How to Pronounce Your Favorite Director's Name
- foggy eyes
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- MichaelB
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- MichaelB
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I asked this exact question to a friend from Taiwan several years ago, and their description had more of a 't-sh' sound at the beginning of both 'Sheow' and 'She-en', so that it sounded like 'Who Tsheow Tshe-en'.Lemmy Caution wrote:Hou Hsiao Hsien would be written in Pinyin as Hou Xiao Xian
(I think, but actually don't know what his family name is, probably Hu in Mandarin), and pronounced:
Ho
Sheow (kind of like meow, but quickly with the "e" sound fairly short. "shout" without the "t;' would be reasonably close)
She-en (like "she" + the pronunciation of the letter "n". For this one, there definaitely needs to be two distinct vowel sounds together).
Ho Sheow She-en
I haven't seen this one covered yet, how do you pronounce Andrei Zvyagintsev? Is it how it reads?
- MichaelB
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- Jean-Luc Garbo
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- MichaelB
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Close, but his last name is only three syllables. Zvya-gin-tsev. The 'ya' in his last name signifies the Russian soft vowel 'ya' and not two separate syllables. Generally, I'd place the emphasis on the first syllable - ZVYA-gin-tsev, but I actually could be wrong about that...MichaelB wrote:Pretty much, yes! Zvee-ah-gint-sev is how I'd render it (with the caveat that I have only the most casual grounding in Russian pronunciation)mmacklem wrote:how do you pronounce Andrei Zvyagintsev? Is it how it reads?
- MichaelB
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You're absolutely right - I should have checked the Cyrillic version first!portnoy wrote:Close, but his last name is only three syllables. Zvya-gin-tsev. The 'ya' in his last name signifies the Russian soft vowel 'ya' and not two separate syllables. Generally, I'd place the emphasis on the first syllable - ZVYA-gin-tsev, but I actually could be wrong about that...
(Russian, like most Slavic languages, is relatively easy to pronounce once you've mastered the rules - certainly a lot easier than English or French!)
- MichaelB
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This is total (albeit educated) guesswork, but I'd say oos-MAHN sem-BEHN and SOO-lay-mahn si-SAY.Kirkinson wrote:How about Ousmane Sembène and Souleymane Cissé? I presume the common spellings are French transliterations, which makes me want to say (roughly) oos-MAHN sem-BAYN and SOO-lay-mahn see-SAY. Am I remotely close?
- Saturnome
- Joined: Sun Aug 12, 2007 5:22 pm
I'm a french canadian but I'm not too great at writing english pronunciation. I should go get that microphone in my basement and pronounce it Anyway I think it's something like Jeanne Dielman, vein-troah kay du kommerss, mille-katre-vey Brukselle.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
May I ask for Zbigniew Rybczynski ? I think it just appears more complicated than it is, but the "bczyn" part confuses me. the W appears tricky too.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
May I ask for Zbigniew Rybczynski ? I think it just appears more complicated than it is, but the "bczyn" part confuses me. the W appears tricky too.
- denti alligator
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I've Sembene pronounced with an extra syllable at the end: sem-BEHN-eh. Though that seems counter-intuitive in French, he's not French.MichaelB wrote:This is total (albeit educated) guesswork, but I'd say oos-MAHN sem-BEHN and SOO-lay-mahn si-SAY.Kirkinson wrote:How about Ousmane Sembène and Souleymane Cissé? I presume the common spellings are French transliterations, which makes me want to say (roughly) oos-MAHN sem-BAYN and SOO-lay-mahn see-SAY. Am I remotely close?
- Matt
- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 12:58 pm
Okay guys: Siodmak. As in Curt and Robert. Robert Osborne on TCM pronounces it see-ODD-mack, but we all know his difficulty with names.
EDIT: Well, maybe that's right, at least according to this guy on Senses of Cinema:
EDIT: Well, maybe that's right, at least according to this guy on Senses of Cinema:
Chris Justice wrote:Many have never heard of him, and when they have, they rarely can even pronounce his name (see-odd-mak – emphasis on the “oddâ€).
- tryavna
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- foggy eyes
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That's probably right, as I remember reading somewhere that Siodmak would routinely wear a blazer on set with the phonetic spelling 'SEE-ODD-MACK' printed across the back. The anecdote is also recalled on p.10 of the extract that can downloaded here.Matt wrote:Okay guys: Siodmak. As in Curt and Robert. Robert Osborne on TCM pronounces it see-ODD-mack, but we all know his difficulty with names.