who would refer to themselves with one name when with Westerners and another name when with other diaspora... What's the origin of this behaviour and why is it so prevalent with East Asians, particularly with Chinese? Does the reverse happen in China with Westerners adopting a Chinese given name?

Hmm. I think part of it is that Asian names are considered a little difficult for Westerners to remember and sometimes pronounce. Also, in post-open&reformed China, English names became cool and sounded modern and so many people like using them. I know Western companies often require that everyone has an English name, with some insisting they they are used. I've dealt with some Western companies in China where colleagues didn't know each others Chinese names.

In China it's not uncommon for people to use different names in different situations. For instance, someone might have their full official name, a simpler name they use everyday or among friends, plus a nickname that family and close friends use. So I think an English name is seen as just another variation. Some use their assumed English name a lot, some just in business or among foreigners. I also have had friends who change their English name now and then.

As for your other question, in China, not only do they prefer if a Westerner has a Chinese name, but it's a full name complete with a surname. I found that a bit odd, trying to adopt a Chinese family name. I was given a full Chinese name by some friends, but it wasn't easy for me to pronounce correctly and make people understand it easily. So I scrapped it and just transliterated my American family name into Chinese, which works well because it's 3 syllables and the same pronunciation as the name of a well-known city, so everyone knows what I'm saying without a hitch. Some Chinese find my Chinese name a bit dissatisfying because the first character (for the family name) isn't a Chinese family name, although it is a homophone for one. But as a foreigner you are allowed to do something wrong or foolish -- it's almost expected ...

I was amused one time when a teenage Chinese girl stuck out her hand and said "Hello, I am Linda Green." Rare for a Chinese person to take a Western family name. And she was very earnest. In that case, she had translated her family name Liu.

[jindianajonz]

I was amused one time when a teenage Chinese girl stuck out her hand and said "Hello, I am Linda Green." Rare for a Chinese person to take a Western family name. And she was very earnest. In that case, she had translated her family name Liu.

Is that how you pronounce that last name? I always thought it was pronounced "loo", whereas the color green verges on being an inpronouncable (to me, anyway) monosyllabic "loo-EE" or more accurately "lwee".

[Shrew]

Liu is actually a different family name, pronounced leeoo as one syllable. The color green is a different character, written as lv or lu with an umlaut over the u. It sounds like the French u (round your lips like an o but say a u or ee with your tongue). I don't think green is a normal Chinese surname, but it may be an uncommon one. More likely her name just rhymes with green (probably the same last name as Lu Bu for anyone who knows Romance of the Three Kingdoms or has played too much Dynasty Warriors).

To make it more confusing, there are other Chinese names written Lu with an regular u sound (as in the writer Lu Xun), which rhymes with new or you.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

The lu-as-in-green (or "Lu Bu") should be written as "lü," which is actually pretty intuitive, since the sound corresponds exactly to the German ü. In China it's frequently but unofficially romanized as "lv," because the "v" key is used as a substitute for ü in pinyin input methods; this spelling sometimes sneaks into movie credits. "Lyu" is sometimes used in Taiwan. Writing it as plain "lu" is the worst option, since there's no way to distinguish it from lu-as-in-Lu Xun. Just to make things a little more difficult, the same "ü" sound is spelled "yu" at the beginning of a syllable (yu, yuan, yue, yun).

[knives]

This is a more a general language question, but in German how is the ß pronounced? I've been using a very hard B sound like in Bub, but I obviously don't know for sure.

[Mathew2468]

It's "ss".

[knives]

Would have never guessed that. That's a real harsh thing to pronounce.

[Mathew2468]

For example: Kafka's The Castle is Das Schloss or Das Schloß.

[Moe Dickstein]

its actually an "ss" sound

edit: DOH beaten. My high school German remains pointless.