Is it “Camel-uh” or “Cam-ahl-uh”?

    • magnetosphere@fedia.io
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      4 months ago

      Thank you for this. I’ve heard her name mispronounced so often that I genuinely thought kah-MALL-uh was correct. Whoops! COMMA-la it is!

    • MHLoppy@fedia.io
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      4 months ago

      “Comma-la” unfortunately doesn’t help much for people without US accents lol (though of course people in the US are who the question and answer are most relevant to). On first reading – without the accent or something close to it – it implies “kom-uh-luh”, whereas with the accent it implies something more like “kah-muh-luh”, just based on how people pronounce “comma” differently.

      • otp@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Isn’t the Pokemon’s name pronounced like coma + koala? Coma and comma are different.

        • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
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          4 months ago

          🤷I’ve been pronouncing it as Ko-Ma-La without the emphasise of ow. I appreciate this post though, i’ve seen so many asian name being butchered by english speaking country it become annoying.

          • otp@sh.itjust.works
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            4 months ago

            Ko-Ma-La without the emphasise of ow.

            I’m not sure I follow. Coma would probably be “ko-ma”, like I’d suggested, whereas comma is something like “cah-ma”…but I’m not sure where the “ow” comes in

    • Miaou@jlai.lu
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      4 months ago

      It’s funny because the way you spelt it sounds like the first “don’t” of the video you linked. Americans in general seem to make a point of pronouncing things their way rather than how they should be. I don’t think it’s racism as much as it is laziness.

      • memfree@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        their way rather than how they should be.

        Every language has different sounds. It has long been understood that languages will translate words/names into versions they can actually hear and pronounce. Sadly, some people mock or demean people who try to speak a non-native language and make errors in it. In the U.S. it used to be fairly common to mock Asians coming from a language with only one liquid consonant sound for their inability to differentiate between ‘r’ and ‘l’ sounds.

        I know I can’t hear the difference in various Russian language vowels and while I can hear tones, I don’t know how I’d explain their pronunciation in an Anglicized name – or if it would be relevant.

        While I appreciate that regional accents mean that non-U.S. citizens might not say “comma” the way it is heard in the U.S., I do expect that if a U.S. citizen tells me to pronounce their own name in a U.S. manner, then that is how it “should be” pronounced.