Why for some it's not easy for some to pronounce KAMALA!

[@faffrin5216]

"But Americans are now in agreement that a galaxy far, far away is exotic enough to require the taco treatment." 👏👏👏

[@kacperwoch4368]

Apparently the galaxy far, far away is somewhere near Tijuana

[@amuro1701]

The "taco treatment" is how Harrison Ford pronounced "Han" in the original film, thus establishing its pronunciation. Billy Dee was probably imitating how he heard the British production crew say it.

[@hakonsoreide]

That's one for the quotation dictionaries.

[@rmdodsonbills]

I mean, he's not wrong, and it certainly is a great quote, but it's also true that there is enough of a German influence on American English that we are familiar with the German name Hans. Also, Hans Gruber and the SNL body builders Hans and Franz came about long after A New Hope, but that is the way I've heard those names pronounced all my life (I should note that I grew up in South Dakota which had a significant amount of German immigration).

[@thejoin4687]

Hahn, my bookie!

[@swatiparasnis]

Indian here, fluent in two sanskrit-based languages. Kamala is usually pronounced "Come-uh-laa" in most Indian languages. The "la" like in "father". While speaking it often gets constricted to "Come-la" especially in the northern parts of India.

[@Snow-Willow]

This is very interesting, thank you. Can I ask, in you experience is there usually a stress put on the name anywhere, like "come-UH-laa" or "COME-uh-laa"?

[@sidchari]

@@Snow-Willow I was going to make a similar comment, as someone born in the US to Tamil-speaking parents. Everyone I've known with this name has pronounced it something like "cummel-la" rhyming with pummel, so stress on the first syllable and potentially eliding the middle syllable entirely to "come-la" as swatiparasnis pointed out.

[@AWildBard]

Thanks, since he said it was Indian, I was wondering about Indian pronunciations.

[@speedwagon1824]

I speak Hindi and I'm used to Kamala being pronounced as Kuh-mul (/kə.məl/)

[@grasshopperye3593]

@@Snow-Willow I'm an Indian American, and I've heard my parents say it closer to "COME-uh-laa". Just don't spend a long time on any of the syllables if you want to sound authentic.

[@WhatIsRukiUpTo]

What I expected- a 1 min video explaining the pronunciation. What I did not expect -a 13 min video on how native English speakers will never get my name right. 😂 well done sir 👏

[@ttt5020]

Ruki.. like 'rude-key' without the d? rhymes with pookie?

[@user-vd6qq6uk8p]

@@ttt5020sorry mate, you’ve been sayin’ y’name wrong all this time, innit 😹

[@davidkumarmahto8187]

​@@ttt5020 rookie?

[@ttt5020]

@@davidkumarmahto8187 no, rue is different from the oo in rook. Like Nuke vs nook, Luke vs look. Ruke-ee.

[@davidkumarmahto8187]

@@ttt5020 there's now way rookie is pronounced like that

[@krishna_omkar]

Geoff - thanks for this video. Just a note for 1:11 - her name in Sanskrit is *not* KAMAL कमल /kə.mələ/ (ending in schwa in Sanskrit, but eliding the terminal schwa in Hindi so it sounds more like /kə.məl/), which means lotus. Her name is कमला /kə.məl.a:/ ( ending in long “aa”), which is an epithet of the Goddess Lakshmi, meaning “she who is of the lotus”, because the Goddess is depicted standing or sitting on a lotus flower. Her middle name is “Devi”, meaning goddess, or Kamala Devi, which clarifies things.

[@abhishekmhatre1554]

I'm not sure if that's correct. On the one hand, pretty much every news source (like NBC, NYT, WaPo, Time, Politico, etc) has stated that her name means "lotus". But then again Kamala herself doesn't pronounce her name as either ka-ma-l ("lotus") or k-uh-mlā ("Lakshmi") but rather as kāh-ma-lā so I don't know what to make of it. Her maternal relatives probably know what it means.

[@F2_CPB]

​@@abhishekmhatre1554they probably doesn't understand it well. I'm from India and I can tell you it's far more common for people to name their daughter as Kama'la' than Kamal. Kamal has a bit of masculine sound to it. So it is kind of gender neutral name. Another thing to know is it's quite common for a girl to be named after one of many names of Goddess Lakshmi.

[@1080lights]

@@abhishekmhatre1554 Most Indian-Americans know how to say their own names authentically. They have to affect a different pronunciation so that other Americans don't keep messing it up

[@prajithr2202]

​@@abhishekmhatre1554 Political correctness. Look what Vivek Ramaswamy had to go through. They will definitely underplay anything related to a Hindu Goddess.

[@pavanmaddini]

Am I wrong? I am sure कमल in sanskrit is pronounced as Kamala but in Hindi it is Pronounced as Kamal. Kamal in Sanskrit is written as कमल‌्. Isn't this one of the basic differences between Sanskrit and Hindi?

[@Hananotaka]

For what it’s worth, as an American kid in the 80s, who knew nothing of karma, I thought Boy George was saying “Comma Chameleon.” It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then, little in 80s music did.

[@Laecy]

that's. . . that's not the line?

[@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648]

or, come-a come-a come-a come-a come-at your convenience (AM radio quality)

[@kendrama1]

There’s a t-shirt I’ve seen at a few conventions (I think from Snorg Tees?) that’s a picture of 5 commas and a chameleon! 😂 ,,,,,🦎

[@baronderochemont8556]

@@kendrama1 😆

[@junipersbrew]

This video is how I found out. I thought he was just taking a long time to say chameleon.

[@OldWhitebelly]

These subtle *between* vowels make this all so much fun. We are all so unaware of how incredibly rich and subtle the things we say are. It's so much fun finding out.

[@TheMule71]

Now, think for a moment the problem Italians have. When you're used to an in between sound (both hearing it and producing it), it's very hard to tell the difference. Remove vowel length that isn't a thing in Italian, and you get Italians who have an hard time telling different English vowels apart, and Englishmen getting rid of a think accent when speaking Italian.

[@atriyakoller136]

As a Russian, I could not hear the difference between the long and short I (as in live-leave) until my first year at university. Any recordings we used, things I watched (not that many), nothing. My moment of revelation happened while I was watching Doctor Who and Matt Smith said, I think, the word "listen". I just paused and said "so that's what they've been talking about!"

[@davidec.4021]

Ə

[@edwardblair4096]

Those "between" vowel sounds are probably a big part of why people find other people speaking in a different accent so striking. Whether the difference is perceived as positively or negatively depends on a lot of other cultural factors, but the ability to consistently and systematically use an alternate set of vowels draws attention.

[@jeff__w]

It’s the examples that Geoff Lindsey uses that perfectly nail it, with precise clips, that make the videos so engaging.

[@3Dant]

I love watching these UK vs USA videos because it feels like here in Australia we have a chaotic mix of both. I'll be like "hey we still have that British pronunciation here" and immediately after that there'll be one where it tends more towards the American side.

[@ikelom]

Same here in Canada!

[@dert693]

Same here in South Africa!

[@laylabean3141]

Same in Northern Ireland lmao

[@mmcworldbuilding5994]

same in ireland lmao

[@Pomguo]

And a whole host of features and sounds entirely your own!

[@DontSigh]

It's funny how people are so unaware of their own accent/linguistic limitations/biases, especially in situations that specifically concern tricky pronunciations

[@carlpanzram7081]

People who aren't autistic just don't care, and it's better that way.

[@lasagnahog7695]

​@@carlpanzram7081 Is that based on data or just how you feel? I'm very cautious about people attributing things to autism, it edges far too often into stereotypes. And even 'positive' stereotypes are harmful. The broad language of "people who aren't autistic" is wild to me. Do you truly think that every single non-autistic person are unaware of linguistic biases? Do you then think that all autistic people care specifically about linguistic biases?

[@attaboy7729]

@@carlpanzram7081 You're probably trying to be funny but that's one of the stupidest things I've read.

[@emperordragon1794]

@@carlpanzram7081 autistic, neuro-divergent, adhds are the new nerds. they can seemingly do tasks unfathomable to "normal" people. they are keen, insightful and very much detailed oriented. they are also very good observants, hyperfixate and solve complex problems. /s

[@sackiesack8492]

@@emperordragon1794 Lmao do you mean /srs because /s is usually understood as /sarcasm😭

[@jeff__w]

3:20 “Americans say ‘gala.’” As someone in the US, I _love_ when you do a US accent-it’s almost like how a generation of US airline pilots imitated US Air Force officer and test pilot Chuck Yeager.

[@Eronoc13]

Even funnier since oodles of Americans say "gala" with the same relative vowel as the English do.

[@OldWhitebelly]

@@Eronoc13 And many more say gayla.

[@stevenjlovelace]

I've heard it pronounced gah-la, gal-a, and gay-la, but years ago I got a job where we hosted charity galas on a regular basis, and everyone at my office (in Texas) said gay-la, so that's how I say it now.

[@jeff__w]

@@stevenjlovelace I wouldn’t pronounce it “gay-la” _except_ when saying “gala event.” Maybe the long _a_ sound helps the phrase from merging into something like “galavant” (with a “vent” last syllable)? Obviously, I'm no phonetician.

[@Eronoc13]

@@OldWhitebellyIndeed!

[@Landoverse]

“They’re DIFFERENT vowels!” Lol like speaking to a five year-old…My American ass very much appreciated the pointer😂

[@Xubuntu47]

Right? I always thought it weird that a and o so often represented the same sound; now I know why.

[@silver.shoelaces]

@Xubuntu47 Do they really sound the same to you? The “a” in father is higher in my mouth than the “o” in bottle. They sound similar but distinct to me.

[@Moggetslittlesister]

@@silver.shoelaces Some American accents retain the distinction, but they are exactly the same in the "default Hollywood" accent. I too only learned that there was a difference through one of Dr. Lindsey's videos (probably the one with American actors that he mentions in this video)

[@Landoverse]

@@silver.shoelaces Depends on the US dialect, I think.

[@Xubuntu47]

@@silver.shoelaces I can *hear* the difference now that it's been pointed out. But tbh I never noticed the difference before. They are the same vowel in my dialect; we say them even if we hear the difference.

[@richardbuttner1989]

Someone said phonetics would be boring. Someone was wrong. Had a lot of fun watching 😂

[@HayTatsuko]

Phonetics and linguistics are _never_ boring because they are both incredibly diverse subjects!

[@lamewater772]

If anyone wants to know the indian pronunciation, there's a tamil song "kamala kalasa" lol, you can hear her name multiple times iterated in it

[@philcollinslover56705]

eyyyyyy

[@user-ho4rv6kg8u]

Kamalahahahaha

[@VikingTeddy]

In Finnish, Kamala means "horrible" 😊, so our media never uses her first name.

[@12SPASTIC12]

Seems accurate though 😆

[@sjsuismylife]

Fitting

[@946towguy2]

Que Mala. It describes her accurately.

