# Foreign proper nouns in news article



## hadronic

Every time a foreign proper noun appears in a Hebrew article, it comes without any nikud. Does the writer leave it out to the reader as to what the actual name is? 
For instance, I read recently that Israeli ירדן גרבי lost to French קלריס אגבגננו in the world judo finale. 
I guessed קלריס was Clarisse (but how many Hebrew would?) but couldn't figure out how to pronounce the family name. I had to go to a French article to get it right (it was Agbegnenu, of African origin). 
How do you usually do? Let's say you were to read that article in public?


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## arielipi

Well, you guess just like any other word you dont have niqqud. you can say the same in english, how do you know how to read a new word? it could be of french/germanic/latin/else origin and changes the way the word is read.
usually in hebrew you would put -a sounds when you dont know, some letters feel right after some letters to have a schwa; שורה תחתונה you guess.


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## anipo

Yes, foreign names are often a riddle when written in Hebrew. The classical joke is about California, which in Hebrew could also be read as Cliporania! 
My son, as a child, read Hamlet as Hamelet and Larnaca as Laranca. And when I see the word קמרון, I have to refer to the context to know if they refer to the British PM or to the country in Africa.
Sometimes you hear funny pronunciation of foreign names (especially geographical) over the radio or TV, because the broadcaster did not know the right one (or simply guessed wrong).


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## hadronic

What is so funny about Cliporania?... 
And about קמרון, I first read kimron (dome)... took me a little time


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## arielipi

im not familiar with this classical joke (why isnt it 'classic'?)
a friend of mine read pered and gorj (g as gimel, j as jimel - it'd be nice to know how to denote sound itself and sound with movement with no confusion) for fred and george from harry potter.
my sister once read ibudi kadvar when she glimpsed a basketball game on tv. what was written was איבודי כדור.
i once read bemeydi (thinking its a place) instead of bamiyadi (similar to ASAP).


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## tFighterPilot

When putting a little known name in a news article, a thoughtful editor would put nikkud. However, most don't. I think most Hebrew speakers would read קלריס correctly, though it wouldn't hurt to write it as קלאריס. But yeah, no one would be able to decipher that surname.


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## hadronic

Regardless of the conventions, could they decide to transcribe as אגביגנינו? This gives a closer idea.


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## airelibre

That looks like "Agbigninu".


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## hadronic

It's anyway closer than Agbgnnu. 

Don't you find?


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## hadronic

א : for all /a/ sounds
י : for all /e/ or /i/ sounds
ו : for all /o/ or /u/ sounds. 

Or if we follow this other convention :
א : /a/ or /e/
י :  /i/
ו : /o/ or /u/
We get אגבאגנאנו. 

 Or the Yiddish one : אגבעגנענו. 

Or use some nikud  

My question really is, why most editor just chose to do nothing. Why do they impose that on others when they perfectly know that everybody (including them) struggle?


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## origumi

hadronic said:


> My question really is, why most editor just chose to do nothing. Why do they impose that on others when they perfectly know that everybody (including them) struggle?


I guess one needs to send a letter to the editor of "The Daily Canaanite" newspaper . They started it many years ago and we simply follow, adding few matres lectionis. The Hebrew (and Arabic, Aramaic) reader is supposed to know the pronunciation.


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## arielipi

hadronic said:


> א : for all /a/ sounds
> י : for all /e/ or /i/ sounds
> ו : for all /o/ or /u/ sounds.
> 
> Or if we follow this other convention :
> א : /a/ or /e/
> י :  /i/
> ו : /o/ or /u/
> We get אגבאגנאנו.
> 
> Or the Yiddish one : אגבעגנענו.
> 
> Or use some nikud
> 
> My question really is, why most editor just chose to do nothing. Why do they impose that on others when they perfectly know that everybody (including them) struggle?


yes well, we can also overhaul the language. your suggestion reminds me of a satiric post about merging english letters and ending up in text looking like german.


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## arbelyoni

anipo said:


> Yes, foreign names are often a riddle when written in Hebrew. The classical joke is about California, which in Hebrew could also be read as Cliporania!
> My son, as a child, read Hamlet as Hamelet and Larnaca as Laranca. And when I see the word קמרון, I have to refer to the context to know if they refer to the British PM or to the country in Africa.
> Sometimes you hear funny pronunciation of foreign names (especially geographical) over the radio or TV, because the broadcaster did not know the right one (or simply guessed wrong).


As a kid I thought אלפרד היצ'קוק was Alfred HaYachkuk assuming "yachkuk" was some kind of a fancy title


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## hadronic

I'm not talking about overhauling the entire language, just for proper nouns, or at least unusual proper nouns, or at least when they first occur in an article. 
That the canaanite Daily Post   decided to do so makes sense in the realm of the sole Hebrew words, for which vowel are highly predictable. But foreign words do not work this way, and Yiddish perfectly understood it, that made consistent usage of nikkud.


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## origumi

hadronic said:


> But foreign words do not work this way, and Yiddish perfectly understood it, that made consistent usage of nikkud.


