I've always thought that the word "Robot" comes from Slovak "robota" (regular work, commonly used) instead of Czech word "robota" (forced labor, rarely used). It was explained to me by people from former Czechoslovakia that Karel had his brother Josef recovering from an illness in Tatra region of Slovakia in 1919 where people used the word all the time; Josef then suggested Karel to rename his originally intended "Laboři" (laborers) as "Roboti" (robots). BTW, they both were devastated by Munich Agreement 1938 and Josef later died in a concentration camp, so one could wonder what could have been...
Moreover, Rossum from R.U.R. is a word play on "rozum", which is a Czech/Slovak word for mind/brain. Mind's Universal Robots ;-)
I loved War with the Newts ( or as it was called in the Russian translation, War with the Salamanders). At the time I didn't even know sci-fi was a thing.
R.U.R. is a great quick read, and while some aspects are a bit dated, a lot of it is quite ahead of its time. Or perhaps I just feel that way due to way in which so many modern scifi stories (be it in books, tv, movies, games) were clearly influenced by this.
Either way, if you're into scifi, I consider this play required reading.
The article hints at this, but I thought it was interesting that Capek's robots, though mass-produced tools, were not mechanical: "There are descriptions of kneading-troughs for robot skin, great vats for liver and brains, and a factory for producing bones. Nerve fibers, arteries, and intestines are spun on factory bobbins, while the Robots themselves are assembled like automobiles." (Wikipedia.)
"The power of man has fallen. By gaining possession of the factory we have become masters of everything. The period of mankind has passed away. A new world has arisen. … Mankind is no more. Mankind gave us too little life. We wanted more life."
Karel Čapek's name is a perfect example of the ridiculous habit of English-speakers to preserve foreign spelling. As you'll notice, ‘Čapek’ isn't written in English, as ‘Č’ isn't a letter in English alphabet. Now, how many people in English-speaking countries know how to pronounce Czech letters? I've heard the name pronounced as ’Kahpek‘ or ‘Kaypek’ (e.g. right in the Librivox book linked in the thread). But it's actually [tʃapɛk], which would be better represented as ‘Chapek’.
Apparently, since English-speakers have no idea how to pronounce English words that they didn't memorize beforehand, they also gave up on the idea of representing foreign words phonemically. But they still keep trying to read them that way if they see vaguely-Latin alphabet.
I wouldn't attribute this to English or English speakers at all. Imagine I am Czech (I am) and my last name is "Gödel" (it is quite similar, and Kurt Gödel was actually born in what is now Czechia). Such a name has at least three pronunciations which are relevant to me -- the way Czechs themselves pronounce it [Ge:dl], the way Germans do [ɡøːdl̩], and the way an English speaker would [ˈɡɜːrdəl].
Can you really say the Czech pronunciation is correct because I am Czech? Or the German one, because it is a last name of German origin? If so, are all the people in my native country mispronouncing my last name? :-)
You point it out right there yourself—each language picks a pronunciation and sticks with it. The German pronunciation doesn't come in when you're speaking Czech—for the simple reason that German pronunciations don't fit in Czech. Then, just write down the pronunciation in the system used for the language.
A Ukrainian speaker would easily use two pronunciations and spellings for ‘Gödel’, since Ukrainian doesn't have a ‘yo’ letter but Russian does and Russian is widespread in Ukraine. But the person would use each pronunciation and spelling in the corresponding language, not in the other one.
English doesn't do that—instead, it goes with the foreign spelling first, and then people pronounce the word whatever which way since they can't be bothered to look in an encyclopedia, or don't have one on them.
At least in the US when Ellis island was one of the main processing centers for immigrants we would anglicize names. But over time that changed and now we keep the spelling of the original/source language where possible. Of course things become complicated when we go from non-alphabetic languages to English and vice versa. Ex a last name “Guo” can have multiple transliterations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo and getting your English (or alphabetic) name rendered in ideographs or characters can be quite challenging. Often it’s easier to just adopt s local name.
>English doesn't do that—instead, it goes with the foreign spelling first
It only does that with accented letters that are otherwise shared in a common alphabet and then only sometimes.
In your desire for a rule that you like, you are insisting that English is following another rule that you do not like, when in reality it is actually much less simple. English has conventions within contexts, but is more or less allergic to to hard and fast rules.
My favourite quote on this is by the writer James Nicoll.
>“English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.”
You presupposes that a spoken form is primary and a written form is derivative. While that is true for an origin of a written form, once established, written forms are independent memetic entities, inter-influencing with spoken forms, both affected by different selection and mutation pressures.
> English doesn't do that—instead, it goes with the foreign spelling first, and then people pronounce the word whatever which way since they can't be bothered to look in an encyclopedia, or don't have one on them.
Personally, i much prefer people botching pronounciation of my name while keeping proper spelling, than botching spelling while keeping proper pronounciation.
> You presupposes that a spoken form is primary and a written form is derivative
Not sure how much linguistic knowledge you're putting behind the claim that written forms influence pronunciation, but as far as I gathered from my feeble noob learnings, spoken language utterly dominated word development even with widespread print—contrary to folk etymological intuition. This might be changing only recently, with written communication becoming much more prevalent and especially with English-language web going ubiquitously global. E.g. computer terms may be borrowed into other languages through print first.