[@jira6423]

@@12SPASTIC12saw that one coming lol

[@JP_Names]

Rip 😂

[@DemianUsul]

it's funny that as a Spanish native speaker I can understand the video, but I cant hear the differences between most of the non nativizing strategies 😅

[@ladymarianne793]

Yes! The same for a Greek native speaker 😅

[@paradoxmo]

This is one of the big challenges of learning English for Spanish speakers, as coming from Spanish’s 5 vowels to English’s 15-25 is a big shift- both in identifying them and producing them.

[@946towguy2]

Que Mala.

[@DemianUsul]

indeed! As a linguist I'm sadly aware of whats happening in the phonetic level, but I just gave up about it and I simply keep the focus on the grammar and pragmatic levels haha

[@DemianUsul]

​@@946towguy2Kemala suerte 😢

[@lt827]

The comment about Donald Sutherland, a Canadian, not doing an American style pronunciation of foreign words is spot on for an older generations of Canadians. As Donald Sutherland was born in 1935, he would not have had the influence of American tv growing up and his pronunciation is closer to what a Scottish or English person would say in terms of short vowels in Nazi, mafia and Vietnam. Another example of this vintage Canadian voice is from another actor of Sutherland's generation, Christopher Plummer, who was born in 1929. Most younger Canadians sound more like Americans: many older ones call their mothers Mum like British people, whereas many younger ones call their mothers the American equivalent: Mom.

[@sambartlett1435]

I was going to say, I've lived in Canada my whole life and have never heard anyone pronounce those words like that, but I'm younger and my grandparents are immigrants and not native English speakers.

[@lt827]

@@sambartlett1435 I have modified my comment. It’s a subtle thing: Canadians have lost their Britishness slowly. I mainly heard this from people born before 1920 and those with British parents. Here’s a good example Christopher Plummer’s accent in 1971. A viewer describes it as a posh Canadian accent in the comments. kzbin.info/www/bejne/aqecpolpjJV7gsksi=oaTybGsogeXg-1nN

[@nlpnt]

Dr. Lindsey could do a whole study on the accents of Son of a Critch, particularly how the very different takes of the two English actors playing Newfoundlanders - Malcolm McDowell uses a sort of pan-Celtic accent while Benjamin Evan Ainsworth sounds like he could be from Toronto or LA. The real Mark Critch plays his own father with a stronger Newfie accent than he himself has (when not amping it up for comedic effect); it's said to fade with every generation like every North American regional accent but this shows it in accelerated form with Ainsworth in particular taking his verbal cues from local kids his own age rather than what a Gen-X teen in the '80s would've had.

[@CainXVII]

I am a younger non-native English speaker and of course I mostly get American English. I still lean towards shorter vowels in those words. Maybe it's because they are loan words in Swedish too? If I say nazi with a long a it sounds like I say it in Swedish

[@bouzoukiman5000]

Terrible example. He was in character, acting. I have seen a lot of his movies and his pronunciation changes. He was an actor!

[@reidleblanc3140]

It baffles me that none of these people speaking on wide public forums even bothered to LOOK UP the pronunciation. That’s what I did, the second I learned about her, and I don’t think I’ve ever even said it out loud.

[@cereal_chick2515]

Right? That's what I always do when I encounter the written name of an unfamiliar figure, and it wounds my heart every time a pronunciation is not listed.

[@EdwardLindon]

How would that help? The vowel they're trying to say does not exist in their dialect.

[@chrst7346]

@@EdwardLindon I am quite sure that something like a schwa does exist in any dialect…😃

[@Bagley2014]

​@@chrst7346 but "something like" isn't good enough. All of the pronunciations people pick are "something like" the correct one. The issue is that the actual correct one doesn't exist in some people's dialects.

[@carlpanzram7081]

Because it doesn't matter? You'd have to be a REALLY obnoxious and self-important person to demand people speak some foreign word in YOUR specific foreign tongue. Why? Why would that be reasonable? Do you apply that standard at ANY other level? Like dialects for instance? Do you go around and correct everyone's dialect? How do you feel about AAVE? 😂 Can you cope with that but not with someone saying "kamala" in a way that makes SENSE? I'm German, and I can tell you that I've not heard a single American pronounce ANY German word correctly, even tho your language is FULL of them. I don't care. Nobody who is at all reasonable cares. Imagine you'd do this the other way around. Go to Australia and tell EVERYONE that they are not pronouncing your name right 😂

[@LeCrenn]

I was going to comment that it isn't difficult to pronounce Kamala, but am so glad I watched the video first. Your analysis was fascinating. Not just how you explained foreign words being naturalized, but also the differences between American and British vowels. Also, I didn't realize there were so many people on tv struggling to say it the way she does herself, nor that people were feeling that was necessary. I'm sure the Vice President doesn't mind hearing her name pronounced with a British accent. (And thank you for pointing out how the right is weaponizing the more exotic, foreign sounding pronunciation.)

[@danielzhang1916]

a lot of Asian people don't mind, people can never get it right, it's not always the way it's spelled

[@paradoxmo]

How exotic it is has nothing to do with why it’s being weaponized, it’s more of a “pronouncing it different than she does, on purpose” thing. Same principle as calling the opposing party the “Democrat party” which is only a weapon because it’s not the accurate name, not because it’s inherently a bad name for a party.

[@mattbalfe2983]

The American non-nativization strategy is just approximating Mexican Spanish pronunciation rules. Since most of us have taken basic Spanish in school and interact with a lot of Spanish speakers.

[@jdb101585]

I'm in the Northeast US, never took Spanish, and I *still* aim for the MS pronunciation.

[@adamcetinkent]

But it's just wrong? Spanish vowels are pretty consistent, and they're never "tah-co"

[@jevinliu4658]

Not just Spanish, sometimes it is French because of historical influences

[@ahab1976]

@@adamcetinkent Most spanish speakers would say it as the guy from 0:59

[@FirstSynapse]

​@@ahab1976I'm Spanish, and that's not true at all, that's just not what "a" sounds in Spanish.

[@ajs41]

She said to pronounce it like "comma" + "la" but that obviously doesn't work for British speakers, because we pronounce comma differently to Americans.

[@mugglescakesniffer3943]

It's like Alderaan the planet from Star Wars. People from the UK say it different. Especially with the a sound We say al der ron in 'Merica you the UK say all der anne (like the name anne)

[@everydayispoetry]

@ajs41: You mean "differently from" Americans-but oh wait, you're British, aren't you?

[@maueflcoach1506]

Try karma-la

[@woodfur00]

@@maueflcoach1506 Try watching the video

[@AWildBard]

@@everydayispoetry haha

[@jenfoley5101]

Thank you for explaining why it is difficult for people to pronounce sounds that are outside their phonetic system. For the past few years a number of memes have been circulating implying that there is some malicious intent when someone is unable to pronounce a name like a native speaker and that if only they cared enough to put in a minute amount of effort, they could do so. Having studied linguistics, I understood this is not the case. My name starts with a "J," a sound that does not exist in many languages. If someone can't pronounce my name the way I do because English isn't their first language, I've never assumed any malicious intent or laziness on their part and it's never bothered me. I wish more people understood this.

[@himani8927]

Speaking for myself and what I’ve noticed many Indian-Americans do (including Kamala herself), most foreign people here automatically americanize the pronunciation to make it possible for others to get close enough phonetically. For example, her “comma-la” pronunciation isn’t authentic/accurate but it’s the closest Americanized pronunciation. So I do find it can be rude imo when someone still won’t put in the effort to learn even the easier/nativized version.

[@JK-ji3kl]

Right it's s not lack of effort, we want to get your name right but there is a big thing called not being familiar with the entire phonology of your language, unfortunately some people are of the disposition to assume malicious intent. Many immigrants don't even have perfect English pronunciation themselves, not for lack of trying.

[@LauraMorland]

Yes! A friend of mine was dating an Indian man named Ajay, and he HATED the American pronunciation of his name. The "J" in particular (as far as I could tell from his instruction) is much softer in Hindi -- something between an English "J" and a French "J". The final syllable, also, was not AY, but something between a short "A" and a short "E" (as in "eh"). I could be off in my memory (it was 15 years ago). What I told my friend is that she should explain to Ajay that *it's hard to stop in the middle of an English sentence and pronounce a word with different rules.* Similarly, I live in France half the year, and my name - Laura - is pronounced quite differently in French: the "L" , both vowels, and *of course* the "r" are quite different. But it would be weird to expect my French friends to pronounce my name in the American way.

[@Gee-xb7rt]

​@@himani8927 to me the comma is weird, especially living in the south where there are definitely two m's with a gutteral stop between them. com-ma la.

[@JK-ji3kl]

​​​​​​@@LauraMorlandInteresting example. There is the fricative j in the middle of some words, like the way some English speakers pronounce "Beijing" (Also at the end of syllables like "Taj Mahal", "The British Raj" etc) but it would be wrong to expect it in the middle of "Ajay". To that point, it doesn't help that the nickname "AJ" is not uncommon.

[@abhishekdb9800]

The initial 'k' in Kamala is unaspirated in Indian languages which do distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated consonants. And Indians speaking English tend to use unaspirated initial consonants where Americans and Brits use aspirated sounds: kite, pot, play, etc. Europeans tend to use unaspirated initial consonants in English.

[@angeldude101]

Considering Geoff Lindsey's videos on aspiration, North American and British English speakers don't really distinguish plosives by voicing, but primarily distinguish them by aspiration. Trying to say "pot" without aspiration will just sound like "bot". "gite" and "blay" are thankfully not recognized words, so they're less likely to be misunderstood, but it will take extra effort to understand them without the aspiration, but there are plenty of other worlds with initial plosives like "pot" that outright become different words when the aspiration is removed.

[@laurencefraser]

Yeah, if you want an unaspirated stop in the onset of a syllable out of most dialects of English you have to shove an s on the front to suppress the aspiration... or pretend it's voiced. (spot is unaspirated, while pot is not, bot also isn't. nominally the b is voiced, but in practice the voicing starts so late in the sound in most dialects that you don't so much end up with a voiced consonant as a lengthened following vowel).

[@WaterShowsProd]

Languages in southeast Asia also use aspirated and non-aspirated K, as well as aspirated and non-aspirated P, and T. That's why you'll see there are times to use kh and times to use k, or to use ph or p, or t or th (ht in Romanised Burmese, because there is also a th sound like in English). In Burmese they also have the hard G, so you have K, KH, and G, each written with a different character.

[@artugert]

The first four letters of the Hindi alphabet are K KH G GH. Not only do they have aspirated consonants; they have more than English does! Not sure about Tamil or other Indian languages, though.

[@JoshuaNichollsMusic]

@@artugertTamil and almost all other Indian languages have this 4 way voicedness/aspiration distinction. Don’t quote me on this, but I believe it started with Sanskrit and was borrowed as a sort of areal feature into the surrounding languages.

