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Shana
HELP! How to read these British names? Geoffrey Chaucer 、 William Shakespeare 、 Francis Bacon 、 John Donne 、 Daniel Defoe Jonathan Swift 、William Blake 、Robert Burns、 William Wordsworth、 Samuel Taylor Coleridge、 Jane Austen、 George Gordon Byron 、Percy Bysshe Shelley 、 John Keats 、 Charlotte Bronte 、 Charles Dickens 、Alfred Tennyson 、Robert Browning 、Matthew Arnold 、 Thomas Hardy Oscar Wilde 、George Bernard Shaw 、 Joseph Conrad 、 T.S.Eliot 、William Butler Yeats 、Virginia Woolf 、James Joyce, D.H.Lawrence、 E.M.Forster 、 William Golding 、 Doris Lessing 、 John Fowles 、 Dylan Thomas 、 Philip Larkin 、 Ted Hughes、 Seamus Heaney Antonia Susan Byatt 、 Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul 、Kazuolshiguro 、 Ian McEwan 、Julian Barnes
Dec 30, 2021 9:46 AM
Answers · 3
1
I’m afraid my keyboard isn’t set up to write such a long text in IPA, but here’s the trick: We put the primary stress on the last name in each case. For the famous ones, you can check an encyclopedia or dictionary — that will usually show the pronunciation. Otherwise, your guess is as good as most native speakers’ guesses — we read names the same as we read English words. Thus, “Chaucer” rhymes with “saucer”. There are of course some places where names have a more conservative spelling, for example “Geoffrey” is pronounced the same as “Jeffry”. Some of those names have additional silent letters, such as the “e” in “Wilde” and the second “o” in “Woolf” (or perhaps the common noun “wolf” lacks an “o”…). In “Charlotte Brontë”, the “e” in the first name is silent, but the “e” in the last name is usually pronounced /i/ (which is why we often write it with a dieresis). “Vidiadhar Surajprasad” looks like a name from India, but again, your guess is as good as an American’s.
December 30, 2021
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