The band !!! is usually pronounced "chick chick chick." The name comes from the subtitles in The Gods Must Be Crazy whenever a Bushmen would make clicking sounds. According to the band, the name can be pronounced as any monosyllabic sound three times in rapid succession. I've heard a band member say "pow pow pow." I purchased a track on iTunes, and the band is listed as "!!! (chk chk chk)."
Pending
Robert: I'm not going to edit war, but personal experience is not an adequate basis for judging pronounceability in other languages. People can get confused enough about what sounds are pronounceable in their own language, mixing it up with spelling.
Expert research would be a rather more convincing argument. The phonemes and phoneme combinations of Indian languages are a matter of record, and they are not an exact superset of those allowed in English. In particular, English allows clusters of three or four consonants, not all of which are allowed in every single Indian language in the same position. The ones that aren't are mildly unpronounceable. They may be well approximated, which registers as an accent, but they can't be pronounced exactly by native speakers of those languages.
The underlying point is that for any pair of languages, it is all but certain that each of them contains words unpronounceable in the other. Thinking this runs only one way is pretty parochial. The exceptions are close relatives, and cases of language contact. If enough English words infiltrate a language, it will end up with all the sounds of English, making all English words pronounceable in it.
Cattle die, kinsmen die. You yourself will surely die. Only word-fame dies not, for one who well achieves it. Hide / Show Replies
Expert research would be a rather more convincing argument. The phonemes and phoneme combinations of Indian languages are a matter of record, and they are not an exact superset of those allowed in English. In particular, English allows clusters of three or four consonants, not all of which are allowed in every single Indian language in the same position. The ones that aren't are mildly unpronounceable. They may be well approximated, which registers as an accent, but they can't be pronounced exactly by native speakers of those languages.Um, did you just go ahead and prove yourself wrong? Let me check...
They may be well approximated, which registers as an accent, but they can't be pronounced exactly by native speakers of those languages.Yup, you did.
The Unpronouncable stands for not being able to pronounce it at all (yeah, hence, you know, the name, hello?) , not pronouncing things with an accent.
Edited by Darkmane Tyler Durden is my bitch.
Most of the real life examples, other than intentionally unpronounceable things such as Prince's alternate name or that guy with a paragraph block name, should be cut. The trope isn't The Unpronounceable By English Speakers. It's about words that are completely unpronounceable by humans. Some of them, like the Indian name one, are completely ethnocentric.
And half of them are perfectly pronounceable by an Anglophone. They're just spelled unintuitively. Like La-a as La-dash-ah. Any English speaker can say that. They just need to know how.
Edited by MatthewTheRaven
I'm all for cutting the entire section if that's what is needed, but it's only gonna pop up again.
In my experience though, most of the examples are Truth in Television; different languages train your pronunciation abilities differently, and I've heard repeated complaints from my Grandpa's students (he used to teach Malayalam to foreigners) struggling just to get the basics right. (Go ahead and try saying "Thaakkolkodukkatharunodayatthilthaanemuzhangumvaliyoralaram" out loud. And yes, it is spoken as a single word, and it's not even a tongue twister.)
Similar instances occur all the way around, too; there's a reason Japanese Cinema has gone almost completely ignored in India - Dravidian speakers cannot speak Japanese for shit, even more so than Westerners. The prevalence of such instances in Real Life is why most of the examples are ethnospecific.
Edited by Darkmane Tyler Durden is my bitch.
Like I said though, it's stupid to have an Edit War over this; so nuking the section is an option I agree with. Maybe we could add a note to the page description asking people not to add RL examples.
Tyler Durden is my bitch.
Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love for Sail had an illegal emigrant named Xqzits or something like that. It's been a while since I played, so I'm not sure on most of it. Could anyone with a fresher memory add it?
I think that having both a Websites section and a Web Original section is unnecessary. Dr. Clef should be moved to Web Original.