[@209PH]

Re the different nativisation patterns of British v. American English, I notice that no American commentators pronounced the erstwhile UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's name as he would. They said "ree-shee", whereas Sunak himself and his fellow Brits said "risshy".

[@hbowman108]

It's a short I in Hindi.

[@ninjalectualx]

Sussy Sunak

[@Gerishnakov]

Rashee Sanook

[@Lizard-813]

I'm American and I can't remember ever having heard anyone pronounce it with the /i/ vowel. I've only ever head it pronounced the second way, with the /ɪ/ vowel. Granted, maybe I somehow avoiding hearing any Americans other than myself pronounce it? I do mainly read things, and a lot of the voices I hear online are from the UK.

[@hbowman108]

@@Lizard-813 I realized what this is. They're remembering the 1960s celebutard guru Maharishi Maheshyogi. And in that name, it's Sanskritized, and Sanskrit is different. It has [i iː], short and long tense vowels, and this distinction evolved into a lax/tense distinction in Hindi, [ɪ i]. The funny part is that Maharishi's name is WRONG in Sanskrit. Mahā has sandhi with the syllabic R in rshi promoting it to vrddhi grade so the correct "great teacher" is Mahārshi, pronounced [mahaːɽʂi].

[@alexconnor9680]

When Harris first came on the national scene, the most common pronunciation in media was "ka-MAHL-a". Then as part of her presidential campaign in 2019 she released an ad clarifying that she pronounces it "KAHM-a-la" It's interesting to learn why different English speakers default to different pronunciations, but when we're talking about proper names I feel like one must try to pronounce it as they do. To not do so ends up feeling disrespectful, especially with such a prominent figure

[@BeeWhistler]

Yes, I thought the two men discussing how to say it and dismissing it as something Americans do were missing the point. SHE says it that way.

[@profeseurchemical]

this was my gut feeling on the matter. like meeting an irish dude and calling him kay-lum instead of kallum. or trying to get the R right in the spanish Borja. The bond point threw me for a loop though. like in american english, unequivocally the way to say the name is how she says it herself. but in tamil, presumably the way her mother says it is the correct way. so, in british english, do you aproximate the american of the person in question, or the tamil of her mother? if she was ur friend, or someone you met, u obviously just mirror the sounds u hear her say. as a public person you hear about second and third hand? i think karma beats out comma

[@jenniferhanses]

@@profeseurchemical There's the added problem of your position. If you're Joe Blow reading the news, you look at a name, and pronounce it whatever way you think when talking to the people around you. When you're Johnny Newscaster, though, you have a duty to make a good faith effort to say it properly. What is properly? When you're talking about someone's name, it's the way she says it. You should be trying to get what you say as close as possible to that.

[@karatekid7640]

She's also a politician with fear that if her name is not simple enough to people she may not come as relatable...

[@AtomikNY]

In general, I agree, but at the same time there has to be some room for dialectal accommodation. For example, I'm going to Americanize the pronunciation of an English "Grant" [gɹɑːnt] or "Charles" [ˈtʃɑːɫz] into [gɹẽə̃nt] or [ˈtʃɑɹɫz], adjusting for the regular phonetic correspondences between British and American English, even though it's not the closest I could get to their pronunciation of their own name using the phonemes available in my dialect.

[@adityasshukla]

The hilarious part is that most Indian-Americans pronounce their names wrong themselves. They don't want to lose the game of accent. A popular one that I have heard frequently is "Patel" which they pronounce as "Pae-tell" when it actually is "Puh-tail". Born English speakers can easily pronounce this word, wonder why they don't.

[@EdwardLindon]

No one pronounces their name wrong.

[@adityasshukla]

@@EdwardLindon I guess you only speak English.

[@chrst7346]

@@EdwardLindon but many - especially Americans - spell their names wrong… 🤣 or at least those who name their kids in just any random ‚fancy‘ style

[@lorscarbonferrite6964]

I'm one of the people that does this (although my name technically isn't actually South Asian in origin). I also tend to anglicize almost all foreign words (ie. word that stray outside the American English phonetic inventory) to some degree if I'm speaking in English, even if I know how to pronounce them properly. It's just because switching to a drastically different phonetic inventory mid-sentence sounds too jarring to me. And it can be confusing to the listener if they aren't used to hearing those phonemes. Also nobody has any idea how to spell my name if I don't anglicize it.

[@adityasshukla]

​@@lorscarbonferrite6964 Valid point. Can you share your name if you don't mind?

[@ayy232]

As some Indians viewers have pointed out, British English "come" [kʌm] (or even American English [kəm]) is closer to the Indian pronunciation than "cam" or "calm".

[@zak3744]

Yeah, to my ears from Southern England, I hear the Tamil newsreader at 9:03 say something that sounds like /kʌməlɑː/ in terms of my own English vowels. So if I wanted to call the American army Humvee vehicle by it's nickname of "hummer", I could call it a "hummer car" and that would rhyme with what I'm hearing there for Kamala! But it seems interesting that for the public discussion about pronunciation options, it's concentrated on the first two vowels: the final vowel is forgotten. Maybe this is another example of Americans ignoring vowel length in their language!

[@lamudri]

But IIRC, Alastair doesn't have that vowel in his usual accent, and would use [ʊ] in “come”.

[@ayy232]

@@lamudri No he wouldn't. He does use the strut vowel in done, come, judge, etc, if anything tending in the direction of a schwa rather than a put vowel.

[@anonymoususer2756]

⁠​⁠@@ayy232Everyone has a STRUT vowel in “done”, “come” and “judge”. What you mean is that he pronounces those words with [ɐ~ə] and not [ʊ].

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

I had a section on that but I can't cover everything alas.

[@TerribleLotus]

I happen to have the same first name. I’ve gotten called Camel-a by many, many people for years and years. And Camilla. And Carmella. People frequently want to spell it with a C as well if I only say it and they need to write it. My parents were hippies so I use the koala rhyme pronunciation. But I will answer to anything similar sounding. And kids sang karma karma karma chameleon at me in elementary school. Only I thought until recently it was comma comma comma chameleon…

[@Mullkaw]

is your first name where the Lotus in your username comes from?

[@TerribleLotus]

@@Mullkaw yes! Also the terrible - a Finnish friend told me Kamala means horrible/terrible in Finnish !

[@sluggo206]

I thought it was "comma chameleon" too. I think it sounds that way to Americans.

[@watchp0int]

… i thought it was comma comma comma comma karma chameleon

[@consensuslphisk]

Until now I thought it was (be)come a, come a, come a, chameleon

[@VaebnKenh]

Okay. Big like for the "My Fair Lady" reference 😂 That was hilarious

[@cdsteig]

The rain from the plane falls mainly into Spain? Or was that the planar rain? Shouldn't there be a train? Or was it just a training montage?

[@bethhumphreys110]

Just needs a good ol' British "By George, she's got it!"

[@q-tuber7034]

Did Geoff suppress a bit of the audio to turn “I think she’s got it” to “I think he’s got it”?

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

@@q-tuber7034 Yes. Weak H-Drop means that we normally link 'he', 'him', 'her' etc. to a preceding word without the /h/ (give 'im my regards), so simply removing the 'sh' of 'she' does the trick.

[@myliwy]

And the ending! I adore your sense of humour

[@CrookedKnight-xl4nn]

Indian with knowledge of Sanskrit here. I have actually heard even Kamala saying her name wrong possibly to make it easier for native English speakers with too much stress on the first syllable. None of them are long syllables or stressed syllables in Kamala. Each of them sounds like the vowel ‘u’ in bruh’ or ‘o’ brother. Kuh-muh-luh sometimes in speech kuh-muh-laa. Kind of sounds like come-a-lot. Also, it is a soft unaspirated k like in kite, not the hard kh - or c in come. A lot of the ‘a’s in Indian names are actually like the last ‘a’ at the end of the word pasta. Same with the word karma. Both the ‘a’s are short English needs a lot more distinct vowels and consonants is all I can say :)

[@danielzhang1916]

everyone does that here, people can never say it right with Asian names

[@bletwort2920]

Hello, Indian with knowledge of Sanskrit. You're wrong. The final vowel is an open vowel, the first two are schwa.

[@CrookedKnight-xl4nn]

@@bletwort2920 there is no schwa in Indian languages. There short ‘a’ - अ and long ‘ā’ - आ. Short ‘a’ abounds like the ‘u’ in “run” and long ‘ā’ sounds sounds like the British pronunciation of ‘a’ in the word “bath” . All the ‘a’s in the word “Kamala” are short.

[@venumenon]

And the tragedy of it all is that a person with seemingly little knowledge of Indian languages, including Sanskrit, is analyzing a name that an audience including potentially 1.4 billion native speakers would know how to pronounce. That's the arrogance of the ignorant. Instead of asking a native speaker how the name should be pronounced, there are assumptions based on assumptions.

[@_skysick_]

Y'all she is not pronouncing her own name wrong. Pronunciations get English phonology in the speaking of English by an English speaker to an English audience.

[@fromchomleystreet]

It seems to me that a better way to conceptualise, for a speaker of Southern British English, some approximation of Harris’s pronunciation of her own name would be neither “comma-la” (too rounded) or “karma-la” (too long), but instead “cumma-la”

[@danielzhang1916]

that is the right way, it's not comma or karma, people are overthinking it

[@-SUM1-]

Just because American doesn't have phonemic vowel length, doesn't mean that phonetically their "ka" in "Kamala" (when stressed) isn't longer. It clearly is, as you can hear in the video.

[@dylanevans3237]

Good point. Especially in MLE (Multicultural London English), the vowel in "cut" can be almost identical to a general American "cot"/"father". But for some accents of Northern England, the "cot" vowel can be open enough to be close to the American pronunciation.

[@peterw29]

“comma-la” (too rounded), “karma-la” (too long), “cumma-la” (too short).

[@kennnesbitt]

Lovely that you wore a Dr. Seuss shirt for this video, given that the middle name of Theodor Seuss Geisel (AKA Dr. Seuss) was a German name pronounced "Zoice," not "Soose."

[@halfsourlizard9319]

If you want to indicate how something is pronounced, use IPA ... rather than some Latin-alphabet letters that are probably pronounced differently by other humans.

[@kennnesbitt]

​@@halfsourlizard9319 I would, but I get drunk if I "use" too much IPA. 😉

[@Thindorama]

​@@kennnesbitt lame pun. Though puns might not exist if we weren't allowed to say lame things.

[@kennnesbitt]

​@@halfsourlizard9319 zɔɪs, not sus. Better? 😋

[@hbowman108]

I remember once encountering the name "Suess Glacier" in Antarctica and was disappointed it wasn't named after Dr. Seuss. The glacier is named after a Swiss geologist pronounced like "Süss".

