(no subject)

[boxofdelights]

I got into a stupid fight on James Nicoll's LJ, which inspired me to post:

How many syllables does "Julia" have?
How about "Danya"?
And "Darya"?

Given that the correct answer is "However many the person whose name you're pronouncing wants it to have," do you find it difficult to pronounce any of those names with two syllables?

How many syllables does "jewel" have? "Poem"? I don't want to start a stupid fight on my journal, but so far everyone who comments here has reasonably good sense and reasonably good manners. If you feel safe answering this question in this context: Do you have prejudices about people whose answers to the last two questions are different from yours? What are they?

And what is it about being female on the internet that makes people think I couldn't really understand what I just said, so they ought to explain it to me?

Comments

[liv]

Wow, that really is an amazingly stupid fight. Not you, the people who are throwing around linguistic technical terms in a completely incoherent way while being belligerent to anyone who points out that they're not making sense.

I'm British so my answers to your questions may not be useful. But Julia I naturally pronounce with three syllables, can do two if I'm speaking quickly or if the person prefers that. Danya definitely two. Darya I have never tried pronouncing; I find it hard to get my tongue round a two-syllable version because my British r won't blend with the y very well.

Jewel: either one or two. I think I slightly prefer one, but either sounds ok. Poem: definitely two; I've only ever heard the single-syllable version used by people who were deliberately trying to caricature or mock other people's accents.

[loligo]

For all the female names you listed, spelling them with a Y inclines me toward 2 syllables, and spelling them with an I says three to me.

[laughingrat]

Six or seven, when sung by Ian Astbury.

BRB DYING

The internet does appear to be full of douchebags who like fighting for its own sake, definitely.

[onyxlynx]

Considering that until I heard it spoken, I pronounced Ms. Twain's name "SHAH-nya," I probably shouldn't talk. (Like that's ever stopped me.)

All those things have unstressed and mostly-swallowed syllables that I might pronounce if Being Theatrical, but mostly just hint at when speaking. Except "poem," which in my diction would slide too close to "pomme," and "jooolry," which vies with "jury" and "Jewry" in the soundscape, but "jew-el-ry" sounds aff-ec-ted.

[telophase]

I tend to twitch when "poem" is pronounced either "pome" or "poim" as I don't like the sounds of either of those, my preferred pronunciation being somewhere in the middle. Except when I start repeating it to myself in an effort to work out how it "should" sound, at which point I lose all ability to pronounce it in any way that sounds nice to me. (But I recognize this is a weird affectation of mine and try not to push it on anyone else!)

Something I do tend to judge people on is pronouncing "cooperation," which I can trace back to an interminable speech I had to listen to in highschool at a convention that was ridiculous to begin with: the Office Education Association of America, which changed its name to Future Business Professionals of America at the convention, but which failed to change anything substantive about the organization to reflect that -- the officers dressed in jockey silks at the opening ceremonies (held in Louisville, Kentucky near Derby Day), and at closing ceremonies they wore party dresses and each sang a song.

But they also each gave a speech at closing ceremonies, and I had to sit there and listen to one of the party-dress-wearing young women talk on and on and on about "kwaperation" and I just wanted to throw something at her and shriek "IT HAS FIVE SYLLABLES, NOT FOUR! YOU PRONOUNCE BOTH OF THE 'O'S!"

I hope they've figured out what "professional" really means in the past 24 years.

(The entire reason I was there was that my computer science teacher was the local faculty rep for the group and made me participate in a competition at State level, which I inexplicably won, so the school sent me and a couple of others who placed first in various competitions to the national convention competitions.)

[the_siobhan]

Toronto accent here. (Which is different than the rest of Ontario)

Julia: 3
Danya: 2
Darya: 3

At least until I'm corrected.

Jewel: 2
Poem: 2

Do you have prejudices about people whose answers to the last two questions are different from yours? What are they?

Hrm. I'm aware of class differences in the way some words are pronounced. I try not to be prejudiced on that basis, but you know I'm a work in progress just like everybody else.

