Spanish pronunciation's fairly piss-easy really but one that always gets me is the pronunciation of Barcelona's captain. He's Carles Poi-ol, not Carles (or Carlos) Poo-yol.

There's also an annoying tendency at times to add a syllable to Andres Iniesta's name, making him Een-ee-es-ta. It's just 'Een-yes-ta'.

Can someone who had the volume higher than me for Spain's game the other day tell me how commentators are pronouncing the letter 'V'?

The not pronouncing the 'n' at the end of a word is just an Amsterdam thing, as far as I know.

SamLKelly wrote:

QUOTE:
There's also an annoying tendency at times to add a syllable to Andres Iniesta's name, making him Een-ee-es-ta. It's just 'Een-yes-ta'.

Ah, they're always doing that. See also "Ally-addy-air".

Wiki says

QUOTE:
The final 'n' of the plural ending -en is often not pronounced (as in Afrikaans where it is also dropped in the written language), except in the North East (Low Saxon) and the South West (West Flemish) where the ending becomes a syllabic n sound.

So the questions seem to be: is it a plural, and where are you?

Great stuff re the Dutch pronunciations.

As a new part time resident of Delft (Delluft) I have noticed that "ui" is often the Norn Iron = ow but sometimes does emerge as more of an "ayee". Is this a regional thing?

In this town the n (at the end of Robben, van Basten etc) is pronounced...

But the other thing of course is the G, which approximates to a gutteral H much of the time, so NiHHel, HeitinHHa, StekelenburHH - these will all get the treatment - more harsh in the north, sfofter in the south I inderstand!

Better get used to it as the Dutch are going far in this tournament - it was a great night here yesterday, I think!

Wyatt Earp:

Low Saxon??? Does that mean that I am Dutch (oh my god ...) or do we have a second Macedonia case with two countries demanding the same rights on a name?

Don't worry, Jupp, to me you'll always be a Ostfriese.

Doesn't the national anthem of the Netherlands say someting like "We are all a bunch of Germans really, but bow to the king of Spain"?

That wiki thing Wyatt quoted has me a little puzzled: "The final 'n' of the plural ending -en is often not pronounced (as in Afrikaans where it is also dropped in the written language)".

Maybe it's dropped in written Afrikaans because it doesn't exist in spoken Afrikaans, which is, of course, a hybrid language, having borrowed from Malay, German, French, English and even Portuguese.

SamLKelly wrote:

QUOTE:
Spanish pronunciation's fairly piss-easy really but one that always gets me is the pronunciation of Barcelona's captain. He's Carles Poi-ol, not Carles (or Carlos) Poo-yol.

I always thought that Puyol was Pujol (With a French 'j') as he's a Catalan.

Wyatt Earp:

Low Saxon??? Does that mean that I am Dutch (oh my god ...) or do we have a second Macedonia case with two countries demanding the same rights on a name?

Nice double.

See, Jupp, double posting like that is a real Ostfriesen thing to do.

Heard a couple of mispronounciations from the BBC commentator during Sweden's game agains Spain.

It's Andreas EE-saksson, not EYE-saksson.

Johan El-MANN-der, not ELL-mander. (Wrong emphasis).

Thanks Otto, when Elmander played for P$V the Dutch commentators always pronounced it el - man - DARE. Nice to know they get it wrong sometimes as they are often a bit sniffy about other countries' pronunciation of Dutch names.

**

"We are all a bunch of Germans really, but bow to the king of Spain"?

More or less, yeah. The "we are of German blood" line gets a lot of people's goat, partly for historical reasons of course, but also because for 40% of Amsterdammers (for instance) it is factually incorrect.

That's why a significant minority of Dutch people refuse to sing their anthem, if you notice before a game the players of Surinamese or Moroccan decent rarely, if ever, sing along.

By the way, it has come to my attention that I made a mistake in my list of pronunciations on page 1 - Lobont also has one of those tricky little cedillas on his "t" and should therefore be proununced "lobonts". (Romanian commentators call him "Lobby" though which just sounds ridiculous)

Are there other languages that put cedillas on the letter "t"? It strikes me as quite unusual.

And might you have any idea if Rat is ethnically Hungarian? For some reason I think that Vasily Rats was.

Not as far as I know. I've never heard a Hungarian name "Rac" (which is how the same name would be rendered in Magyar), and it doesn't even look remotely likely. It sounds more Slavic to me.

Wiki says that Vasily Rats' real name was Rácz László.