Pronunciations
The Problem[1]
As part of my work I have to pronounce a lot of names and other uncommon/specialized words. More often than not this turns out to be hard.
This is quite time-consuming because of things like:
People trimming off or omitting introductions from speeches, TED talks, podcasts etc.
The scourge of machine-generated SEO-bait websites and YouTube channels with incorrect pronunciations flooding the internet with noise.
Even when they get it right:
This guy (headphone warning, try to guess the timestamp when he finally says it)
People sometimes being confidently wrong in their podcasts etc. (guilty...)
People with interesting names often not particularly caring about, or just being resigned to, mispronunciations.
Pronunciations
I’m going to maintain and regularly add to a list here of pronunciations for key names and concepts relevant to LW and its extended ecosystem. Hopefully this will be a useful resource for anyone creating audio content, giving talks, interviews etc. Maybe check here first before wading into Google.
Feel free to comment with corrections and suggested additions.\
Pronunciations:
Apotropaic - æp.ə.trəˈpeɪ.ɪk
Aviles—a VEE lays
Bear Braumoeller—Beer BROW-mewlla
Bernal—ber NAHL
Brynjolfsson—brinYOLFsen
Brower—like eyebrow
Carnot cycle—Approximately French kaʁno—CARno
Char-RNN - -CAR arr enn enn
Compute (noun) - Com-PUTE ‘how much comPUTE would it take to brute-force this?’
COP 21 - ‘cop’ 21 (not initials), ‘cop’ like ‘copper’
Dag Hammarskjöld—Here are some native speakers. Darg Hammerheld/Hammerhold/Hammer-hyeld. Roll the r if you’re fancy.
Demeter—duh·MEE·tuh
Duprex—doo PRAY
Dylan Hadfield-Menell—DIL-lan HADfield-menELL
Eleusinian—elle you SINny an
Eli Lifland—Ee -lye LIFF-lend
Eliezer Yudkowsky - Elly EZzer Yood (rhymes wood) - COW—ski
Esfandiary—ESS fan diYAHri (based on the Persian pronunciation)
Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) - EL-see
Eudaemonia—you-da-MOAN-ia (you da man! no, you da man!)
Evan Hubinger—Evan HEW-bin-ger (as in germ)
Frequentist—FREEquenTIST
FU YING (approximate pronunciation)- Foo (as in ‘foot’, don’t hang onto the vowel), Ying (as written, approximately.)
Stephan Guyenet—STEffen Geeyenay (hard g, rhymes with DNA)
IARPA—eye-ARPA (with the dipthong between syllables 1 and 2). ‘Ieyarpa.’
Igic—IGG itch
IPCC – EYE PEE SEE SEE
Jaffe—Jaffy
Jan Leike—Yarn Like-eh
Kareiva (Peter) - Ka-REEva
Kokotajlow—ko-ko-tie-low
Leverhulme—Leaver—hume
Mandarin (language) - MAN duh-ren (the last I is not sharp, the last syllable is weak.)
Mercator—Mer—KAY—ter
NeurIPS Conference—rhymes with europe’s conference or ‘new rips’ conference.
Piers Millett – Somewhere between ‘pierce’ and ‘peers’, muh-LETT
Sarewitz—sair (rhyme hair) uh wits
SARS CoV 2 - ‘sars KOH-vee two’
Savulescu—savoo LEscoo
Schlegeris - ? It’s either shLEG-ris or shLERRis, I’ve heard both, TODO
Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh - (yes) Shawn uh’HAY-ger-t(h)é
Selegiline—suh LEDGE uh lean
Vernor Vinge – VIN-djiy
Wassily Kandinsky—va·suh·lee kan·din·skee
Wasieleski—Vashi-LESHky
Zhdanov - ˈʐdanəf
- ^
Test footnote
I find https://youglish.com/ to be very helpful with this.
Some websites are great, but I’ve found they’re wrong often enough I usually want to corroborate them with something else.
A specific pronunciation I sometimes want and haven’t been able to find in the past is Ali Maow Maalin, for reading 500 Million, But Not A Single One More.
(The other awkward names in that according to me are Viktor Zhdanov and Karel Raška, and I don’t remember their pronunciations offhand but it looks like some combination of google and Wikipedia will help.)
I would use the following strategy: find how the name is written in the original language, then copy it into Google Translate (with the correct language set) and click to hear the pronounciation.
For example, the Wikipedia English page for Viktor Zhdanov links to Russian (Русский) page for… well, the page title is Жданов, Виктор Михайлович (вирусолог), because there were multiple famous people with the same name (including the patronymic)… but anyway, just copy everything into Google Translate, which also deciphers the Cyrillic, so you can now rearrange it to Виктор Жданов.
With Karel Raška, you already have the correct written form, just set the language in Google Translate to Czech.
Yeah this is a super useful method and increasingly my go-to for esp. Chinese
This is a great strategy, Viliam, thank you! Stumbled upon it while trying to pronounce Ali Maow Maalin.
It can also be very useful to translators, like me! Thank you!