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Re:Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers by cabalamat on Monday July 26, 2021 @09:33AM (#27959141)
> Unvoiced stops (p/t/k) in isolation "pat" or "cap" are moderately aspirated. Voiced stops (b/d/g) are not like "dog" or "bad". (Leaning on this pattern as a partial hack using a feature common in a lot of European languages, is why p and b are what they are in Pinyin, and many other Chinese romanizations.)

Some languages, such as Hindi, have both the voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated distinction, so they have 4 consonants (/t d th dh/) where English only has two (/t d/).

Hindi also has retroflex equivalents of those 4 consonants, and there are minimal pairs between all 8 of them. A typical English speaker would struggle to tell the difference between them.

For these sorts of reasons, a Romanisation of names in different languages that (1) is easy to pronounce for English speakers, and (2) sounds like the word in the original language, is going to be a tall order.

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