If you ever bought into this idea that mispronouncing someone's unfamiliar/foreign name is somehow rude or racist or an extension of white supremacy/privilege, you should see how english names and surnames are pronounced in non-english speaking countries. People give it their best shot and fail, that's all there is to it.
Of course there's also names that have transformed to nearly unrecognizable forms; George over here has evolved into Sjors (or the other way around?), John into Sjon, etc.
The "J" consonant leads to many interesting things because of how many pronounciations it has. It can be an english "J" or the softer latin "J" (identical to an I) or an in between Y which could be between an english J and SH. In current spanish, however, the J is pronounced as the "voiceless velar fricative"[1] (a very strong H?), so whilst the name started sounding like "Iacobo", it's now a very firm HHakobo.
Ah it turns out that may not be true, though widely believed for the last couple of centuries:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Diego#Spanish
The one that shocked me the most was the number of different names that I associated with different countries that all turned out just to be variations on John.
Ivan, Ian, Euan, Hans, Sean, Jens, Juan, Yiannis, Giovanni, Evan, Ifan, Janko, Ivanko and many more
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_(given_name)#In_other_l...
That's a fun one here in the US. My employer has an office in Romania, so many of my coworkers have names that start with an I for the voiced palatal approximant sound. These names would start with a J in English, have the I in Romanian, and are pronounced (more or less) like an English "y" sound. For example, Julian -> Iulian, approximately pronounced Yoo-lee-an. For extra complication for those in the States, many default fonts show minimal differences between a capital I and a lower-case L, so some people read it as Loo-Lee-An.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palatal_approximant
And then don't get me started on us Americans trying to understand the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-comma
E.g. people from the Czech Republic or Slovakia named Ján, Juraj, Michal might become John, George, Michael.
Slovak and Czech sometimes use back-translated exonyms for place names. E.g. Lawrence is Vavrinec. Thus "St. Lawrence River" is called "Rieka svätého Vavrinca".
https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rieka_sv%C3%A4t%C3%A9ho_Vavrin...
should also add Ya'Qov and Ya'a'Quov, are fairly interchangeable
¡Gracias!
(Feel free to ignore of course, I just got interested.)
It will definitely be much easier for spaniards to pronounce the english version of Vincent than the french. We probably have the worst french pronounciation in Europe despite the fact that we're neighbours! I always chuckle with how some people pronounce croissant: "curasan" (an attempt to transliterate as "cruasan", I believe).
But thanks! I'll probably stick to the English Vincent then, as I'm not sure Vicente would trigger a response from me if I'm not paying attention, but maybe if I ever get to spend a longer time in a Spanish-speaking community I might give Vicente a try.
Fun fact, I can't type hardwood without great effort.
- Quick chats, like answering your name at Starbucks, talking with the electric company on the phone, etc. I use directly the English pronunciation of my name (like Jamie). It's faster, easier and who cares, frankly... Gratefully, I can now use "wrote as Lanister" and fix some writing problems
- With more meaningful relationships, like coworkers or acquaintances that I will be talking several times, etc, the only thing that I care about is an honest try. Most people tends to have problems with the ending vowel, and the initial "hard H" sound, so it sounds more like "Hi-me", but that's absolutely no problem. Different languages have different sounds, and I mispronounce things all the time. All I care about it's the other person putting a bit of effort into it, but that's about it...