[@BooRadleyTube]

I was just thinking "Boy George was closest to getting it right" seconds before he appeared on-screen.

[@ElderUnikirin]

Australian here. I find it interesting how our vowel sounds for father/palm and gather/trap are closer to the English ones than Americans, but the way we (or at least I and people I know) pronounce some of those exotic words at 5:30 is a mix. eg. Yamaha has the gather/trap vowel like Panama. Slovak rhymes with Novak, with the gather/trap vowel, but then Slovakia would have the father/palm vowel.

[@dcseain]

Spanish has an outsize influence on American English, and many an Indian immigrant I've worked with has helped me learned the subtle differences between Indian and American vowels.

[@GinzaBear]

yes!! this is a phenomenon i would love to see properly documented. one way: the spanish influenced chicano accent influenced the california accent which then influenced all americans accents through movies!

[@modo2213]

But the Spanish influence on US English hasn't helped with pronouncing Spanish vowels has it? Consider how US English pronounces taco and salsa. See the video at 7:09 where he spliced an actual Mexican woman's taco vowel into the middle of "spectacular" as spoken byut Southern English woman. Yes, British English short /a/ is very close to the Spanish vowel. There is an influence in vocabulary, sure. But I can't hear Spanish influence on US English phonetics.

[@michaelnurge1652]

@@modo2213 Mexico is a very large country, with quite a few accents, and it's not the only Spanish-speaking country that people in the US come from... If you can't hear it, I would suggest you're not listening too well. But I'm just a native Californian living in a place where many people speak Spanish as their first language, so what do I know, right? My downstairs neighbor comes from Mexico city, and his wife doesn't speak English well. The "a" vowel is brighter than some might think but nowhere near the way most English people say it. __ By the way, around here, you don't pronounce "balm" to rhyme with "bomb". "Balm" rhymes with "palm" in / around the SF Bay area (same consonant cluster as you would use for an elm tree, in case I need to elaborate). Nor does "calm" use the same vowel as "comma" (same consonant cluster as elm, again). Bother and father don't quite rhyme to me when I say them but it's close enough you might not be able to tell from hearing me, similar to how if I say "clothes" really fast it might sound like "close". Closing with that song, too...when I was a kid I didn't realize he was saying the word "karma", and it just sounds like some filler before the word "chameleon" the way some songwriters do stuff.

[@Eronoc13]

@@modo2213 Dr. Lindsey almost always overexaggerates American vowel qualities, moving them further from those of the "foreign" words he claims that we "don't nativize" (which is an outsider's perspective, anyway; as far as we're concerned, at least us younger Americans, we're using _our_ native pronunciations, not performing a "strategy"). Look at the chart at 11:25, which records exact vowel qualities: While it's true that the pronunciation _Dr. Linsdey_ gives for standard American differs a lot from the Italian pronunciation of pasta, the graph shows the majority of the American speakers falling within the range of the Italian pronunciation- in fact, a greater proportion than of British speakers (I think! I'd love to see a formant-to-formant statistical analysis, because though I disagree with Dr. Lindsey on experience, it'd be cool to see clearer data and its analysis- he's the Doctor, not me). The same is true of "taco". The English /æ/ is not as closed (or fronted, often) as the American one, true, but the American /ɑ/ is more closed and fronted than the British, which makes it, in the realization of a lot of Americans, closer to the /a/ of a lot of Spanish speakers than the English get with /æ/. And I'm sorry, but why would this not be true? Despite being far from the border, I buy my taco ingredients _from Mexicans_ at my local, common, Hispanic market, and I've worked with Mexicans and Central Americans my whole working life; I'm very familiar with their pronunciation. Hispanics are the largest ethnic minority in the States, and they've been with us since just about the very beginning. 9 states - that's 18% - have Spanish names. Dr. Lindsey has a lot of good videos, but about this, he seems not only a little underinformed, but also biased.

[@rmdodsonbills]

@@modo2213 Perhaps it depends on what variety of US English you're hearing. To my ear (and where I live and have lived), American and Spanish pronunciations of taco and salsa are very similar to each other. In any case, it's a known phenomenon that it's difficult to hear phonemes that aren't a part of your native phonetic space.

[@catherinebutler4819]

I've always assumed that the English pronunciation of "Paris" wasn't primarily a case of assimilating the French pronunciation to English spelling, but the retention of an older (Norman) pronunciation. That 's' wasn't always silent.

[@allesindwillkommen]

I think the stress should be on the second syllable if it's the French way. In German, for example, you say "pah-REESS"

[@whocansay2215]

@@allesindwillkommenIndeed, but the stress could’ve shifted to the first syllable over time, as has it in other Norman/French borrowings.

[@MrAwawe]

Possibly, but the word has of course shifted along with English phonology; going through the great vowel shift and other large changes to English pronunciation over the centuries it has been a part of the language.

[@riptidemonzarc3103]

Funnily enough, when speaking English, Germans tend to 'overcorrect' how they say Berlin -- they pronounce it "BURR-lin", with a heavy long first syllable. When asked, they proudly say they do this to 'sound English', when precisely no English varieties pronounce it this way.

[@cantthinkofname4494]

​@@allesindwillkommen French has no stressed syllables within words, only within sentences or phrases (where the stress then falls on the final syllable). As you mentioned, while German (and also American English) speakers will stress the final syllable within French words, British English speakers stress the first, but neither is actually "correct", i.e. closer to the original French.

[@suvaissance]

Dr Lindsey I absolutely love your channel! ❤️ I am a Tamil woman. Ever since I watched “My fair lady” when I was six, I have been fascinated with phonetics and linguistics. I haven’t had the opportunity to study these subjects, but I pay a lot of attention to different sounds, syllables and stress while I run a music analysis channel. You make this a TON OF FUN. And that’s a lot of editing! As for “Kamala”, I say the following to Americans who are genuinely curious about how to say it: Kamala - is K without the aspirated force, then a short “uh” A tiny puff of air is of course unavoidable, but still try to keep that puff of air to a minimum. We have Kuh so far Then comes “muh” with a short uh. Then lah with a long “ah” as in “father” Kuh-muh-lah (for some reason, I’ve observed that Americans get the pronunciation right when you include a lot of ending h’s that don’t get pronounced 😊)

[@AmyAndThePup]

Oh wow. Thanks for this. We don't often have what other languages have--stress on the last syllable. Elite comes to mind, but that's one of only a few words. And in three-syllable words, I can't think of any where the last syllable is emphasized. I love linguistics. It's all so fascinating.

[@nikhilreddy8550]

As an Indian myself, I thought of the same thing and am glad you put it out. It's Perfectly described, if anyone is interested to learn the original pronunciation.

[@rexsceleratorum1632]

As a Malayali, that's a good description. Kamala herself is mispronouncing it from a Sanskrit point of view. kaah-muh-la sounds more like lust than lotus. Of course, in Malayalam the la in kamala is always short rather than long.

[@paradoxmo]

The reason adding h is helpful is because without the h it can be reduced to schwa when unstressed. Adding h precludes reduction by normal English spelling rules, even though the h is not pronounced.

[@suvaissance]

@@paradoxmo 👍👌

[@justalildream]

Native Tamil speaker here. The correct pronunciation for “கமலா” (Kamala) in English phonetics is: Ka-ma-lā Here’s a breakdown: • Ka: as in “cup” • ma: as in “mother” • lā: where the “lā” is pronounced with a soft ‘a’ like in “car,” and a slight emphasis on the ‘l’ sound.

[@xeji4348]

I would like to point out that your "English phonetics" aren't universal to all speakers because I don't pronouce ANY of the vowels you stated the way you described them. Either that, or you're not using the best words for examples 81524

[@user-je7gf5uc3c]

​@@xeji4348 If you know IPA I think it would be something like 'kɐ.mɐ.läː

[@user-je7gf5uc3c]

You can find the pronunciation at 9:04

[@microlambert]

As in cup, mother and car in whose accent? There is not one single way of pronouncing any of these sounds in English so at the very least you’d need to specify which accent you’re comparing to

[@bonecanoe86]

Instructions unclear, can't stop saying Kumalar now.

[@MM-jm6do]

Fascinating video! As an American I never would’ve foreseen the problem the British press might have with Kamala Harris’s name. For me, it’s a sign of respect to use the pronunciation people ask you to use, but it makes perfect sense that that doesn’t translate across accents!

[@hadayimosi]

_"For me, it’s a sign of respect to use the pronunciation people ask you to use..."_ How moral of you, as if we don't all do that.

[@softy8088]

It would be unreasonable to expect any English speakers to pronounce my native name according to its native pronunciation. Besides the quality of the vowels being outside of the normal English set (American or British) there is also a rolled R, which I've found many English speakers seem completely unable to pronounce. I use an Anglicized version just to make things easier.

[@sharonminsuk]

@@hadayimosi We definitely don't.

[@paradoxmo]

@@hadayimosi not only do many people not do it, some people are literally incapable of doing it

[@alanm6329]

@@hadayimosi not everyone does. Trump and most of the GOP seem to intentionally mispronounce her name, likely as a not-so subtle dig to imply she is "other."

[@ek-nz]

There are few people who could eek nearly 14 minutes out of the pronunciation of a single name, and fewer still who can make it so genuinely entertaining and educational. I teach, and I try to explain to my international students (and students with non-English names) that if we get their name wrong it’s not because we don’t care to learn how to say it, it’s just that the correct sounds don’t exist in our language and especially can’t be inferred from the spelling.

[@danielzhang1916]

if you have Chinese students, Wang and Zhang etc are more like Wahng and Zhahng (like gong or long)

[@delvida5592]

Eke

[@DeFaulty101]

I was going to dispute your claim about the perceived domesticity of a name effecting its pronunciation, but upon reviewing words and names whose first syllable ends in "a" + some nasal consonant, I wasn't able to find any evidence with which to contradict you. It's a pleasant reminder that our minds are capable of doing all sorts of things without our explicit awareness.

[@DeFaulty101]

@@halfsourlizard9319 You got me.

[@dereckhasken9055]

effecting not affecting - affect pertains to sensory (ie hearing - one of the 5 senses) while effecting is executive

[@terdragontra8900]

Even further, almost everything your brain does you don’t know about. And if we’re talking an emergent property of a huge amount of human brains? Even more so.

[@tanelihuuskonen2078]

@@dereckhasken9055 Actually, "affecting" is the correct word. "To affect" means "to influence; to have an effect on", while "to effect" means "to cause". (There are other meanings, but those are the most relevant here.) Just look them up if you don't want to take my word for it. It's a very confusing pair of similar words, because their meanings as verbs are not connected to their meanings as nouns in a straightforward way.

