Richard -- How about a few specific examples? In what British or American town would a person not initially pronounce Alekhine as Al eh kyne?
It's wrong, but that's a product of how English-language originating populations are trained to read it, is it not?
Who is going to say Aleekeene?
There are over 2000 exceptions in English, and that makes it a very difficult language (hell, king is pronounced keeeng), but it also has its conventions, and they are established.
Those conventions prevent an American or Briton or Irishman or Welshman from having an easy time with Dutch because of the ever-present i and y combos, for starters. But on the flip slde, that doesn't mean I or anyone else has to tailor their spelling or pronunciation to cover both sides of the Atlantic.
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Originally posted by joesheppeDon't know about "Alekhine" (and let's not forget that he himself changed its spelling, and IIRC even its "correct" pronunciation, during his life-time, for political reasons), but let's go back a single example of your first post.
Richard -- How about a few specific examples? In what British or American town would a person not initially pronounce Alekhine as Al eh kyne?
In at least two names, you have what should be a short [a], and you write it as "aw". Now, presumably in your dialect "aw" is pronounced short. In almost all dialects of English I am aware of, it is not - it is emphatically long. It is also pronounced much more like "or" than like "are". Most English-speakers I know would have transcribed the sound these names should have as "ah" rather than "aw".
And that's without going into the fact that, AFAIAA, "Kramnik" is pronounced with a short, closed 'a' and "Anish" with an open, half-long one. Two very different sounds, which may sound very much the same to speakers of some dialects of English, but which will be clearly distinguishable by others. And yet, you transliterate them both using a combination which may sound good to you, but which many Limeys would pronounce very much as "neither of these".
Richard