You'll notice, however, that even with the web and text messaging around, people keep making mistakes that depend on them grokking language by hearing and speaking instead of writing and reading—e.g. “their/they're/there,” which is baffling for second-language-speakers who had to memorize each word and drill them by reading.
The response to that is more education and more curiosity. Pronouncing <cz> as /tʃ/ is no more obvious than the reading of <č> except in the word Czech because of how common it is. But the advantage of using the original graphy is (1) it's more respectful to the original, (2) it can motivate people to search about it and learn stuffs because it is unusual.
As an aside, I would love that more scientific papers use original names in their original scripts in the references section in addition to transcription, the way Knuth does it in tAoCP.
> As an aside, I would love that more scientific papers use original names in their original scripts in the references section in addition to transcription, the way Knuth does it in tAoCP.
Being a scientist, I believe most of my colleagues prefer to cite names exactly as the authors typeset them -- therefore, if there is a work by Karel Čapek, I would cite him as [Čapek, 1921] but I would not re-type a name like Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi back into the "original" spelling if the author himself writes it this way in a paper (e.g. [1]). And on top of that, sometimes (with say Japanese-Americans) you could re-type a name only to end up with an incorrect result!
BTW the person you're replying to is roughly but not quite correct: TAOCP doesn't have a separate references section, and when citing papers (inline in the text) Knuth does cite names as the authors typeset them, except for abbreviating to initials of course. It's only in the index of the books that he gives the full name of each mentioned person, including middle names and transcription in additional scripts.
> to cite names exactly as the authors typeset them
This is not incompatible with the transcription+native (if any) approach: these researchers will most likely have papers or website with their name in their native language, while descendants of immigrants don’t.
I agree, changing the orthography because pronunciation would be a disaster, especially when you don't have a consistent spelling system like in English.
Referencing works fine in phonemic-orthography languages: unambiguous spellings are picked after a time by convention combined with fitness for the target language. See the example of ‘Watson’ here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20799966
Curiously, your argument unabashedly presumes independence, if not primacy, of written language from oral. That wasn't ever the case at least in continental European languages—afaik spelling did matter in development of only a few words, contrary to some of modern folk etymological intuition. But this may change now that writing is much more prevalent in people's lives, with the English web getting ubiquitous, and English finally becoming completely logographic. If Mandarin doesn't wipe it all out sooner, anyway.
On the other hand Arabic names do get transcribed and as a consequence you can find like 15 different spellings of Al-Qaida. At least you can write it whichever way you want
Inconsistent localization of names and people struggling with pronunciation an unfamiliar glyph is not a problem unique to English native speakers.
As a counterpoint foreign names - let's say Serena Williams - can get sort of inconsistently mangled in Czech too. Sometimes it'll be left alone as "Serena Williams", sometimes localized "Serena Williamsova". And the sometimes the "W" might be pronounced correctly or mistakenly pronounced as "V".
Nobody's perfect, people make mistakes and if you are able to suggest a correction then most people are happy to learn the "correct" way.
The problem is not unique, but it's uniquely persistent among the languages that I'm more-or-less familiar with.
“Foreign names can get inconsistently mangled in Czech”—but to my knowledge Czech doesn't attempt to preserve foreign spelling, with e.g. letters Ñ or Ø. Czech adapts spelling to native pronunciation, which is my entire point. The ‘mistake’ here is that English keeps doing things backwards, and ‘Čapek’ is just one example here.
I had to look up the usage of ‘W’ in Czech, and Wikipedia says: “The letters Q, W and X are used exclusively in foreign words, and the former two are replaced with Kv and V once the word becomes ‘naturalized’.”
There's a close example in Russian: John ‘Dr.’ Watson's surname can be pronounced either ‘Vahtson’ or ‘Oo-ohtson’, but there's no intermediate sound like English ‘W’ in Russian (and no letter for it). So the name was spelled either of the two ways in print until it became settled on ‘Vahtson’ (‘Ватсон‘), which fits more naturally in the rest of the language. I expect a similar thing to happen to ‘Williams’ in Czech, though I'm surprised that they still have trouble with it at all, as the surname is old and widespread. However, current strong influence of English can mess things up—people, including myself, use English pronunciation even in the context of a native language.
That quote from wikipedia is interesting, because it says something you're interpreting as a being a consistent and simple rule but it's actually really vague and ill-defined - basically "Q, W and X are preserved in foreign words for a while until they're not".
Another example, place names are often localized even if they don't contain a non-Czech letter: Venice=>Benátky, Paris=>Pařiž, London=>Londýn, and so on. And sometimes original place names are left in place when they do have a letter or letters that are not Czech (or not very Czech) - see Washington, New York, Sydney, Chicago. In fact the last one is particularly interesting, since "ch" is considered a single letter in Czech - and there's a pretty perfect mapping to the Czech alphabet that preserves the stress on the "a" in "Chicago": Šikágo.
