Stircrazy wrote:

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I predict that the next big pronciation debate next week is going to concern the names of Billy's & Paul's first round opponents, Jaume Munar & Thiago Seyboth Wild respectively.  Jaume is a Catalan, so that initial "J" is closer to the "J" in the French name Jean than the guttural, back of the throat "J" in its Castilian equivalent, Jaime.  The stress should fall on the second syllable of his surname.

The sounds of Portuguese are very difficult to approximate in writing, but Wiki gives the phonetic spelling for the englightenment of anyone who can read the phonetic alphabet &, unlike the Spanish naming convention, in which the first surname is the individual's father's & the second the mother's, so is frequently dropped, the Portuguese is the opposite, so TSW is generally referred to as "Thiago Wild" in the Brazilian press (the article refers to TW's claim that his ex-girlfriend was trying to blackmail him after accusing him of physical & emotional abuse!).   One way of pronouncing the full name can be found here.

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 There's no excuse for the commentators to get the pronunciation of Jaume Munar's name wrong, since it's available on his ATP bio (and I assume that's him saying it) if you click on the speaker icon. https://www.atptour.com/en/players/jaume-munar/mu94/overview

(TSW's bio also has the speaker icon but there doesn't seem to be any connected audio.)

Hearing Bouncy or Lloyd on the commentary is an instant "oh, never mind, I'll find another match to watch" for me. (Or find a stream without commentary. The only time the commentary is really useful is when a player is talking to the umpire and it's hard to hear what's being discussed.)

Tanaqui wrote:

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Stircrazy wrote:

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I predict that the next big pronciation debate next week is going to concern the names of Billy's & Paul's first round opponents, Jaume Munar & Thiago Seyboth Wild respectively.  Jaume is a Catalan, so that initial "J" is closer to the "J" in the French name Jean than the guttural, back of the throat "J" in its Castilian equivalent, Jaime.  The stress should fall on the second syllable of his surname.

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There's no excuse for the commentators to get the pronunciation of Jaume Munar's name wrong, since it's available on his ATP bio (and I assume that's him saying it) if you click on the speaker icon. https://www.atptour.com/en/players/jaume-munar/mu94/overview

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I've just had a listen & it seems reasonably accurate.  I gave up using the option some years ago when I checked a name out of curiosity (forget which player it was, but it was probably French or German) & was disgusted to hear what was quite clearly what the Yanks thought it should be & nowhere near accurate!  Perhaps the ATP has finally got its act together on that front.

The one that's got me in the past is that of poor Ons Jabeur, whom I like as a player & as a person.  For some reason, Clare Balding always fails to pronounce the "s" at the end of her first name.  Either she knows something I don't or she's just plain ignorant.     

Stircrazy wrote:

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Tanaqui wrote:

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Stircrazy wrote:

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I predict that the next big pronciation debate next week is going to concern the names of Billy's & Paul's first round opponents, Jaume Munar & Thiago Seyboth Wild respectively.  Jaume is a Catalan, so that initial "J" is closer to the "J" in the French name Jean than the guttural, back of the throat "J" in its Castilian equivalent, Jaime.  The stress should fall on the second syllable of his surname.

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There's no excuse for the commentators to get the pronunciation of Jaume Munar's name wrong, since it's available on his ATP bio (and I assume that's him saying it) if you click on the speaker icon. https://www.atptour.com/en/players/jaume-munar/mu94/overview

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I've just had a listen & it seems reasonably accurate.  I gave up using the option some years ago when I checked a name out of curiosity (forget which player it was, but it was probably French or German) & was disgusted to hear what was quite clearly what the Yanks thought it should be & nowhere near accurate!  Perhaps the ATP has finally got its act together on that front.

The one that's got me in the past is that of poor Ons Jabeur, whom I like as a player & as a person.  For some reason, Clare Balding always fails to pronounce the "s" at the end of her first name.  Either she knows something I don't or she's just plain ignorant.     

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I think they now get the pronunciation audio on the ATP and WTA site player profiles done by the players themselves, which helps. Though of course, some players, especially some of those who have gone to USA colleges, actually pronounce their own names in the way that's easiest for Americans, which is really sad. 

Of course, some of our own players do something like that too, but usually because they grew up here. e.g. Raducanu for a start!

Those who follow me on Twitter may have noticed that I (and some of those sitting near me, given the whispered questions I heard) got quite confused this week about how Sonay Kartal, whose name is Turkish, prefers her name to be pronounced - quite important when going "Come on Sonay!" In Turkish, it would be pronounced Son-eye. Kartal is also pronounced slightly differently in Turkish but I can't work out how to show that, since that difference is more subtle. However, I had a feeling I knew she preferred it to be pronounced with -ay as in 'day' (that later got confirmed from a couple of videos of her saying her own name, which is probably where I had picked up the idea that it was her preference in the first place) but the umpire for her FQR match pronounced both her given name and her family name the Turkish way, so I thought maybe he had been very conscientious and taken the trouble to ask her. Now I think it's probably because he came from or had spent time in that part of the world (it would be Son-eye throughout the Middle East, I believe) or somewhere else where -'ay would be pronounced that way.