[@SJPYT]

0:58 You almost got it, I'd say it's good enough for a non-Indian. (I'm Indian and I routinely butcher English words with no one complaining about it). If you want to improve, make the first 'ka' a bit softer - you said it more like 'kha'. The last 'la' is distinguishable only for Indians - because we actually have two letters that are both written 'la' in English. The difference is where the tongue touches the upper palate in the beginning of the syllable. Move the tip of the tongue forward until it almost touches the base of your top row of teeth.

[@slypretenseofstumbling9529]

As someone who grew up on the west coast of the US of the US and moved to the east coast, I feel like there should be a follow-up to this video explaining why people like me and the vice president (who is also from the west coast) pronounce her last name more like 'hair-is' whereas the president (who is from the east coast) as well as brits such as yourself seem to pronounce it more like 'Ha-ris', with the 'a' sounding like 'cat' or 'bat'.

[@ulexite-tv]

Yep. Californian -- Hair-iss

[@woodfur00]

Is Hæris allowed in your phonology? It's not in mine, and I don't think I've heard many Americans who say any words like that. That would just make it a distinction we've lost and they haven't.

[@jlewwis1995]

​@woodfur00 Well by "in your phonology" do you mean can you physically say it? Because I can physically say Harris with an ae, fairly easily in fact, but that's not how I would normally say it, it just feels like doing an accent. Like I can say "car" in an Irish type accent with an ae too but that's even more cringe because obviously literally no american does that 😂

[@hbowman108]

Some people have more vowel distinctions before -r than the sixish in Generic American (nurse, hair, ear, fur, oar, tour). For instance, the marry/Mary/merry split. I tend to associate it with New York City and New England. They do it with "Harry" too, pronouncing it differently from "hairy" which I tend to notice. Some NYC people, especially older ones, even have a split in "oar": so if Donald Trump calls Stormi Daniels a horrible whore, the vowels don't match.

[@Amehtta]

Pretty sure this is related to the Mary/marry/merry merger gradient. Can’t remember if he has a video on it, but it’s one of the bigger east-west dialect differences in American English that a lot of people don’t pick up on if they’re from somewhere that’s partially or fully merged the three vowels

[@Bibbedibob]

Interestingly, in Hindi the name (कमला) has developed to drop the middle vowel, being pronounced more like Kamla.

[@absawa]

In Hindi both the middle and final vowels are dropped. A long a vowel was added to distinguish between masc Kamal and fem kamlaa.

[@capitalb5889]

And it's much easier to say! I will adopt this approach.

[@bletwort2920]

​​@@capitalb5889 Some English speakers also drops schwas for example in veg(e)table and comf(or)table. Hindi has a severe case of schwa deletion which is not indicated in writing.

[@purplemarsmotionpictures]

Interestingly enough, the name Kamala in Sanskrit is Kamalātmikā, which means the one who resides in a lotus flower; a name for the hindu goddess Lakshmi. Kamala is the diminutive version of that name. Today, the original pronunciation of the name is lost as sanskrit is a dead language. Instead, many of the state languages of India have their own pronunciation of the name. In hindi, the name is Koh-ml or Kah-ml; in punjabi the name is Km-a-lah; in Tamil Kaama-laah. On top of that there is the Urdu name Kamala, which most Americans know because of Kamala Khan from the MCU, which is a different name with its own etymology; Kah-Maa-Laa.

[@AWildBard]

Interesting! Thank you

[@speedwagon1824]

Original sanskrit pronunciation has been reconstructed tho

[@speedwagon1824]

No, kamalatmika is derived from "kamal", which was borrowed into sanskrit from Dravidian

[@ShivanshThakur-sh8ub]

​​@@speedwagon1824 not the tamil supremacists again. And wtf is a Dravidian? Dravid itself is a sanskrit word

[@ShivanshThakur-sh8ub]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/jZXHm42vm86pfqssi=vaz3t6sDjEOGaFpS This song will tell you how pronounce it, its very catchy.

[@thornton]

People are really insulting them in the comments for not speaking in American accents...? 🤔 In US coverage of the current UK PM, who has 3x r in his name, do they use the rhotic r or do they pronounce it the southern English way like most of our media? Trying to gaslight people in to believing that accents don't exist is a weird pass-time imo

[@BarunKharel]

As a South Asian, I can confirm that the Tamil news reporter at 9:04 pronounce it correctly (Ka-Ma-Laa, कमला in Devanagari). None of the pronunciation by English speakers are correct in the video 😄.

[@dino0228]

I usually Google the pronunciation of names I’m not familiar with, but she’s so famous that all I get is news about the pronunciation and mispronunciation of her name!

[@danielzhang1916]

the Brits are overthinking it, it's not comma or whatever, they see the K and get confused

[@weirdfish1216]

Totally agree. This video is kind of hilarious.

[@ostsan8598]

I think the point of the video is that even after you hear VP Harris pronounce her own name, it can still be difficult to match that pronunciation. Not every language, and not every dialect within a given language, has the same sounds to reproduce Kamala the way that she pronounces it.

[@JaakkoPaakkanen]

Actually, in 5:51 Kamala herself and Joe Biden pronounce the name differently in a way not pointed out here, and probably native English speakers don't even hear the difference. Kamala pronounces the second, unstressed 'a' as a vague /ə/ (schwa), while Joe Biden pronounces it as a more distinct short /a/. To a Finn this is significant, as the Finnish word "kamala" (= terrible) is pronounced more or less as Biden does in the clip, only with a softer /k/.

[@Plan-ETs]

Good catch

[@rmdodsonbills]

My brother tells the story of a British choir conductor instructing an American choir to "just sing it like you would normally say it: Alelluyer Amen" without even realizing that he was including an intrusive R. It can be very difficult to introduce phonemes from outside your own phonetic space, so, my advice is just to make a good faith attempt to get as close as you can and then quit worrying about it.

[@davidpaterson2309]

Re the “intrusive R”. This is mainly a southern English thing rather than “British” in general. So much so that we Scots find it weird that southern English people can find our “rolled” R exotically amusing yet seem incapable of pronouncing R when it appears in a word (it becomes a strangled “ahw” sound), but instead add it to words in which it doesn’t. IDEARR? Just bizarre (with two rolled Rs).

[@tommccanna7036]

This has reminded me of another linguistic example. In 1896, a British music journal included a joke about a choir singing the word "Alleluia", and the conductor telling them not to linger on the "lu". This only works as a joke if it's a pun on "loo", and thus is an early example in print of that particular slang word.

[@KamBha]

I have the male version of Kamala (Kamal) and I live in Australia . First day I went to Kindergarten, my Kindergarten teacher tried 3 times to pronounce my name and it always sounded like Carmel, eventually she pronounced it Ka-MHAL and that is the pronunciation I used when talking to native English speakers most of my life. As there were so few Indians in Australia during those years I was going to school, I never had any issues of people using the correct pronunciation inside of school and in social settings with predominantly native English speakers. That changed when I started going to uni and now have to deal with the confusion the two pronunciation can cause. Funnily enough, there is a B List celebrity in Australia called Kamahl who is Malaysian, but whose ancestry is Tamil who uses the same pronunciation my kindergarten teacher used, but spells it differently (and that name is a shortened version of his last name) and so I have the added confusion of the spelling not meeting people’s expectations. Despite that, many native English speakers in Australia still pronounce it like Ka-MHAL when they see the spelling. I guess that is the influence of Kamahl.

[@mvpfocus]

OK. So, how is it supposed to be pronounced?

[@mtarkes]

​@@mvpfocus Kumlah, with stress on the 'lah' is the most acceptable pronunciation in Northern India. The similar sounding Kum-uh-lah is the classic pronunciation is even more accurate especially since Harris's mother is of Tamil Brahmin origin, which is closer to the original Sanskrit pronunciation

[@mvpfocus]

@@mtarkes Kamal?

[@mtarkes]

@@mvpfocus kumla

[@KamBha]

@@mvpfocus If you are talking about my name, basically, say the ‘a’ as short as possible. Think about how you would pronounce kml.

[@LincolnDWard]

I don't think anyone in the US will get mad at Brits for using the "camel" pronunciation. We're familiar enough with British pronunciations that that basically sounds like the same word in a different accent.

[@MawcDrums]

I think the "tacko" part was a bit of a stretch. Every single mexican person I interact with calls them "TAH-CO" not "TACK-O"

[@george0t]

Many American accents I've been exposed to, particularly from the New England region and some Southern states, have the balm/bomb split and use distinct vowel sounds for each lexical set. The difference, at least to my ear, is that the rounded variant is usually not as rounded as it normally is in BE. And it's the same with many Canadian speakers - just listen to Jordan Peterson and the way he pronounces words like "job," "god," "lot," "adopt," and "obvious."

[@columbus8myhw]

("wovel" sounds?)

[@dylanevans3237]

Peterson is Canadian. Like most Canadians, he uses the same rounded vowel for "bomb" and the "father" lexical set. Boston-area accents often have that same rounded "bomb" vowel as Canadians, but more traditional R-dropping Bostonians merge the "balm/father" vowel with "arm/farther". Pittsburgh accents also use the rounded vowel for father/bomb like Canadians do (check out Pat McAfee for an example).

[@TheMister123]

The thing is, most South Asians with the name that is transliterated "Kamala" have a separate derivation entirely, and is pronounce it as "ke-MAH-la". Think Kamala Khan, the fictional Pakistani-American known as Ms. Marvel.

[@MaheshKumar-yj8nc]

That Kamala has different origins(maybe Urdu / Persian/ Arabic) than Kamala Harris name which has Sanskrit origin.

[@tp71000]

Indian here. (1)First KA in Kamala is pronounced like K at the end of many English words. It is receding, not ascending (if there is any such thing). Pronounce K as in WorK (it is not worKA) GeeK (not geeKA) MusK. (Elon Musk, not Elon MusKA) (2)Second MA is also pronounced as M at the end of many English words. M as in RaaM, AsyluM, atoM (not atoMA, asyluMA etc) (3)LA is pronounced correctly by everyone currently as intended by her mother

[@davelind4141]

thank you for including culture club, it was a cherry on top!

[@helloworld0911]

0:11 I would say Biden is a standard English name, his ancestor William Biden was born in Surrey.

[@Cayles764]

Biden is a rarer name than Harris or Bush though.

[@Aurora_Animates]

I live in Surrey and I’ve ever met a Biden in my life

[@capitalb5889]

​@@Aurora_AnimatesI haven't met one either, but it has a British feel to it.

[@valeriemacphail9180]

He claims to be lrish.

[@capitalb5889]

@@valeriemacphail9180 you can be Irish and have an English surname - it just means that you have relatives from multiple countries. Edit: ten of his 16 great great grandparents were Irish. The Biden surname comes from an immigrant who landed in 1820 from England. And also, Biden isn't Irish - he's American, as are all Americans.

[@MyNameIsNeutron]

You can sometimes spot American fans of British comedy online, when we spell Romesh Ranganathan's name "Ramesh."

