this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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Doesn't he pronounce the in his name? That's not really a thing in American English - /h/ can only appear before a vowel, not before a consonant or at the end of a syllable. The pronunciation of the is also a tossup between /æ/ as in hat, /ɑ/ as in spa, and for traditional New York accents, /eə/ as in man. So while it isn't too hard to guess since /ɑ/ is the most common match for foreign words with , it's not a 100% guessable name even using the English rules.
Cuomo is just being an asshole, though.
If you drop the h and just use plausible vowels I think it's basically fine. It'll keep you from saying Zor-han at least.
For sure, I just enjoy pointing out the ways that people could reasonably be fucking up his name without even realizing.
Admittedly I never considered how people are pronouncing his first name, where I'm more understanding (I didn't even know he pronounces the 'h', I thought it was silent), I actually meant more they keep saying his last name as 'Mandami' or 'Mandani'
Ah, gotcha. Even with Mamdani, I can see why people might flip the consonants on the first try. English tends to assimilate nasal consonants - /m/, /n/, and /ŋ/ (as in song) - to match the mouth position of whatever consonant follows them. In the case of /d/, that would mean the expected nasal before it would be /n/, because they're both pronounced with the tip of the tongue and /m/ uses the lips, so flipping the place of the /m/ and the /n/ makes it fit better with the expected phonetic structure of English words and I would believe people doing it accidentally because the brain likes familiar patterns. BIG HOWEVER, we still do allow clusters of /md/ in some rare words like Camden and where two morphemes (units of meaning) meet, like in ram+-ed becoming rammed /ræmd/. So if you consistently fuck Mamdani's name up when he's your biggest political opponent, you are probably being an asshole and probably playing it up for racists, because after the first correction it should not be a problem to straighten out the consonants in his name