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I noticed that many cultures do not pronounce names in other cultures correctly.

For example, Fattahilah in Java, becomes Faletehen in Dutch and it becomes Jenahtopolo in Chinese (don't know which dialect).

Also I look at Vermouth in conan and they transliterate languages like this

Vermouth -> Berumoto
Sharon Vineyard -> Sharon Vin'yādo
Chris Vineyard -> Kurisu Vin'yādo

Source: https://www.detectiveconanworld.com/wiki/Vermouth

My guess is that it has a lot to do with number of possible syllables in languages.

It seems that the Chinese and Japanese have fewer syllables. Europeans have fewer syllables than Javanese.

And so on.

I wonder if there are tables that can map languages to the number of possible syllables the languages have?

I want to confirm that the more syllables a language have, the more people with that language can pronounce foreigners' names correctly, or close to correctly. Is this even true?

Rebecca J. Stones
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obfuscated
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    No, not true. The more sounds your language has, the higher the chance is that sounds found in a foreign name will also be found in your language, but phonotactics (the possible ways sounds can combine into syllables) don’t play that much of a role. English has a much higher number of possible syllables than Chinese, for example, but English speakers are frequently extremely bad at pronouncing Chinese names. Plus names get unnecessarily mangled; e.g., fattahilah would be perfectly pronounceable in Dutch. Jenahtopolo does not look like any kind of Chinese. What is ‘vermount in conan’? – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 25 '22 at 21:13
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    And as a quick Google search will tell you, many (probably most) European languages have a far higher syllable inventory than Javanese. Javanese syllables are maximally CSVC (consonant-sonorant-vowel-consonant), while a language like English is maximally CCCVCCCC. A syllable like skrelmst is phonotactically valid in English (even if it doesn’t exist as a word), but would not work in Javanese. – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 25 '22 at 21:25
  • @JanusBahsJacquet strengths for some speakers would be /strəŋkθs/. And if skrelmst is a noun, then skrelmsts** is presumambly possible, giving you CCCVCCCCC! – Araucaria - him May 28 '22 at 08:46
  • @Araucaria-him Phonetically, yes, but not phonemically (valid point about skrelmsts, though!). Theoretically, CCCVCCCCCC is also phonetically possible (strengthsts), there just aren’t any words that employ it. Similar to the highly contrived (and to me utterly unpronounceable) östkustskts in Swedish. – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 28 '22 at 08:51

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Inability to correctly pronounce words of a foreign language comes from not having experience with the target language's sound system. The number of syllables that exist in the person's language has little to do with it. What is more important is the perceptual distance between the sounds of the native and target languages, and the rules of combination in the two languages.

Some languages have the vowels [ø] or [ɯ], many do not. If the target word contains the vowel [ɯ] and you don't know how to pronounce [ɯ], you are probably not going to pronounce it correctly. If the target language has [o] and your language only has [ɔ], your pronunciation will probably be incorrect, but pronouncing [ɔ] instead of [o] is more likely not to be noticed than, say, pronouncing [ɯ] as [u]. The consonant [ʕ] is rather challenging and most people cannot get it correct, in fact even if you speak a language that has that consonant, you may still sound "wrong" because the actual pronunciation of [ʕ] varies substantially between Tigrinya, Chechen, Moroccan Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Somali and Kalispel. A native speaker of German can probably distinguish a native speaker of German saying Haus, weiss as opposed to an English speaker saying house, vice.

Even if you can correctly articulate all of the individual sounds of the target language, there may well be rules of sound combination that interfere with production, especially when a person's native language has only a subset of possible sound combinations. English speakers have a very hard time pronouncing words that start with [mb, nd, ng], which is a very common initial sequence in African languages. They also have a hard time producing long arbitrary-looking consonant sequences like Polish [fstʂɔŋs] or Georgian [ɡvbrdɣvnis]. The lack of experience with such combinations, or any sufficiently-similar sequences, makes such words hard to pronounce.

user6726
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  • Any tables showing number of possible syllables in a language? – obfuscated May 28 '22 at 03:00
  • You would need a different one for each language and dialect. It's easy to summarize all the possible syllables in Japanese; there are unique symbols for each one that are learned in school. English, on the other hand, has over 25,000 possible syllables, most of them rare and occurring only in polysyllables, but there are fewer than 5000 monosyllabic words in English. – jlawler May 28 '22 at 18:04
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    It is pretty rare for people to list all of the possible syllables of a language, instead we say what the rules of syllable construction are. I don't think you can get a pre-cooked list even for Japanese, since [gak] is a possible syllable, but there is no symbol that represents [gak], instead you have follow rules to construct the sequence. Same with Ethiopic languages, said to be written in a "syllabary", but the extant symbols don't correspond exactly to syllables. The traditional Japanese solution is to redefine the syllable so that there isn't a syllable [gak]. – user6726 May 28 '22 at 19:29
  • @user6726: It actually is common to list all possible, or at least all actually used, syllables in languages at least in the Sinosphere. I knew it was a thing in Chinese but was surprised to later learn that it's also a thing in Mongolian. Children are actually taught how to write traditional Mongolian script with big tables of syllables even though it's an alphabetic script totally unlike Chinese. I agree that it's rare in western languages to do so. – hippietrail May 31 '22 at 10:44
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    @hippietrail, I'd be interested in the deets for Mongolian, given the disparity between syllables and writing-based pseudo-syllables (i.e. the "set of CV letters" approach of syllabaries). To what extent is the Sinosphere practice of listing syllables co-extensive with "in Chinese", for instance a list of all syllables in Tibetan, Uyghur, Korean. – user6726 May 31 '22 at 15:20
  • @user6726 I visited Mongolia for a month maybe 8 or 9 years ago and investigated the language before, during, and after both online and with a couple of books I bought in UB. I tried to do something similar with Tibetan maybe 4 years ago but didn't find any books in China and didn't run into anything on how it's taught. I always intended to visit Xinjiang but it never happened. As for Korean it's written in syllabic blocks. I wasn't sure if I first read Mongolian is taught in syllables on one website, in a book I bought in UB, or multiple different places. But it didn't take long to Google ... – hippietrail May 31 '22 at 18:06
  • @user6726: Making Sense of the Traditional Mongolian Script In modern Inner Mongolia, the syllabic approach involves first learning a large table of open syllables based on combining 16 consonants and seven vowels. Each syllable is shown in initial, medial, and final form. – hippietrail May 31 '22 at 18:08