Subject: summary on anglicization of names

hi - i posted a query a while ago about how non - english names get anglicized . what i got in response was quite interesting , though most of it was anecdotal , as the responders themselves noted . most of the research cited was not in sociolinguistics but in speech technology . i still think this would be an interesting topic to work on . in any case , i ' m including the responses i got , with thanks to all and apologies for the typographical irregularities - best , larry rosenwald , wellesley college 1 ) > from margaret luebs < maluebs @ umich . edu > i saw your message on the linguist list and wanted to share a story with you ( probably not scholarly enough for your summary , though ) . my last name is german and is spelled " luebs " . people always assume it is pronounced " lubes " which is pretty close to the expected german pronunciation ( though that may not have been how my great-grandparents said it ; see below ) . instead , irritatingly enough , we say " lebbs " . the story i ' ve been told ( which may be partly apocryphal ) is that when my grandfather ( the first of 12 siblings to make it off the farm that their parents settled on in the 1880 's ) arrived at the university of nebraska in 1910 , he went to a professor in the german department and asked " what is the american pronunciation of my name ? " ( because up till then his family had just pronounced it the old way - - they spoke german at home and lived among lots of other germans ) . the professor , for some reason , said " lebbs " so that 's what we got stuck with . then a few years later another brother made it to the university , and * he * went to a * different * professor in the german department and asked the same question . the answer he got was " leebs " so that 's how his descendants pronounce the name . other cousins seem to have just used their own common sense , because there are some out there who pronounce it " lubes " . however we have an old letter from germany addressed to my great-grandfather , and it refers to him as " h . libs " , ( a misspelling perhaps inspired by the actual pronunciation ) so the original pronunciation may have been closer to " leebs " . it still does n't explain " lebbs " , but oh well . i know this is n't what you asked for - - it 's not phonetic factors or even normal sociolinguistic ones , but rather the dreaded influence of university professors ! 2 ) > from lexo @ lsi . sel . sony . com ( lex olorenshaw ) hi , the anglicization topic interests me , too , but more from a speech technology point of view . for example , what ways can we anticipate the anglicized pronunciation of names in order to produce better synthesized speech , or to automatically recognize speech better ? some research has been done in this area for text - to - speech synthesizers . but i have n't looked into it too much . there are a couple of references to " name pronunciation " on this web site that might serve as a starting point - http : / / www . bellcore . com / orator / oref . html since i ' ve been wondering about this , i also did a quick search for " name pronunciation " in linguistics abstract online ( currently on a free trial basis ! ) , and came up with the following items - - - - - - - - - - - title : variant grapheme-phoneme correspondences in unfamiliar polysyllabic words author : robert l . trammell journal : language and speech vol : 33 ( 4 ) , 1990 , 293-323 subdiscipline : phonology abstract : ten college students and ten phds read aloud 30 unfamiliar english words , two to five syllables in length , of greek , latin , and germanic origin . the average number of different subject pronunciations per word was five ( range one to ten ) . each response was compared to the rule-predicted , dictionary-prescribed , and most frequent pronunciation for that word . the subjects agreed more with each other than with the dictionary , and with the latter more than with the rules . however , the rules predicted half of the prescribed pronunciations , which was better than the average number of individual subject ` s responses agreeing with the dictionary . the most frequent response to each word demonstrated considerably more agreement with both the dictionary and the rules than did the average number of responses for the subjects individually . the etymological source of the test words had no effect . while the phds as a group did significantly better than the students on most measures , the differences were small . in view of previous research , the frequent vowel laxing in open third and fourth syllables from the end was unexpected . several models of reading are examined in the light of these results . - - - - - - - - - title : novel - word pronunciation : a cross-language study author : k . p . h sullivan & r . i . damper journal : speech communication vol : 13 ( 3 - 4 ) , 1993 , 441-452 subdiscipline : computational linguistics abstract : in the case of a ' novel word ' absent from a text-to - speech system ` s pronouncing dictionary , traditional systems invoke context-dependent letter-to - phoneme rules to produce a pronunciation . a proposal in the psychological literature , however , is that human readers pronounce novel words not by using explicit rules , but by analogy with letter-to - phoneme patterns for words they already know . in this paper , a synthesis-by - analogy system is presented which is , accordingly , also a model of novel-word pronunciation by humans . it employs analogy in both orthographic and phonological domains and is applied here to the pronunciation of novel words in british ( received pronunciation ) english and german . in implementing the system , certain detailed questions were confronted which analogy theory is at present inadequately developed to answer . thus , a major part of this work concerns the impact of implementational choices on performance , where this is defined as the ability of the system to produce pronunciations in line with those given by humans . the size and content of the lexical database on which any analogy system must be based are also considered . the better performing implementations produced useful results for both british english and german . however , best results for each of the two languages were obtained from rather different implementations . authors of abstract : authors - - - - - - - - - - - 3 )