"Venice" is interesting too since "-ice" is a common place-name suffix. It behaves quite weirdly - sometimes it's singular (e.g. Lednice) and sometimes plural (e.g. Valtice). This becomes fun when you start to decline them so "I'm going (by vehicle) to Lednice" is "Jedu do Lednice" and to Valtice it's "Jedu do Valtic" (note: no "e" at the end). And the Venice/Benátky is apparently plural (http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?slovo=Ben%C3%A1tky). Why, I do not know. This is unrelated to the original discussion of course - just an interesting aside :-)
In Czech language even names of cities have genders. So the endings of the words are based on the gender. And Lednice - "do Lednice" is singular, while Valtice - "do Valtic" is plural. There are even some cities where locals use it as singular while the rest of Czechs use it as plural and they tease each other at parties.
> but to my knowledge Czech doesn't attempt to preserve foreign spelling, with e.g. letters Ñ or Ø. Czech adapts spelling to native pronunciation, which is my entire point.
In Czech, adapting spelling to native pronounciation (or adapting pronounciation to native spelling) is done for common nouns, but generally not for proper nouns (esp. names of persons) from languages written in (variants of) Latin alphabet. These are either written as is, or (informally) stripped of 'foreign' parts regardless of pronounciation (e.g. Ñ->N, Ü->U, or Ø->O). One exception is feminine suffix -ová added to female last names, as that is necessary for declension.
See how redundant and non-sequitur this psychological question is?
The "upset" question is equally irrelevant, whether they (the parent) are upset or not.
Who said they're that much upset? Who said it upsets them more than other more important things? And even if they are, who said it's not important in their line of work (e.g. a translator or proof reader) and thus it's not justifiably a pet peeve of them?
Parent didn't come in swearing, fuming, writing in all caps, etc -- they merely made a point.
Well I actually removed this part a very short time after posting (your reply was posted a handful of minutes after mine) because "upset" was the wrong word and sounded confrontational.
The general rule of thumb is not to transliterate names written in Latin sript, but to transliterate those not written in Latin script (e.g., Cyrillic, Arabic).
The annoying habits are people who preserve the basic acute, grave, diaeresis, and circumflex accents on vowels but not those in other contexts (such as the Turkish ǧ, which really changes how the word is pronounced)--The Economist is a.bad offender here.
Well let's see what do Czech people do when they encounter English names. It seems like they learn about how to pronounce them in English. So why should the vice-versa be any different?
Czechs and Slovaks assimilate English (and other) words using native spelling when those words pass into comon use.
For example: víkend (weekend), hemendex (ham and eggs), anketa (enquête: questionnaire, poll, ...).
Proper names are not treated this way: Charlie Chaplin, New York, ...
Japanese words and names receive their own Czech and Slovak style romanization, e.g. džómon džidai (縄文時代: joumon jidai: joumon period , 14000-300 BCE). Curiously, the letter "w" (a letter not used in these languages) is used, e.g. Kanagawa.
Yes, for ordinary words, I believe every language assimilates them after some time. But I was talking about names. No Czech would in their right mind write Čarlí Čeplin even after many decades. So let's not do that with Čapek in English either. Let him be written Čapek (or Capek due to the limits of our keyboards), but pronounce [Chapek], remembering he is Czech.
I couldn't disagree more. Literally no one has a problem pronouncing yet another great Czech: Dvořák. And I defy you to turn that into a phonetical spelling that isn't a abomination upon church and Christ.
We shouldn't be afraid of asking too much of people in regards to other cultures and languages. We humans are more intelligent than you're giving us credit for.
Dvořák's name is another good example for my point. What's the use of parading around the ‘ř’ in English texts if the sound can be pronounced only by speakers of Czech, a few nearby dialects and Kobon speakers in Papua New Guinea? Well guess what, every language has a spelling in its own alphabet, for the pronunciation that the speakers adopt for ‘Dvořák’—including English, in this case.
At least even with ‘ř’ it's not as bad as ‘Čapek’, since ‘ř’ is likely just replaced with more-or-less-hard ‘r’ when speaking, and not an unrelated sound.
Before I learned Czech, I pronounced it like most English-speakers: da-vor (rhymes with door) zhak (rhymes with shack). Now that I speak pretty decent Czech and can throw down a respectable 'ř'(which is one my great life accomplishments :), I feel that the English pronunciation is absolutely fine, and it requires no change.
You write can write Čapek in any way you want. But, personally, I'm proud that it's spelled that way. People know his great works, they (across all languages) commonly use a word he coined, and they literally make people learn a tiny bit more about the Czech language when they say, "Ah! So in Czech the Č is a CH!"
Literally no one? I'm fairly sure a majority of native English speakers has never even heard of Dvořák, never mind know how to spell his name correctly.
The better approximation to fricative z is usually rz. (Like Polish dipthong.)
rj could be mispronounced as unrecognizable ar-jay combo, resulting in something resembling dwor-yak or dwor-jak instead of rd3. (Sorry about lack of proper IPA.)
Moreover, Rossum from R.U.R. is a word play on "rozum", which is a Czech/Slovak word for mind/brain. Mind's Universal Robots ;-)