Comment by gerdesj

5 days ago

Erdős

I was told by a hungarian, that hungarian written spelling and spoken pronunciation is pretty precisely aligned compared to, say, english. Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random!

Why not do the bloke the decency to spell his name correctly? Those diacritics are important.

Anyway, I was told that Paul's name is very roughly pronounced by an anglophone as: "airdish".

19 comments

gerdesj

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mjcohen  5 days ago

(I saw this on a math department bulletin board about 1960)

A theorem both deep and profound States that every circle is round But in a paper by Erdos Written in Kurdish A counterexample is found

  • ChicagoBoy11  4 days ago

    I suspect there is a great joke embedded in here, but sadly it went over my head. Any help?

    • gerdesj  3 days ago

      Erdős rhymes with Kurdish.

      EDIT: Oh and Erdős was the great collaborator. There is an Erdős number (Bacon and Ozzie too) which defines how close you are to him. eg if you co-authored a paper with Erdős you have a Erdős number of one. If you co-auth a paper with someone with an Erdős number of one, then you have an Erdős number of two etc.

      I think that the Bacon (Kevin Bacon) number was the original and there is also a Black Sabbath number which is related to Ozzie (MHRiP).

      I also gather that a very few people have managed a minimum measure of all three numbers. Feynman might be one of them (its too late to check).

perching_aix  5 days ago

Ő is just œ (oe), nothing crazy. Certainly not a scenario that would belong to the quirky category.

The only weird ones I can think of are the ones that end in -y. For example, Görgey. They're meant to be -i endings. They signify a noble lineage (or at least used to).

I guess "ch" might also show up every now and then too (it's just "cs", just like "ch" in English). For example, Széchényi.

Since this is a compsci forum to some extent, maybe I should also mention that the so-called Lanczos-interpolation is "actually" Lánczos. Took even me a while to pick up on that one! Thinking about it, I now see that it features a "cz", another letter (digraph) that is longer part of the alphabet.

Also note that Paul is a "translated" name. His actual name was Pál Erdős. He got lucky with that one, it's an easy swap. Edward Teller (Ede Teller) was the same way, and so was John (von) Neumann (János Neumann).

As a bonus trivia, the Hungarian name order is big endian, like the Japanese. So it would be "Erdős Pál", "Teller Ede", "Neumann János", and "Lánczos Kornél". Though just like with Japanese, I would not recommend trying to adhere to this order in most English speaking contexts.

  • int_19h  4 days ago

    The "weird" part about Hungarian names and words for English speakers is that "y" is a modifier letter in most cases, not a sound in and of itself. So e.g. "Nagy" is pronounced closer to something like "Nahj".

    • perching_aix  4 days ago

      They said:

      > Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random!

      The letters "gy", "ty", and "ly" are not exclusive to names, nor are they significantly more common in names.

      It's not that I disagree people would struggle with these, just that it's not unique to names, so it couldn't have been what they were referring to there.

      1 reply →

somenameforme  5 days ago

I take it that that's a palatalized ending? I read your comment at first and was like "airdish" wtf? Then I palatalized the 'os' ending and realized oh yeah... that does sound kind of like airdish!

umanwizard  5 days ago

I could be wrong, but FWIW I doubt Hungarians include diacritics that don’t exist in Hungarian (like ñ) when writing foreign names.

  • gf000  5 days ago

    Depends. There are names that are "romanized" to Hungarian pronunciation rules, like Dosztojevszkij (Dostoevsky), or Kolumbusz Kristóf (Cristoforo Colombo - Hungarian puts the family name first), though it is no longer the practice, it's mostly used for historic names only. That is, Trump is written like that, and not as we would pronounce (something like "Trámp")

    In general, if the source language has a latin alphabet, we try to stick to the original spelling in most cases, but it is not uncommon to replace non-Hungarian letters with the closest one. It's a bit more complicated in case of non-latin alphabets, especially Cyrillic due to a lot of shared history.

zajio1am  5 days ago

Diacritics are language-dependent, so using hungarian-meaning diacritics into english text makes no sense.