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Most commonly mispronounced scientists' names
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[QUOTE="dextercioby, post: 6819814, member: 1064"] Ah, my favorite topic, phonetics. Well, you see, that's why we have the IPA [URL]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet[/URL]. Which has a set of characters defined to cover all possible languages, but let us choose for simplicity the major European ones. So yes, the "legal" way to pronounce a person's name is to apply the country's IPA to the letter description of the name. Einstein is a German surname, or a name most likely to be found within German-speaking countries (irrespective of whether the bearer of the name is German or Jew or whatever). In IPA the official pronunciation is here, right after the word "German" in the first line: [URL]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein[/URL]. Because for a native English speaker who has not undergone a rigorous study of the German language in school (any level from elementary to University), the German pronunciation is almost impossible to reproduce with the mouth and vocal cords, one has devised an "anglicized" pronunciation using the set of characters from the English IPA. That is why English and Americans pronounce it the way they do. And Dutch has a set of fundamental sounds (or phonemes) even trickier than the Germans, and the French do as well. That is why the anglicized pronunciation is not close to the "legal" one. [/QUOTE]
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Most commonly mispronounced scientists' names
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