Arabic has voiced and unvoiced, but it also has two emphatic versions of the voiced and unvoiced ones. There's no real one agreed upon way to transliterate Arabic, but some of them get written as "dh" and "zh" and such at times. This is made more complicated by the fact that things like the dhaal become pronounced as z in many dialects.
i have some language nerdery to share! there's languages, for example finnish, which have a "k" and a "kh" sound and they're actually different! most western "k"s are actually more like "kh"s and if you have a language which explicitly has a "k" and a "kh" sound the distinguishment makes sense.
I don't know anyone who doesn't regularly make spelling or grammar errors in French. Including native speakers.
Oh there's definitely languages that have a k versus kh. Which is my point. If you aren't going to really describe why you bothered writing kh then don't fucking do it. Because otherwise you have people like me who have studied Pali, Finnish, Arabic, and several other languages to greater or lesser degrees. who are just pissed at you for having no logic behind your fantasy names Well maybe if the academie du francais got off its fucking high horse and just accepted that it lost this war many years back...
Also, even the Wikipedia page for French vowels managed to mess up one of the examples. Unless I've been pronouncing "ai" wrong my whole life, which, at this point, might not even be surprising.
Oh, don't worry, they're got other stuff to do. They're going to fuck up history now. A few Presidential candidates want them to rewrite textbooks to fit "the national narrative". Fun times.
@LadyNighteyes, for a couple posts there, I got really confused and thought your first name was literally "Welsh," and I was having such a hard time figuring out why so many people would struggle with it. (though I did have one friend, native English speaker, but with parents who were native Spanish and Arabic speakers, and she could not for the life of her pronounce one of our teacher's names. It was Mrs. Thorpe, and my friend pronounced it Thor-up, and she couldn't get that r and p together, even when she was trying to do it. I always wondered what gave her that quirk. On the other hand, I went the better part of a year without even noticing she did the thing, but when I went to Ireland and people pronounced film as fillum, it rendered the word completely unrecognizable to me)
In Quebec the attitude towards L'Academie has been mostly you make us try bro which means ironically there are fewer english words in quebecoi french. i think
Oh my god really. Yesssss. YESSSSS. MY THEORY ON WHAT LACADEMIE'S SHIT HAS PROVEN ACTUALLY A THING. KIND OF MAYBE. Which is that their trying to snobbishly force things is playing into French French's shit going so off course from what it wants.
Ah, name mispronunciations. My given name has two actual pronunciations and at least one common mispronunciation that's entered the mainstream. The pronunciation I use is the German Mennonite one, which has a silent letter but the initial letter is pronounced as it usually would be in English. (There are a few fictional characters I can name off the top of my head who have the same name pronounced the same way, actually. This does not stop people from mispronouncing it constantly, usually as the common mispronunciation but occasionally as the other technically-correct pronunciation.) And my chosen IRL name is super fucking common--Anna--but people pronounce it AW-nuh all the time, even though ANN-uh is a much more common pronunciation for that spelling, at least among English speakers. I'd blame Frozen, but people did it a lot long before that movie came out, so who even knows. It also gets misspelled as Ana a lot, despite Anna being, again, more common among English speakers, I think. Like, in this case both spellings and both pronunciations are valid, but I use both the more common spelling and the more common pronunciation...and people still fuck it up a lot. (For the record, also, I pronounce Acey as AY-see, with the emphasis on the first syllable. I've had a surprising number of people pronounce it ay-SEE, which doesn't sound right to me, but it's not like it's a common name, so...)
My name is from Greek mythology, but not any of the parts of Greek mythology that make it into pop culture, so no one has any idea what the hell it it or how to say it. (Which is odd, because it's basically spelled phonetically.) Thanks, nerd parents. And to make this fanfic-related, when naming an OC please try to follow the naming conventions of the canon to some degree. If everyone in canon has a relatively common name for their language/setting/time period, don't give your character a name that looks like the cat walked across your keyboard just to make them stand out. Please. I'm begging you.
I remember someone complaining about how fics set in America always have OCs named Sakura and ones set in Japan always have ones named Dave.
Dave is such a poisoned name for me. Like, no other Homestuck human's name is so intrinsically Homestuck in my head, just Dave. Dave is always Dave in my head. Just pretending to be another dude named Dave in another series for some obscure goof. Awful.
I can't say my own name in english, and it's Marianne. when i try it always sounds like mary anne, with a space in the middle, and idk how to not make it sound like it has the space in the middle. this is from original writing, not fanfic, but i want to make a callout post for myself; in this thing i'm writing everyone has normal common names, except the one dude named argentum aurum <normal surname>, but there are reasons for that name and it's pointed in-text how ridiculous it sounds. so i can, obviously, kind of stand this when it's done in a tongue-in-cheek thing in fanfic, like those comedy ones that like to hang lampshades on canon ridiculousness.
