this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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Saying “pronounce it how it is spelled” has proven to be completely unhelpful to USians in my experience. They almost don’t associate all letters with particular sounds since English has at least 2 vowel sounds per vowel letter and odd rules with silent letters, and voiced and unvoiced sounds.
I speak Spanish which I use to help myself remember how tf to spell words in English. USians are also woefully uneducated
Usually when people mispronounce Zohran in a way worth correcting, it's because they say Zorhan, which isn't a matter of ambiguity but of jumbling letters. Like when Eric Adams kept calling the "Intifada" the "Infintada"
It's even more egregious with his surname for the same reason.
Can't forget about the famous US football player Brett Faarv.
USians are illiterate.
That's completely normal based on how French allows syllables to be structured compared to English. In French, the name is one syllable, /favʁ/, with the /ʁ/ on the outside of the syllable. That is really unusual across languages, and English doesn't allow it. It's even kind of weird in French, and when a word starting with a vowel comes after words that are structured like this, the /ʁ/ actually gets shunted over to start the next syllable so that "Favre est" is really more like "Fav rest". English speakers have a few options to fall back on if they're trying to pronounce the name according to English syllable structure, because they are overwhelmingly not going to keep the original French structure intact. They can:
All of these are common strategies in borrowing loanwords across different languages.
Very interesting, thanks for your explaination.
Most Americans never actually learn to read, apparently.
This is a real issue in the education space, apparently they're taught, like, to rely on pictures to guess words? They don't even try to teach 'sound it out'.