[@ActuallyAnanya]

I mean I think that's just because Brits have been aware of him longer than US fans of British comedy. I'm British and my ethnicity is Indian. Ramesh a very common name in South Asia, it has a Hindu religious meaning to it, I even have an uncle named Ramesh and can name a few Ramesh-es off the top of my head. Romesh Ranganathan is the first Romesh I've personally ever known, but that spelling apparently is more common in Sri Lanka and West Bengal (in the latter's language, 'a' sounds are replaced with 'o' in most words). But because of the population disparities between India and Sri Lanka, you're much more likely to meet a Ramesh than a Romesh.

[@gyorkshire257]

I love this, it's kind of the "well it sounds like this to us in Spanish, so it must be the same in all languages".

[@johnnyvsx]

Wonderful video. I’m an American and just the other day a colleague of mine corrected my Ka ma la to Comma la. He even intentionally used the word ‘comma’ to indicate how to pronounce the beginning of her name.

[@bird4816]

Be a chad and keep saying it how you like

[@fly463]

Oh such an Ohio skibbidy Sigma you are ​@@bird4816

[@SnackMuay]

I saw this being discussed on twitter and I felt completely out of my depth trying to figure out if Brits pronouncing “comma” with their own accent would be accurate or not. It saddened me to think I’d never get your input on this topic but I should’ve known better 😂. Thanks for your consistently wonderful and informative videos.

[@oRevived]

Didn't except a new video so soon. What a pleasant surprise! :)

[@LividImp]

It's funny you used Karma Chameleon at the end there, because I remember when the song first came out, my American brain heard "Comma Chameleon" and thought, "that can't be right, I must be mishearing that."

[@MisadelphiaSAR]

I think one thing that you touched on briefly but didn't go into detail on is that most (but not all) dialects of American English tense the /æ/ to [eə] before nasals and the letter R, which makes them more likely to use the "exotic" [ɑ] in such cases. [keəmələ] would be pretty far off from [kɑmələ], while [kæmələ] is sufficiently close. Same is true of Mario: [meəɹiow] would be pretty far off from [mɑrio] so most Americans say [mɑɹiow]. [mæɹiow], as British people say, isn't as far off. But not all American dialects do this: New York, for example, retains the historic /æ/ in words like camel and manager, so plenty of New Yorkers say [kæmələ] (such as Alan Lichtman and Bernie Sanders). And of course plenty of New Yorkers (such as Mario Cuomo) say [mæɹiow]

[@anonymoususer2756]

Correct. Slight nitpick though. Even though the TRAP vowel in British English is commonly transcribed /æ/, that vowel is actually pronounced more like [a]. The GOAT vowel is also usually [əw].

[@jenniferofholliston5426]

I didn’t think you could make a whole video about how to pronounce Kamala, but you did, and it is interesting!

[@SK-ou4gt]

and the frickwad never pronounced it the Indian way, although he links to an Indian newsreader (a pretty one, to boot) saying it.

[@PM-ut6sy]

@13:20 you had it coming :D

[@chegeny]

Excellent information, Dr Lindsey. With names, I always attempt to pronounce it the way they would prefer it pronounced..

[@kjh23gk]

Yep, this is really the only correct answer when it comes to proper nouns. It's disrespectful to insist on any other pronunciation. Same goes for transliteration.

[@Kattbirb]

@@chegeny I also saw that episode of Star Trek. 😉

[@KevinVinck]

American here. I never realized until this video that I pronounce bond the financial instrument like "bahnd" but Bond as in James Bond as "bawnd". Also interesting that we're still taught here (at least when I was in elementary school in the 90s) that the a in father is 'long' and the a in cat is 'short', even though the difference here is in quality not length.

[@rantingrodent416]

Huh. I'm trying to think of a single fellow Canadian I know personally that pronounces any of those words the same way as Donald Sutherland does in this clip and I don't think I've ever heard it happen. All of those words use the father vowel in my experience. Maybe because he's from New Brunswick.

[@rantingrodent416]

Actually on second thought, this clip might be him trying to put on an American accent. This is the kind of (incorrect) modification that Canadians would usually make when impersonating certain American accents.

[@rp1692]

Or because he's an older speaker (b. 1935 and recently deceased)?

[@WolfdogLinguistics]

Are you a younger speaker? I agree with rp1692 that there have tended to be a lot of shifts in Canadian accents in speakers born since the 1980s.

[@rantingrodent416]

@@WolfdogLinguistics Yeah born in the early 80s, but I'm not just referring to my own peers.

[@digitaljanus]

​@@rp1692 ​Yeah, I'm thinking that as well. He would have grown up in an era when Canada wasn't quite as saturated by mainstream US audio-visual culture and it would have been less influential on his speech. I went to watch a clip of him from the 1980 film Ordinary People and he definitely had the accent you often hear from older Canadians.

[@chriflu]

What I really like about Dr Lindsey's videos is how well he describes principles that, in fact, apply to all languages. Take the words "bungalow" and "tupperware" that are English loanwords in German. In line with Dr Lindsey's earlier videos, it could be argued that the stressed vowel in these words is a "stressed schwa sound" - which does not exist in German phonology, regardless of regional accent. However, these words have been "nativized" differently in German and Austrian Standard German as opposed to Swiss Standard German. The Germans and Austrians pronounce them as though they were German words spelt "Bangaloh" and "Tapperwär". In Swiss Standard German (I'm not talking about the dialects here, just the Standard German accent!) it's "Böngaloh" and "Töpper". Now, one of the explanations given for this difference in pronunciation is usually that Swiss German is heavily influenced by French and we got our English loanwords via French. However, I think there is a much simpler explanation: Whenever Germans or Austrians make fun of the Swiss accent, our broad and dark "ah" sound is part of it. In fact, a Swiss German "a" is much worse of an approximation to the English stressed schwa than a German or Austrian "a" - while the quite open Swiss "ö" comes closer, unlike the quite closed German and Austrian "ö". So every variety of German settled on pronouncing the stressed schwa in English loanwords with the vowel that comes closest to that stressed schwa in their accent - which is "a" in German and Austrian Standard German, but "ö" in Swiss Standard German.

[@komfyrion]

Interesting! In Norwegian we pronounce it as though they were Norwegian words spelled "bøngalåo" and "tøpperwer"/"tøpperver" (although many pronounce it in a non-Norwegian way, with an American English r at the end). Seems similar to the Swiss.

[@thirteenthhour370]

Good disrinction! I was aware of long and short vowel distinctions because of the city Tokyo, which in Japanese is more of a "To::kyo::" and in America is, bizzarely, "Toe-kee-oh" . Putting aside the "kee-oh" instead of "Kyo" (idk how that happened) the Japanese "Toh" is much longer than the American "Toe", and Japanese does distinguish between a long and short "o" sound. But changing the spelling creates such strange vowel results that there's no good solution to show that longer vowel in American English. Toukyou? Tookyoo? Tohkyoh???? It's the same problem for the baseball player Otani Shohei which should be long "O-tani Sho-hei:" I think the media went with "Shohei Ohtani" in the end. All that aside, I had never considered that the A and O meant linguistically differentiated vowel sounds in British English. To an American it's like the caught-cot vowel, which is merged for me---suddenly all the weird spelling, the "ou" and "ough" and "bomb" esists for a reason. Insane stuff.

[@wlritchi]

I think the reason America pronounces Tokyo that way is at least in part because there's no native use of the "ky" consonant cluster, so the default reading is to assume the Y must be a vowel. There's lots of examples like that at the end of native words, like lucky or picky. Americans might be convinced to get the vowels right (if not the stress) by re-parsing it something like "toke-yo" - but that's still quite unintuitive as a native speaker.

[@woodfur00]

Americans don't even know _how_ to observe a vowel length difference without a perceived syllable or word boundary, it doesn't matter how many extra letters you write it with. You could maybe exploit the syllable boundary thing with semivowels, "silent" h's, or apostrophes. Towokyo'o

[@hbowman108]

English doesn't allow the ky consonant cluster except in the GOOSE and CURE lexical sets such as the words "cue" and "cure". Many early sources spelled it "Tokio" and people naturally read that as three syllables as [tɔwkijɔw] The difficulty in differentiating short and long O in English is why Hepburn Romanization uses a macron: Tōkyō.

[@sluggo206]

English speakers (or maybe just Americans) have difficulty with y in unfamiliar positions. Spanish "tiempo" is "TYEMP-o" but in Americans' mouths it becomes "tee-YEMP-o, and likewise words like "ciencia" ("see-ENCE-ya" come out as "see-ENCE-ee-ya". Tokyo and Kyoto are the same, three syllables instead of two.

[@hbowman108]

I only recently found out that British people don't merge caught with thought. And I'm a USAn with a cot-caught split.

[@Maha_s1999]

Can I give this video 3 thumbs up? Very accurate pronunciation of "pasta" in Italian - it feels so good to hear it pronounced correctly 🙂 As always, Dr Lindsey is exceptional in making links with phonetics and linguistics across time and space. Outstanding stuff.

[@contrl31]

Relatedly, there is a funny thing I've noticed - many American English speakers say the endings of "KazakhstAn" and "TaiwAn" with different vowels (-/æn/ and -/ɑn/), which are pretty much swapped compared to their native pronunciations

[@paradoxmo]

The Mandarin pronunciation of Taiwan is more like /an/, which is not a terminal sequence in English phonology. /ɑn/ is closer and is the standard American English pronunciation (LOT) and also approximately the SSB pronunciation (PALM).

[@hbowman108]

@@paradoxmo I would argue that the fronted LOT [lät] with the "German A" is more generically American than [lɑt] which is more East Coast or Canadian. This is final in "neutron" or "Klingon". Putonghua -an final is more fronted, like British TRAP vowel followed by N [an]. Strong contrast with -a. Our closest approximation to that would be with our TRAP vowel [æn] like "man" or "Japan".

[@paradoxmo]

@@hbowman108 I would argue that it’s more important to have the same level of openness than the same approximate level of frontedness, as far as differentiating the vowels goes. I don’t think most mandarin speakers would identify /tʰaɪwæn/ as 台灣 (Pinyin taiwan), it would sound more like 泰文 (taiwen). But /wɑn/ or /wän/ really could only be interpreted as 灣 (wan).

[@artugert]

You’re saying Taiwanese pronounce the country’s name with an “ash” sound? I think it is a more open vowel, but it may become more near-open sometimes by some speakers, somewhere in between the two, but not quite an “ash” sound.

[@hya2in8]

I can't speak to Hokkien but Mandarin /a/ is definitely more like [a] or [ɑ] than [æ] or [ɛə̯]

[@RaphaelBriand]

I grew up in the UK with a foreign (French) name, and there's a pretty straightforward nativised pronunciation with an inserted y sound which isn't quite like the French pronunciation. But it never even occurred to me to "correct" people or that they were saying it "wrong". As Goeff says, it's like expecting Americans to say Bond with an English accent every time. Nativising is completely natural and this scramble to work out the "correct" pronunciation of Kamala bemuses me. Unless you're Indian, you won't get it exactly right anyway. In fact, Ms Harris herself will be saying it with sone degree of American nativisation. I'm planning on saying Kamala like llama, with the stress on the middle syllable, because that's what's most natural for me - would that be rude or inconsiderate?