Hebrew academic material usually contain the non-Hebrew spelling for foreign names whose pronunciation is unclear. Children books and journals may add niqqud in these situations. But for the general media - this is simply not there. Surprisingly, native Hebrew speakers do not feel that anything is missing. We manage to guess if קמרון is an African country or a British PM, the context is usually enough to tell.


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## MuttQuad

In English, proper nouns of other languages are left alone; if from a language written with other than the Latin script, they are transliterated according to a recognized system (if there is one) or as best as the author can manage; the Japanese write foreign words with the Katakana syllabary, which often can only approximate the correct sound. 

Hebrew, however, has the advantage of nikkud, whose sounds are understood by all readers. Concessions have already been made to represent the soft "g" and some other non-native Hebrew consonantal sounds, so why not do readers the courtesy of using nikkud for the vowel sounds of non-native foreign proper nouns? 

It seems to me to be the right thing to do, especially in material that may be intended for reading by less educated people.


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## origumi

MuttQuad said:


> In English, proper nouns of other languages are left alone;


So why Citroën is written in English as Citroen?


> Hebrew, however, has the advantage of nikkud, whose sounds are understood by all readers.


What's the proper niqqud for English words like _dog_ - דוֹג or דַג, _cat_ - קַט or קֶט, or _law_, or names like _Boston_, _Bruxelles_ (assuming we try to preserve the original pronunciation)? What about German umlauts, French _u_, gazillion English vowels and diphtongs? The issue should not be oversimplified.


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## MuttQuad

Omitting standard accents (Western European) in foreign words appearing in English text is just sloppy typesetting. Good typography displays the acute, grave, umlaut, etc. -- often in loan words as well as proper nouns -- even though it is more cumbersome to do so.

As a retired typographer and international typographers trade association executive, I think there may be an element of the same problem with Hebrew typesetters. Even with today's modern equipment, it is somewhat difficult (and takes extra keystroking time) to set any type of diacritical, including nikkud. Your typical newspaper -- which is what this discussion began being about -- set "down and dirty," as rapidly and cheaply as possible without too much regard for extra "niceties," which limits production speed.


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## Drink

origumi said:


> So why Citroën is written in English as Citroen?



Because English keyboards usually do not have any way to input diacritics. Hebrew keyboards do have a way to input nikkud.



origumi said:


> What's the proper niqqud for English words like _dog_ - דוֹג or דַג, _cat_ - קַט or קֶט, or _law_, or names like _Boston_, _Bruxelles_ (assuming we try to preserve the original pronunciation)? What about German umlauts, French _u_, gazillion English vowels and diphtongs? The issue should not be oversimplified.



The author would have a Hebrew pronunciation in mind anyway, so the nikkud should follow that.


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## arielipi

Drink said:


> Because English keyboards usually do not have any way to input diacritics. Hebrew keyboards do have a way to input nikkud.


שיקום האדם מהרחוב ויגיד שהוא יודע איך מערבבים את המקלדת כדי שתפלוט ניקוד, וגם איפה כל תו נמצא.


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## origumi

Drink said:


> Because English keyboards usually do not have any way to input diacritics. Hebrew keyboards do have a way to input nikkud.


The technical issue is not an issue, especially for large web sites or newspapers. They can acquire one French "Azerty" keyboard and write Citroën French style. I mentioned this issue with English as a response to a claim that in English foreign names in Latin-based scripts are written as in the original language. Seems that English and Hebrew are alike here - we prefer the simple spelling (no diacritics and alike) either because we're too lazy or, more likely, because this is how it's done.



> The author would have a Hebrew pronunciation in mind anyway, so the nikkud should follow that.


For many names there's no problem - the Hebrew reader will recognize countries, cities, European and other person names, etc. When facing "strange" names, Hebrew niqqud is limited (as Spanish vowels, for example, for transcribing English). If we cannot represent correctly African or Chinese names in Hebrew writing, the benefit of niqqud is limited.


In the bottom line it's a matter of habit, culture, tradition. No convincing arguments are likely to make a difference.


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## MuttQuad

There is no problem with English word processing or typesetting keyboards nowadays in terms of using common Western European diacriticals. Right now, I am using an ordinary Windows QWERTY keyboard and have set so that I can easily type words such as éclair, über, città, français, mañana, etc. (yes, I know that ñ is not a diacritical cum base character). Software and hardware for English computer digital typesetting are similarly capable.

Years ago I consulted with the manufacturer -- and then operated in my plant -- the world's first commercial computerized typesetting machine that could phototypeset Hebrew (also Arabic, Greek, Russian). I don't remember how, or if, we were able to set nikkud. Even today, I am not up enough on current technology to know how, if at all, the problem is solved of nikkud placement under "single leg" characters such as daled or resh vs two-legged or closed-bottom characters such as het or mem. In the old days, the nikkud were "zero-width" characters and printed centered under any character with which they were used -- causing some ugly effects.


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## airelibre

Drink said:


> Because English keyboards usually do not have any way to input diacritics. Hebrew keyboards do have a way to input nikkud.



Really? I am yet to find a way to write nikud with a keyboard, yet I can write several diacritics on an English kéybóárd!