So it can be quite tough to know what the player prefers even if you try quite hard to get it right. Of course, a lot of commentators clearly don't even try, and that's much less excusable.

As for Ons, my guess is that Clare Balding did a bit of French at school, thinks the name is French (Jabeur looks like it could be and Tunisia was once a French possession, so fair enough perhaps) and remembered that a final 's' is often left unpronounced in French, but the 's' in Ons definitely should be pronounced!

steven wrote:

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9vicman wrote:

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Stircrazy wrote:

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I predict that the next big pronciation debate next week is going to concern the names of Billy's & Paul's first round opponents, Jaume Munar & Thiago Seyboth Wild respectively.  Jaume is a Catalan, so that initial "J" is closer to the "J" in the French name Jean than the guttural, back of the throat "J" in its Castilian equivalent, Jaime.  The stress should fall on the second syllable of his surname.

The sounds of Portuguese are very difficult to approximate in writing, but Wiki gives the phonetic spelling for the englightenment of anyone who can read the phonetic alphabet &, unlike the Spanish naming convention, in which the first surname is the individual's father's & the second the mother's, so is frequently dropped, the Portuguese is the opposite, so TSW is generally referred to as "Thiago Wild" in the Brazilian press (the article refers to TW's claim that his ex-girlfriend was trying to blackmail him after accusing him of physical & emotional abuse!).   One way of pronouncing the full name can be found here.

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 Sounds like Thiago pronounces his last name slightly differently: https://www.atptour.com/en/players/thiago-seyboth-wild/sx91/overview

Good luck looking to any commentator saying that in the middle of a rally.

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Oh my! Having once done some Portuguese (I actually love the unexpected sounds of the language!), I would have got most of the Seyboth right (maybe not the 'th' at the end) but the much simpler-looking Wild completely threw me! I don't think either of his surnames are originally Portuguese words (e.g. wild in Portuguese is selvagem), which makes them even harder to guess.

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I'm not a betting woman, but I'd have put money on both names being of German origin, particularly given the fact that South America became a haven for so many Nazi war criminals after World War II.  A glance at Wild's ATP bio shows that I was only half-right, though it certainly explains the way in which he pronounces the matronymic:

-  Father, Claudio Ricardo Wild, manages tennis academies; mother, Gisela Christine Seyboth, is a doctor; sister, Luana.

-  Surname is derived from many nationalities: Father's family is from Romania and Russia, mother is German.

I'd never have guessed at a Russo-Romanian derivation for "Wild"!  This map shows that the surname Seyboth is, unsurprisingly, most common in Germany, followed by the US AND Brazil.

Like you, I have dabbled in the learning of Portuguese (which I can read well enough thanks to my knowledge of Spanish), even to the extent of starting evening classes, but, unusually for me,  I couldn't keep it up (though I still have the Collins Portuguese-English dictionary I bought at the time!).  I actually hate the harsh, guttural sound of it:  I've always said that you can walk past a couple of Portuguese in conversation in the street with your eyes closed & easily imagine yourself somewhere in eastern, as opposed to southern, Europe!  I've found that I can manage the more or less phonetic sounds of Spanish & the nasal sounds of French, but not both at the same time, hence my aversion to Portuguese!

One of the things I learned during my brief flirtation with (trying to) learn Portuguese was that the letter "l", when it appears before another consonant or at the end of a word, is pronounced very much like our letter "w", which you can, if you strain your ears, hear in both his pronunciation on the ATP site (clearly influenced by his mother's origins) or in the Forvo example linked in my original post (by someone probably unaware of the German connection).  Another curiosity is the letter "r" when it appears at the beginning of a word or as "rr".  Then it turns into an "h" (cf. the pronuciation of Ricardo Reis here). 

To pick up on 9vicman's point, I venture to suggest that Brazilian Portuguese is not hugely different from European Portuguese, since native speakers of the two can usually understand one another (though may seek occasional clarification), but it has evolved through being subject to different influences & borrowing from differing sources in much the same way as South American Spanish (with its many regional variations) or québécois has - or even British & American English for that matter:

Both forms of Portuguese have borrowed words from other languages, but the sources are different. For example Portugal borrowed "pulôver" from British English, while Brazil borrowed "suéter" from American English. European Portuguese has borrowed more from other Romance languages, while Brazilian Portuguese has borrowed more from indigenous and African languages.

Such differences in vocabulary are arguably the main reason why a European Portuguese-speaker may experience a degree of difficulty in understanding Brazilian Portuguese - & vice versa.  That said, most Brits are aware that the Yanks call trousers pants, a car bonnet a hood & its boot the trunk, our taps are their faucets &, at a pinch, our drawing pins their thumb tacks. but do they know that their equvalent of "to faff about" is "to lollygag" & that our squaddies are their grunts, both of which I had to look up the first time I came across them?

Brazilian Portuguese certainly scores on the easier on the ears front, being slightly more nasal & therefore softer.

beeb comment of the day when discussing players height *tennis is largely played on the ground *

Unless you know different