[@fromchomleystreet]

Sometime you need to tackle the vexed issue of how an American “should” pronounce the name of the Australian city Melbourne. The typical American pronunciation is highly controversial amongst Australians, and it’s a great window into a wider philosophical question: where does the line fall between (a) “correctly”pronouncing a word of which people with an accent different to your own feel a sense of ownership, and (b) mimicking their accent.

[@209PH]

I think, at the very least, it is reasonable for Americans to pronounce the in "Melbourne" even though Aussie's wouldn't.

[@hbowman108]

Simple: the same way Americans pronounce the Melbourne on the Space Coast. And Cairns is not pronounced "cans". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne,_Florida

[@fromchomleystreet]

@@hbowman108 Melburnians (yes, the “u”, rather than the intuitive “o”, is somehow the orthodox spelling for reasons lost to time) will fight you if you attempt to pronounce the name of their beloved city in any way other than “Mel-b’n”. Any American pronouncing Cairns as “cans” is probably responding to Australians “correcting” them, and attempting to approximate what they hear Australians doing. The American “cans” is phonetically closer to the Australian “cairns” than the American “cairns” is, because of the non-rhoticity of Australian English and the fact that the American “a” leans closer to a long Australian “e”

[@_oaktree_]

Can confirm as an American living in Canada, most anglophone Canadians say "pasta" the English way, not the American way.

[@LimitPotential]

I don't know how/whether stress manifests similarly in Indian languages (my experience is that it doesn't), but for my family members and other Indians named Kamala, the first two syllables have exactly the same "short a" vowel (I'd use [ʌ]), and the third has the "long aa" That's of course aside from Harris's own expectations, with her having grown up in the US (and to what degree among the Indian diaspora I don't really know)

[@timothystamm3200]

Well her mother's side is of Indian Subcontinent ancestry. Her father's side is of the Jamaican part of the African Diaspora due to enslavement and the slave trade. Her father is an emeritus at Stanford so South San Francisco Bay area. Probably pretty cosmopolitan though I think her parents are both first generation immigrants.

[@JCWiley2300]

Han Solo gets the Taco Treatment! 🤣 so lovely

[@Ficalos]

You show the clip of Donald Sutherland using the "nativized" pronunciations at 6:40 as an example of the distinction between US and Canadian accents, but I (American) hear it more as a generational/era thing and perhaps a class/education thing. I think of US soldiers (generally lower class) fighting the actual Nazis in the 1940s having pronounced it like in that scene, and maybe the same for Vietnam later on. Think Brad Pitt in Inglorious Basterds. It's associated with southern accents too, although not exclusively. I associate the "nativized" soft-A pronunciation, which I use personally, with younger or perhaps more college-educated people. I do agree that there is a kind of performance to the whole thing, trying to sound sensitive to other cultures but only going halfway. Today I associate those pronunciations with the speaker wanting to convey a certain old school American-ness and perhaps a disdain for the subject. Funny enough, I think actual Vietnamese people say it like the "wrong" American pronunciation. Someone knowledgeable about Vietnam correct me on that if it's wrong.

[@everettgiesbrecht779]

Agreed - I’m Canadian, and I never hear anyone pronounce those words like Sutherland in the clip, except for maybe the odd 70 year from a small town, or someone doing a hillbilly type voice as a joke

[@hydencp]

I love your rhotic pronunciations and how deliberate they feel.

[@jeff__w]

4:51 “…if an exotic word has a stressed letter _a,_ then that _a_ should be pronounced with the American vowel of _father_ and _palm,_ and not with the American vowel of _gather_ and _trap_ and _MAGA,_ which is now felt to be somehow too American.” And then there’s the name of _Copenhagen,_ the second-to-last syllable of which also gets the taco treatment: Americans seem to like to pronounce it as “hah-gun,” possibly because it supposedly sounds more “authentic”-even though the actual Danish name, _Köbenhavn,_ doesn’t really resemble it-the last part of which sounds (roughly) more like _hound_ without the _d_ - _and_ which, reputedly, the Danes themselves avoid when speaking English because it sounds like the German word for and pronunciation of the capital.

[@IsaVarg]

Although I've never personally heard the reasoning for it being related to German, I can confirm, anecdotally, that a lot of Danes (including my own partner) say "hay-gun" rather than "hah-gun".

[@wlogan2000]

I suspect the "hah-gun" pronunciation of Copenhagen is more recent than the "hay-gin" pronunciation. My guess is that people have borrowed it from the pronunciation of Häagen-Dazs.

[@jeff__w]

@@wlogan2000 That occurred to me, too, _except_ that there’s the musical number “Wonderful Copenhagen” from _Hans Christian Andersen,_ with the “hah-gun” pronunciation, which precedes the popularity of Häagen-Dazs by more than two decades. (The pseudo-Scandinavian name _Häagen-Dazs,_ dreamed up by Jewish-Polish immigrants from Brooklyn to give the ice cream a kind of Danish panache and meaningless in any language, except possibly that of marketing, is a linguistic story in itself-and, of course, gets the same kind of taco treatment. Come to think of it, maybe the causal relationship goes the _other_ way.)

[@jeff__w]

@@IsaVarg I found just a few vague comments online so it’s good to get some real-world confirmation, even if only anecdotally. 👍

[@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410]

no American pronounces it "hah-gun" with a straight face unless they've never heard somebody say the word. It's pronounced 'hay-gin' (hard G) more accurately in American English

[@iagreewithyou4328]

In languages that exhibit schwa deletion, the pronounciation would be "Kamla" which is not correct. The correct pronounciation would be as pronounced by speakers of any one if India's classical languages (except Odia). Namely Sanskrit, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu or Malayalam. The IPA for this would be /kɐmɐlɑː/. Plain and simple. No other pronounciation is fit to be termed "accurate" or "true to its origin" by any means. P.S: Some people seem to confuse /ɐ/ with a schwa, which it isn't. /ɐ/ is a near open central vowel and is more open than a schwa. The schwa appers as a pronounciation only in schwa deleted languages. In those which don't exhibit this phenomenon (barring Odia, which makes the sound rounded), the most basic vowel is /ɐ/, which comes as an inherent part of any alpha-syllable in the brahmic script family.

[@ninadgadre3934]

I don’t understand why the pronunciation isn’t “correct” in schwa deletion languages if the word is native to that indic language. In Hindi/marathi, the pronunciation is “cum-lah” (with the L doing a retroflex lateral flap in Marathi), and you’d be amiss to say hundreds of millions of people are saying a word incorrectly. Language at its core is made up anyways. Would you say all languages that are not Tamil or Sanskrit are “untrue” because they are different from the original languages?

[@zenosAnalytic]

your cheeky editing jokes are always fun, but this one was a masterpiece uwu uwu

[@josefinaenfedaque9229]

The end clip killed me!!! Fantastic explanation - and a true ear-opening experience for a 5-vowel Spaniard native speaker.

[@lanasinapayen3354]

Geoff, have you seen Randy Rainbow's old video, a parody of Kaamelot but with "Kamala" Edit: wow, none of the commenters has watched the video apparently...

[@ulexite-tv]

I remember it -- "KAMALA! - A Randy Rainbow Song Parody" -- and it is brilliant.

[@sluggo206]

Nope, haven't heard of Randy Rainbow.

[@gerardacronin334]

@@sluggo206 He is incredibly talented. And Rainbow really is his last name.

[@nlpnt]

And the Trump clip repeated in there proves that he did pronounce her name correctly at least once.

[@webbess1]

Very interesting! I've heard Brits say that they cannot always tell the difference between an American saying "can't" and an American saying "can," because most American accents use the same "a" in both of those words. Whereas, for example, in Modern RP, you would say, "can" and "cahn't," so making very different "a" sounds.

[@Ardub23]

Lindsey covered the "can"-"can't" pronunciation distinction in another video, which I found quite interesting: kzbin.info/www/bejne/p53FeKd7nJtrrpY

[@anidnmeno]

American accents can be wild! I pronounce "can" like "kn" usually in normal speech. "I kn getchu at eight"

[@anidnmeno]

sometimes i even soften it to a g sound "awggn getchu addeight"

[@sluggo206]

Lindsey's "can" and "can't" video says English speakers tend to unstress the positive words and reduce the vowel, whereas in the negative words they don't. I think Americans do that too. (I'm American.) (And "can't" can't be reduced because it would sound like an offensive word.)

[@johnnye87]

I think Geoff has a video on that somewhere. It's more than just the vowels, Americans often drop the t in can't as well! Something like "I can't help it" will come out like /aɪ kaːn hɛlp ɪt/ - the only way to tell that it's "can't" is that "can" would be reduced to /kən/.

[@LearnRunes]

Is it more important to respect an individual by compelling others to say their name correctly or to tolerate linguistic diversity by not expecting anyone to be able to say sounds they're unfamiliar with accurately?

[@SomeoneBeginingWithI]

I think you should get as close as you can to the way a person pronounces their own name using the sounds you're able to reliably pronounce. If you're having to concentrate on pronunciation every time you say a name, that adds social friction which isn't helpful. But you should try to get reasonably close to the correct pronunciation and not just give up because a word is foreign. The American way of pronouncing foreign A sounds really irritates me because it can come up with a pronunciation that's unnecessarily far from the original. See also Beiden's pronunciation of Rishi Sunak. Sunak grew up in the UK, his name already has an anglicised pronunciation which is the one he uses and isn't at all difficult for English speakers to say. There's no need to deviate from that just because the word is unfamiliar.

[@nigeladams8321]

You should try to say someone's name the way they say it, if you're reading it then it's fine to guesstimate

[@ooglyboogliee6653]

Really cool video! I have a video suggestion: I hear a lot of native speakers say "I wish you would have told me" but I think that's technically not correct; it's actually "I wish you had told me". There must be some kind of reason why natives find "I wish you would have told me" to be more natural (despite being technically incorrect), because otherwise they wouldn't be saying it. I feel like there's some kind of small nuance in saying "would have" instead of "had," but I can't quite explain it. Maybe it's expressing that you wish someone had the intent of telling someone, kind of like the way "would" in "I wouldn't tell you" is used, and the single word "had" just doesn't encapsulate it in the same way. Anyway I think it would be a really interesting video

[@anonymoususer2756]

I think it’s because if you wish you HAD done something, then you already would have done it. If you went up to a genie and wished that you WOULD HAVE done something, he would snap his fingers and go “there, now you WOULD HAVE done it”, and nothing will have changed.

