> So just because the "th" sound doesn't exist in many languages, like German, they should pronounce "Heath Ledger" or "Anthony Hopkins" or "The Beatles" incorrectly?

They're going to use the sounds that exist for them, yes.

> That seems to me a way more "insane" standard.

I hope you never get to make any decisions. Dave Barry once wrote about someone thinking "What an idiot I am! Here I am, a Japanese person, in Japan, and I can't even speak English!"

But then again, Dave Barry was joking.

> By the way, the Scottish are perfectly able to pronounce "Loch Ness"

The population of Scotland is 5 million; if you want to talk about "most English speakers", the Scottish aren't even worth noticing.

> > So just because the "th" sound doesn't exist in many languages, like German, they should pronounce "Heath Ledger" or "Anthony Hopkins" or "The Beatles" incorrectly?

> They're going to use the sounds that exist for them, yes.

That wasn't the question I asked. They will at least try to pronounce "Heath Ledger" or "Chopin" correctly, they won't act as if there was a correct German way to pronounce those names.

I think there's something about sounds that you learn early on in language acquisition - maybe your brain develops differently.

'th' is the obvious one that non-english speakers struggle with. I remember a dutch guy laughing at my attempts at various dutch words - I literally could not hear the difference between his pronunciation and mine.

And 'ch' (as in Loch or Bach) is a sound in Scottish english but not in English english.

I lived in Scotland till I was 4, then moved to England and all traces of my previous Scottish accent are long long gone. But my friend, whose surname is Donnachie, says I'm the only English person she's met who pronounces her name correctly - I guess because I learnt that sound early on.

Similarly, my dad, who learnt english in India, still struggles with a "j" sound (he says "zudge" instead of "judge"), despite living here for 50 years and having a posh middle-class English accent that sounds just like a "native" english speaker.

> And 'ch' (as in Loch or Bach) is a sound in Scottish english but not in English english.

You need to talk to a Scouser! Back and Lock will be pronounced Bach and Loch.

I lived in Japan for a while. My name contains sounds that just didn't work for them. No one pronounced it correctly.

I was not upset, annoyed, or confused. It's just the way language acquisition works. You learn the sounds you need and the rest are hard to acquire later in life.

Be strict in what you send, forgiving in what you receive.

Also you want your voice assistant to play you music not hassle you about correct pronunciations.

But that's exactly the issue here when people use the correct pronunciation, which happens to be different than how normal words in their language are pronounced, but the voice assistant assuming normal language, which leads to absurd misfirings. The issue is not people not knowing how to pronounce something, the problem is that it's a hard problem for "dumb" AIs to know how a certain name is pronounced, as long as they are not multimodal LLMs.

> It's just the way language acquisition works. You learn the sounds you need and the rest are hard to acquire later in life.

As a point of interest, this is actually backwards. You're born recognizing all the sounds; what you learn is to ignore the difference between sounds that aren't distinct in your language.

You do keep that ability for the rest of your life, but it isn't helpful when you try to learn to recognize foreign sounds.

Well, sure.

I don't know if "th" exists in Polish or not, but a common (perhaps dominant) spoken way to refer to "The Beatles" is[0] "Bitelsi", which not only loses "th", but also like half the other sounds in the name[1].

Thing is, we understand it just fine. More than that, if you overheard me saying to someone, "puść teraz Bitelsów" ("put on the Beatles now"), there's a good chance you'd identify the name from context. If you didn't, you could always ask to verify (well, not if you were actually overhearing me...).

----

[0] - Or at least would look like that written down. Polish is mostly a "you say it as you see it" language, but with foreign names, often enough people write the correct form but use localized pronunciation.

[1] - I'm sorry, I'm not a phonetician.

Want to flummox the Japanese tongue? Try a sentence like "Darth Vader is Luke's father". It hits most of the highlights: interdentals, labiodentals, and that weird 'r' sound English has that Japanese sometimes tend to conflate with 'l'. Even a competent Japanese English speaker is likely to render it as "Dāsu Bēdā izu Rūkusu fazā". Depending on the region they may mess up the 'f'; the syllable 'fu' is actually 'hu', but pronounced with very pursed lips in Tokyo Japanese (not so much in Kansai).

Unless they're bilingual from childhood, most people are not able to pronounce sounds outside their milk tongue without difficulty. That you expect English sounds to be perfectly pronounceable by non-English-speakers is probably more reflective of the fact that quality English education is widely available where you live than anything.