That doesn't mean I won't tease my close friends about how they say certain words. The way my Brit-accented husband says 'urinal' never fails to be comedy gold.

[brigantine]

Hmm, lessee... for "jewel," I generally end up with a sort of one-and-a-half syllables, with the second being quick. If I'm speaking more slowly, it's likely to be two distinct syllables. When people say "jewlery" instead of "jewelry" that kind of bugs me, though I don't get too uptight over it, since even for me it is easier to say "jewlery" clearly than "jewelry."

"Poem" is definitely two. Again, the second gets a bit short shrift, but it's definitely there. I hear it shortened to what sounds like "pome" fairly often, but to my ear the difference is so slight, that it doesn't bother me much.

"Julia" is always three syllables for me, though if I'm talking fast the last two tend to get squished into one "ya".

"Danya" can go a couple of ways, mostly because I agree with your rule, that it's however Danya wants her name pronounced. If I haven't been told her preference, I'd be likely to go with two syllables, like "Tanya." Wouldn't be surprised if it's Dan-EYE-ah, though.

My first inclination for "Darya" would be DARia, being three syllables with sometimes the last two kind of squished together if I'm talking fast.

[melannen]

Julia : 3
Darya : 2
Danya : 2

Jewel: 2
poem: 2

...however I am not promising that's what they actually sound like when I say them; that's just how the phonemes divide in my head. I've found that a lot of people can't hear the difference unless it's emphasized more than I do, so I think some of it comes down to how verbal/written oriented one is, even within my dialect. (also like loligo, I give -ia two syllables and -ya one, so Darya is two syllables but Daria is three.)

I judge only when somebody is being prescriptive about language and has not even stopped to consider the fact that it varies. I don't just mean people like those correcting you on the internet; for example, one of the first comprehensive versification books I read used a line ending in 'fire' as one of their examples for how to rhyme (and how not to rhyme) and it took me ages of flipping the page back and forth before I realised they must speak a dialect that pronounced it approximately "fah" instead of "fy-er", they just assumed everybody knew that, and that's why none of their statements about how to rhyme it made any sense to anybody in a different dialect.

...and don't get me started on spelling reformists who apparently think "everybody should have to phonetically spell my dialect" would actually be less complicated than what we've got now.

[melannen]

...also morae-guy gives the impression of having taken one linguistics class and decided that everything on the final was gospel truth. From a versifying perspective, I was alway taught that syllable length (which moraic theory seems to be a subset of) was etremely important in some languages (and in fact is the basis of their poetic forms) but in English is too variable and is susperseded by syllable and stress - to the extent that when we borrow poetic forms from languages that work on syllable length, like Greek and Latin, they just get silently converted to English verse's accent-counting system. (In no case, iirc, is length converted to number of syllables, because that just doesn't work.)

[amaebi]

In the absence of a conversation partner I'm echoing, 2.5, 2.5, 2.5, 1.5, 1.5.

[malka]

Julia: 3

Danya: 2

Darya: 3 (although this is translating itself to Daria in my head, and I think there's some i/y influence going on)

Jewel: it depends. I think I'm more likely to use 1+ than 2-, but it's square in my fuzzy zone and depends on factors like how quickly
I'm speaking. My only association with syllable count here is the recent Terry Pratchett book with a character whose name played with the 1-syllable pronunciation. (Deliberately vague to try to avoid spoilers.)

Poem: 2, although people who use one syllable remind me of a really good English teacher of mine who pronounced it that way.

My current syllables-in-dialects concern is that I grew up in a region where caramel had three very distinct syllables -- CARE-uh-mehl -- and I now live in a region where it has two-minus -- CAR-muhl. It's sufficiently firmly set to two in the various local dialects that signs at fairs almost always advertise "carmel corn". I don't know why I've fixated on this dialectical difference instead of all the other ones, but I'd like to stop, because it makes fairs less pleasant for me.