[@gyorkshire257]

This is a question of dialect and register. Standard English grammar, which is what you get taught if you are not a native speaker, usually mandates the past perfect (had done) as the verb form used for the causal clause in a third conditional sentence, and the past conditional (would have done) for a consequence of this: If you'd told me you were coming, I would have made a cake. This first causal use is then extended to past subjunctive forms expressing desire If only I'd bought a house in 2005. I wish he had spoken to his mother. However, in reality, in spoken English many dialects use "would have" in both positions, though usually shortened to 'd've' or even just 'd'a'. So of I were speaking, even in quite formal situations, I might say: If you'da told me you were coming, I'da made a cake. If only I'da bought a house in 2005. The 'da' here is grammatically a contraction of "would have" but most people don't really think of it that way and in England it is rare for people to write this or even pronounce the full "would have". In fact the full "would have" rather than 'da' pronunciation often indicates irritation, and that is when it is most often written down. However, in US English subjunctive forms using "would have" are quite common in writing too, and would probably be considered correct. I suspect that given this "would have done" subjunctive is present in almost every dialect, the rule that we should really use the past perfect is quite recent, and the Americans are closer to original English usage. If I had to bet it would be that English grammarians copied this rule from French, as a lot of English grammar rules were just made up by some guy in 1780 (fewer/less, no split infinitives, never end a sentence with a preposition). French example: Si tu m'avais dit que tu arrivais, j'aurais fait un gateau. had told would have made

[@mvpfocus]

@@gyorkshire257 Interesting write-up. But it definitely would have been a bad idea to buy a house in 2005, as that was the height of the market. It would be nearly two decades before prices would even approach those levels again.

[@gyorkshire257]

@@mvpfocus That depends where you are, in the UK the height came in 2007, and the crash started in 2008.

[@mvpfocus]

​@@gyorkshire257 It's very true that location determines the specificity of that information. Yet, the prices were already high in 2005 in the UK as well, to where hindsight wouldn't have suggested such a purchase. A great time to buy _in the UK_ would have been between 2000 and 2002. The prices _in the UK_ really took off in 2003 and 2004. While the height was 2007, there wasn't anywhere near as much increase between 2005 and 2007. But just to clarify, the US market had a quite similar trajectory, as the crash was also in 2008. Still, it wouldn't have been a good idea to buy in 2005, in the US or the UK.

[@DaWorldGuardian001]

so to clarify, the first syllable of her name would be closer to /kɐ/ than /kɑ/ or /ka/, right?

[@quain5063]

Yes in most Indian languages and that's the Sanskrit pronunciation.

[@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410]

/ɑ̈/ would be a better vowel to use because we're talking about an American English speaker's name, but if /ɐ/ is closest for you then that works

[@DaWorldGuardian001]

@@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410 Yea, as a Lithuanian speaker, /ɐ/ is a sound I'm better familiar with.

[@andrewclarke5989]

It's amazing how your videos turn things I already felt on an intuitive level into things I can think about now. Like confirmation bias but good lol

[@ltgerbilmuffin]

You know it wouldn't be the worst choice for South English speakers to use a strut vowel on the first a. That's almost where Alistair has landed in your last sample. A shortened a in a lot of languages (and to my ear, the Tamil speaker earlier) lands somewhere in the strut zone.

[@fromchomleystreet]

I agree. It’s much closer to Harris’s own pronunciation of her name than any of the alternatives. “Cumma-la”

[@RockTheBass]

I was NOT expecting that ending! 😂

[@angeleno12]

My "strategy" is to listen to how a person pronounces her or his own name and come as close as I can. I call it "manners."

[@gyorkshire257]

well, believe it or not, that is everybody in the video's strategy too. If only you had watched it.

[@samylemzaoui2298]

as a french guy its always funny to see the gymnastics english people need to go through to know where to put the stressed syllable or which "version" of the vowel you should use. in french its extremely rare that a string of letters can be pronounced 2 different ways, it only happens when you choose a string that sits between two seperate groups of letters

[@VivekNa]

Except in French HORS D' OUEVRE is pronounced "or diov" or something

[@samylemzaoui2298]

@@VivekNa ho always makes an "o" sound, r is r, s at the end of a word is silent (unless the word comes from a different language or something but its rare), d is d, œu always makes a french "e" sound, v and r are normal and e at the end of a word is never pronounced unless theres an accent on it. if you know french prononciation rules you literally cant mispronounce it. you cant do that in english

[@EdwardLindon]

@@samylemzaoui2298 "If you know french prononciation rules you literally cant mispronounce it." This is true by definition: if you know the rules of anything, you can follow the rules of anything, English pronunciation included. (It's just that the rules might be incredibly complicated.) But I suspect you're making a point about relative phonetic consistency, and it's always been my impression that French is only moderately phonetically consistent, less than Spanish or Italian or Greek, but more than English.

[@paradoxmo]

@@EdwardLindon well, what’s different from French is that English pronunciation rules are actually several different sets of rules, one for English/Germanic words, one for Latin/Greek words, one for French words, and one for modern loan words (as described in this video). also, spelling was frozen in the Middle Ages. French by contrast has kept their spelling reformed so that for most French words, there is at least a one way mapping from orthography to pronunciation. Unfortunately the same phonemes can result in a ton of different possible spellings, but it’s still miles better than English where even which phoneme a letter represents is often in question.

[@sans_hw187]

@@EdwardLindon here the main thing is that French lacks both lexical stress and long vowels, so French speakers don’t need to ask themselves how “Kamala” is pronounced, only one single option exists

[@MJW173]

GREAT ENDING

[@peteck007]

Fantastic video. Thanks for sharing the nuances in the speech and words that we talk. There's so much in those spoken words but a lot of people don't realise it.😅😂

[@djb903]

I love your videos, great use of clip gag humor and educational and interesting

[@user-xe7oh6fu1s]

It's parallel with the ways people pronounce 'Canada'. In English the stress syllable falls on the first, but in French the last.

[@plusquamfuturum]

And in Russian, it's in the middle.

[@conradkleiner9409]

French is stressless, it would only fall on the last vowel in French if it was at the end of a spoken phrase, but then like any word. Referencing stress in French is useless

[@user-xe7oh6fu1s]

@@conradkleiner9409 Also in Spanish & Portuguese "Canadá" is stressed on the last. In Italian it seems both "Cànada" and "Canadà" exist.

[@user-xe7oh6fu1s]

@@plusquamfuturum Yes, and it's the same in some Eastern European languages.

[@jikiajikia]

In Georgian, we pronounce "Canada" as [ˈkʼänädä], with a stressed first syllable and an ejective /k/ sound.

[@Cherodar]

I'm a native speaker of American English who has always distinguished father/bother and other such pairs--I'm still slightly disturbed that so many don't (not disturbed because I'm saying it's "wrong," but just because I hadn't noticed it about the people surrounding me when I was younger, and for me it elides some important distinctions). I still find it weird that for Americans and Brits alike, what I'd call the "simple short A," a plain あ, doesn't seem to exist when I feel like it's the most fundamental, most unmarked vowel sound that the mouth can make. I guess "between A and O" does end up being the best way to describe it, at least in American terms, and I don't fault anyone for pronouncing it in a way that does fit their native accent, without importing other sounds to stretch the way they naturally talk. But I still can't shake my instinctive disappointment (even though I know that would make me a terrible linguist) when what seems like the most ordinary sound (I know there's no such thing!) seems to be out of reach, and Americans turn them all into "aw" or something like that.

[@Ts-fp5sd]

Japanese American?

[@Cherodar]

@@Ts-fp5sd I am, yes.

[@jonadams8841]

Hi Dr Geoff - Your recent videos have made me think about how words are pronounced in Spanish and Japanese. I learned Hirigana many years ago, and was impressed with that set of phonemes. I had many years of Spanish, and live in the US Southwest, so Spanish is pretty common. I will pronounce the same word in two different ways, depending on the situation. There are nuances in the Spanish that I don't use in English, like syllable accent, and not dropping letters. It's pretty weird!

[@ela83a]

If she wins it will be easy enough to say President Harris.

[@StormyDay]

@@ela83a yes I don’t think it would be proper to call her Kamala.

[@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648]

@@StormyDay It would depend on context; informal fans would still say Kamala (as informal fans of Trump would say Donald).

[@baronderochemont8556]

God forbid.

[@bird4816]

Tyrant is even easier to say

[@woodfur00]

Would RP /ʌ/ be a good approximation British speakers would be familiar with?

[@fuckdefed]

The sound of the first syllable of ‘Kamala’ in the video is either the same as FATHER or the American BOTHER or very close to that, the comments about it being ‘COME-a-laaa’ with the first 2 syllables the same make me suspect that some Indians use a stressed schwa (Geoff Lindsay rightly believes in the existence of these) for the first syllable rather than the CUT vowel

[@209PH]

I think it would, probably the closest in RP native phonemes to Harris's California-accented pronunciation, though it obviously wouldn't work for Northern and Midlands English. The problem is that pronouncing a written as /ʌ/ is incredibly counterintuitive for any English speaker!

[@anonymoususer2756]

Yes. In Sanskrit the vowel is [ɐ], which is basically the same quality as a contemporary British STRUT vowel realisation. I don’t think any contemporary accents of English have a true back [ʌ] in STRUT, nor was it ever that back in RP. True [ʌ] would make words like “strut”, “fun” and “jump” sound more like “strot”, “fon” and “jomp”. [ɐ~ə] is a much, much more common realisation.

[@timothynoll4886]

The cut to Karma Chameleon at the end was the icing on the cake for me. Very interesting analysis (as always)! I personally go for something like, "kuh-mah-luh," with emphasis on the second syllable. I'm quite sure exactly how to phonetically spell it out but that's pretty close. (As a side note, I am in a vacuum and never really heard many people pronounce her name when I chose how I would say it).

[@abdulrahimanpalakkal5377]

I don't know much about phonetics , but as someone from the part of the world that speaks the word , the difference i felt is not just about the first two "a" s, but the the way "Ka" is pronounced , it seems that whenever english speakers say her name , theres a hint of either a "ha" - ( like it sounds to me like - Khamala) OR a hint of ya ( for me it sounds like "Kyamala" or more often, both - "khyamala") maybe actively try not pronounce either this "ha" nor "ya" while saying "Ka" of "Kamala". And yeah for the "a" s , i would say the first two are comparatively short and the last one is longer , specially if you are calling the person by that name (sounds like "hey kamalaa"). thats not a fixed rule though , I've heard natives use the last "la" as both "la" and "laa". - in "kamalaa" - each "A" can be said as to take roughly 1.5 x longer time than the consonants "K", "M", and "L". It is worth to note that many Indian languages ( like Sanskrit , Hindi , Malayalam etc ) have different "ka" or "K" consonants. ( Ka, Kha, ga, gha ) and often the words "Kamala" or "Kamalam" starts with the first one "Ka"