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## Drink

airelibre said:


> Really? I am yet to find a way to write nikud with a keyboard,



With the cursor immediately after a Hebrew letter:
On Windows, enable Caps Lock and then press Shift + keys in the top row (the row with the number keys).
On OS X, press AltGr (or the right Alt key) + keys in the top row (the row with the number keys).



airelibre said:


> yet I can write several diacritics on an English kéybóárd!



Well only the acute accent, if my understanding of the British keyboard is correct. You still can't write "Citroën" on the default keyboard layout.


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## MuttQuad

Well only the acute accent, if my understanding of the British keyboard  is correct. You still can't write "Citroën" on the default keyboard  layout.

Don't know about keyboards in Britain, but my good ole American KB, with XP set for "US International," lets me key all sorts of diacriticals with the "dead key" principle. That is, you key a symbol representing the accent mark, followed by the character, followed by a space: é  ï  ö  ñ  à  â   ç and so forth.

I can also set the KB for Hebrew, but I'm not fully sure how it works. There are a few free KB programs around, though, that let you type Hebrew, including nikkud, by following an on-screen layout.


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## Drink

MuttQuad said:


> Don't know about keyboards in Britain, but my good ole American KB, with XP set for "US International," lets me key all sorts of diacriticals with the "dead key" principle. That is, you key a symbol representing the accent mark, followed by the character, followed by a space: é  ï  ö  ñ  à  â   ç and so forth.



Most people in the US have their computers set to the plain US layout. Of course anyone who really wants to can change their layout to anything. I personally have created several custom layouts with the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.



MuttQuad said:


> I can also set the KB for Hebrew, but I'm not fully sure how it works. There are a few free KB programs around, though, that let you type Hebrew, including nikkud, by following an on-screen layout.



It's pretty simple, you enable the Hebrew keyboard and then you can type in Hebrew. You can optionally buy stickers for your keyboard to help you remember where each letter is located. You can switch between English and Hebrew with Alt+Shift.


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## airelibre

Drink said:


> With the cursor immediately after a Hebrew letter:
> On Windows, enable Caps Lock and then press Shift + keys in the top row (the row with the number keys).
> On OS X, press AltGr (or the right Alt key) + keys in the top row (the row with the number keys).
> 
> 
> 
> Well only the acute accent, if my understanding of the British keyboard is correct. You still can't write "Citroën" on the default keyboard layout.



I didn't know that. Well, on most Apple (iOS) keyboards (which make up a large proportion now of keyboards worldwide) Latin diacritics are much _easier_ than typing nikud, which I think is impossible.


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## Drink

airelibre said:


> I didn't know that. Well, on most Apple (iOS) keyboards (which make up a large proportion now of keyboards worldwide) Latin diacritics are much _easier_ than typing nikud, which I think is impossible.



iOS is only for iPhones, iPads, and iPods and on them it is indeed impossible to type nikkud. However, I don't consider these to be "keyboards", so to me they do not make up any proportion of keyboards worldwide.


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## hadronic

I wanted to say that the way to pronounce foreign sounds (English dog, cat, French u, Chinese,...) is irrelevant here. 
There are already conventions on how to "transform" them into Hebrew sounds (French u is usually "i", sometimes "yu"). My question here is, once you have this correspondence, how do you write it down. 

Now, I agree that among Latin-characters based languages, the convention is to keep the same spelling (with or without the diacritics), and sound correspondences are not being kept. For instance, how would you know if    Citroen is "sitro'en"  or "sitrun" (Dutch pronunciation of "oe"). So in that regard, I agree that this convention doesn't allow let's say French speakers to know how to say a name. 
In the same way, you can argue that it works the same way in Hebrew. But where I disagree, is that in Hebrew, they designed ad-hoc transliteration systems for almost all languages, and that Hebrew has the "chance" to not bother with the ambiguity of the original spellings... yet it decided to add difficulty of its own


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## arielipi

Because you cant just spray matre lections all over the place. thats not how it works in hebrew. it looks awful and hideous, they did it in the 80's and it quickly got dumped. it doesnt look natural, it looks alien to the ways of writing in hebrew.


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## hadronic

Once again, I'm not really advocating addition of matres lectionis all over the place and to overhaul all the habits. I'm just asking, why nikkud is not being used where adequate (rare names, on their first occurrence).


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## hadronic

I often think how lucky we've been that yod and vav are 2 thin and sharp signs, that can easily be inserted in words or even allow duplication without looking too awkward. Aleph wasn't that lucky... Thick and bold.


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## hadronic

I'm currently reading a book, translated into Hebrew from English (btw, the quality of the translation is just a-bys-mal, how could this even be allowed to be published). The action is set in Seattle, and the book talks about a Canadian (קנדי), about a certain Candy (קנדי), and another girl, Kennedy (you guessed it, קנדי). Granted, neither are central characters of the book, but still! Come on, it is really, really disturbing. Something MUST have been done to disambiguate.


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## MuttQuad

As a former owner of a company which offered translation service, I can tell you that most translation is poor due to efforts to save money, lack of knowledge by the client, and/or failure to use proper editing. Apparently, the into-Hebrew translator you write of was a very good one.


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