I need to put some kind of pronunciation guide I think, into the book. The most elegant answer would be to do the whole thing in IPA but of course anyone prepared to do that could just as well look up a proper guide. So here I am trying to think of ways to transliterate Swedish pronunciation into English that are neither wholly misleading nor completely hideous. Anyone got improvements on the below?
Where there are recognised English names for Swedish places, I have used them. Unfortunately, there is only one such name: Gothenburg. I can’t believe that the Latinate forms Dalecarlia and Scania are more familiar to English ears than Dalarna and Skåne.
Which brings me to the subject of the three vowels It’s Skåne, not “Skane” and the difference matters a lot. Ä, Ö and Å are letters distinct from each other, and from O and A, just as much as E and F are distinct. The bits on the top do matter, and do make a difference not just to the sound of the vowel itself, but also sometimes to the preceding consonant. “G”, for example is a hard “g” before an “o”, but a “y” sound when it comes before an “ö” (or e, i, and ä). So Sven Göran Ericsson, the former English football manager, is pronounced “Sven, you’re an …” whereas if he were (as English newspapers believe) “Sven Goran” he would be pronounced “Sven Goo Ran”.
The other tricky letters are “j” and “k”, which also from consonants in combinations, as “h” in English does with “c”, “t” and “s”. So “Kjell” is pronounced “Shell”, more or less, and “dj” is always “y”.
With all these rules in mind, there is a simple trick to pronouncing Swedish comprehensibly: talk with your tongue high and forward in your mouth, as if you had someone else’s nipple between your lips.
Very funny, but no good from a pedagogical standpoint. You make simple rules seem complicated.
It’s also misleading. ‘Gör’ doesn’t sound like ‘you’re’ at all in standard dialects.
It also depends on how you pronounce “you’re”, which, when I say “You’re another” sounds much more like (fairly standard) “Gör” than it does when I say “your mother”, even though “you’re” and “your” are meant to be homophones.
(oops. I see I deleted the wrong one of your apparently duplicated comments. will fix)
Here’s the first result for swedish pronunciation.
http://www2.hhs.se/isa/swedish/chap9.htm
You could occasionally write the pronunciation in parantheticals after names.
Yes, that’s why I said misleading, rather than inaccurate.
I always appreciate it when the IPA is included. It works no matter what type of English the reader speaks, also.
and I’ve always been a bit skeptical when people say that Ä and A, etc., are separate letters like E and F, and it comes from the ease with which they’re replaced when the writer is limited to ASCII. Why does one type “Goran”, and not “Geran” or “Gzran”? I mean, I know they’re really different letters, but to you don’t they seem to have a little more in common (besides their shape) than do E and F?
If you were to ask me to imagine someone else’s (well, “someone’s” might be a better choice, obviously not mine or, presumably, yours) nipple between my lips, and then asked where my tongue is, I don’t think I’d answer, “high and forward in my mouth”. The whole “as if” clause strikes me as a non sequitur. Casting no aspersions on anyone else’s nipple-sucking technique, of course.
WRT IPA, I can’t read it without its own pronunciation guide, and I doubt I’m unusual in that respect. So I’d be inclined to skip the middleman, especially when there are guides to Swedish pronunciation as useful as DW’s citation.
“don’t they seem to have a little more in common (besides their shape) than do E and F?”
Er, no.
“and it comes from the ease with which they’re replaced when the writer is limited to ASCII.“
You can strike all vowels from a sentence anbd still get readable prose.
Did you know Swedish is a tonal language, Andrew? It’s not something Swedes themselves have any idea of?
Pete, the answer is that you don’t type “Goran” for “g¨ran”. You type — or you should type — Goeran. That was a recognised convention for Scandiwegian and German. Admiral Doenitz, not Donitz. But it seems to have broken down, though I observe it.
The trouble is that it looks bloody silly with Å which is meant to be transliterated as “Aa” (see the Danish port of Aarhus). Ever since I read at an impressionable age a Private Eye spoof about a Finnish architect (“Aashole, shuvitupya”) I have found something intrinsically comic in that combination; and, anyway, “aa” in English sounds utterly unlike å
JL: do I have to specify the size of nipple? or of mouth?
Of course, the guide that DW cited, using this multimedia thingy, is much more useful than anything else. Thanks to him for finding it.
David, I suppose I know it to speak, but I can’t think right now of a word whose meaning is modified by its tone in Swedish. This may be because I haven’t spoken any for a while, and it’s very much a skill which comes to me only when I use it. I know that of course the words, to be pronounced right, have to have the tones right as well. But I thought in tonal languages there was a lot of meaning conveyed by the tone as well.
Anden (duck/ghost) is the standard example.
This guide is interesting. I had no idea “the predominant Swedish tone is similar to the 3rd tone in Chinese Mandarin”
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1409973
I think the guide to pronunciation dug up by David Weman would be your best answer. IPA can be baffling. The IPA suggestion for the Dutch diphthong ui, for example, is not very helpful. I have happy memories as a 14 or 15-year-old schoolboy of finding myself in a swimming pool in Amsterdam (the first post-war school exchanges were with the Netherlands) doing my best to say “uitsluitend” with my Dutch contemporaries falling about laughing at my efforts. Actually, the best suggestion for pronouncing the Dutch ui is to imagine you are a tom-cat trying to say “howl” while someone is squeezing your balls.
Anyway, we all look forward very much to your book and the enlightenment it will bring.
This gives a whole new nuance to the Swedish tongue. Re the nipples, I think you’ll probably find that there’s usually a noticeable difference between those of the male and the female of the species. Ergo your experience may differ from that of many of your readers.