the "you're in America, speak English" crowd
I think these people also consider it almost a duty to mispronounce any non-English name
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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"pronounced like it's spelled" doesnt help the average english native speaker, because english spelling is stupid. you can see this when they try to pronounce any unfamiliar/foreign word and they just randomly skip letters or insert new ones. their default strategy seems to be to expect every unfamiliar word to be like "through".
If you were taught to read in an American school up until like 10-15 years ago you would’ve been taught phonics, and how to “sound out” a word, and then over time you learn lots and lots of exceptions. Most American adults should be able to read Zohran’s name and pronounce it correctly the first time, it lines up with default American English pronunciation rules.
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
yeah, i know, but based on the pronunciation attempts i hear on youtube, whatever technique they were taught did not stick. when confronted with, let's say, the name of a german town, they'll skip over half the letters. they dont produce what i'd expect if i tried to pronounce the word with an american accent. in fact, what comes out often bears no relation to the letters in the word.
and no, i dont mean that they dont know the "special" rules of german spelling (w, v, sch, etc), that'd be one thing. this is some strange ballistic relationship with pronunciation.
me in Spanish class learning there is only one way to pronounce each vowel
People just guess at pronunciations like they're a human autocomplete. Thanks Reading Recovery!
there's always going to be some of that, but i sort of naively expected people to be consistent enough in their mispronunciations that a native speaker (of the other language, not english) would be able to recognise what word they're trying to go for.
but this isnt even that, this is the name of an american. americans really should be used to asking how a name is pronounced and then being careful with it, cos there's names really are a wild wild west
Anglos managed to stumble into Chinese/Japanese "how this character is pronounced" problem, despite using alphabetical writing!
YES!
Let's hope they will adopt furigana.
I'm not at all joking about the autocomplete thing, to be clear. Kids learning to read have literally been taught to guess words based on the first couple of letters and the surrounding context. The rules of spelling to pronunciation correspondence - however complex they are - are treated as a fallback for when context and guessing don't work. I see it all the time. If they don't have the instinct to sound out words in a random paragraph, they're probably not going to start doing it for some random person that they aren't ever going to directly interact with.
What do you expect? Everyone is 12 now
Everyone is 12
Ismailism btfo. Is that anything?
I don't actually think this is related to the juvenile nature of the political ideology of the right (Well, at least it's not a newfound adolescent attitude). Refusing to pronounce foreign names right on purpose has been a favoured past time of dipshits since time immemorial.
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:
- delete the /ʁ/ and just say /fɑv/, prioritizing syllable count over keeping all the segments
- add an extra syllable with a schwa on either side of the /r/, making /fɑvrə/ or /fɑvər/, prioritizing keeping the segments over keeping the syllable count
- metathesize the last two consonants to say /fɑrv/, prioritizing both syllable count and keeping the segments while sacrificing the exact ordering of the segments
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'.
Try mastering your ABCs
They’d be so mad if they could read
But that’s kinda the problem isn’t it. American elementary and secondary education system is awful. But they do have great marching bands and American football!
we need mandatory sesame street
I get what you are saying but my parents also mispronounced his name like 6 times in a row and Arabic is their native language
Did they read of his name from Arabic script or Latin alphabet (English)? Or did they just hear it and tried to pronounce as it sounded to their ears
idk tbh ,just found it funny ,they think positively of him so it's not out of malicious intent obv
Instead of slowing down and sounding out the word or name, they will just give up and vomit the readiest approximation with a kind of "I don't knowww" tone. They are virtue-signaling their ignorance.
:not-intellectual:
It's pronounced Zo-hran, with emphasis on the second syllable and a touch of that H. This is not how a Western English speaker would assume it's pronounced based on how it's spelled. There aren't many words in English with a pronounced middle-of-the-word H-to-R like that.
I've actually never heard a lefty say it correctly irl.
Most people I've heard say his name pronounces it how he himself says it (Well, he pronounces the R slightly more, but the issue is not emphasis), and if he is saying it wrong then... I mean is he? Can you be wrong about your own name?
Edit: Because if so I have a lot of notes for white Americans with Scandinavian origin names.
Most people don't pronounce the /h/ and I guess some of them flip it with the /r/, so I don't think they actually are saying it the way that he does. Both of those are completely understandable changes to make based on English's syllable structure rules because /h/ is only allowed before vowels in English. So it's kind of a matter of deciding whether you delete the /h/ or keep it and put it in the wrong place if you're not used to hearing or saying it at the end of a syllable.
You can be kind of wrong about your own name if you are deciding to say it differently to avoid dealing with those who say it incorrectly. Like you grew up with it being X but pronounce it Y at work because you're sick of correcting people.
I actually meant more that people keep saying 'Mandani' or 'Mandami' than how they pronounce his first name
Oh I see. Yeah it is kind of amazing how even people who don't explicitly mean anything negative say things like "Mandamni" and such. I think there is a general carelessness in not learning names beyond what a person internalized before age 10. I have tried to get people to just say one or two syllable names correctly, simple phonetic ones, and they fail over and over again.
It's usually older people and I do honestly wonder if it is lead exposure.
Zordon Madonna
Zor Ran Mom Don ee
i guess ive heard Zo-rahn and Zor-ahn mostly, But also who gives a fuck, he almost certainly doesnt, people probably been saying it different his whole life.
Those are basically the same, but Zohran has corrected Cuomo saying Zor-han before, so he cares at least a tiny bit unless you want to say it's 100% a cynical snipe (it's probably partly a cynical snipe, but I doubt entirely so when his last name gets botched so much by people also being racist toward him).
I see people thinking I meant his first name, I actually meant people keep saying 'Mandami' or 'Mandani'
tbf you did just call him by "Zohran", so contextually it seems like you'd be talking about that, and he has corrected Cuomo saying Zor-han before.
reading any hexbear post that's even tangentially related to linguistics causes me immense pain, and this one is no exception. so much uninformed confidence
This is extremely unhelpful and performative if you don't deign to offer even a little bit of a correction.
nobody on this site is going to listen to somebody telling them they're wrong lmao, especially if what they're wrong about is dunking on amerikkkans. why would i waste my energy
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I prefer silent reading over reading aloud because I can pronounce words however I want in my head. I'm going to call it "nitch," not "kneesh" and there's nothing you can do to stop me.
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