If they gave the response “Alexander Dumas” wouldn’t it be rejected, regardless of pronunciation, because it wasn’t in the form of a question?
I want to go on Jeopardy and never use the phrase “who is” or “what is.” “Mitochondria is…what again?”
Jeopardy seems like the game that should penalize pronunciation, and Wheel of Fortune shouldn’t; but I have seen plenty of episodes of Wheel where they didn’t give the contestant the win because they mispronounced a word in the solution; like the viral one where no one could pronounce “Kelly Ripa.” But not one I can recall on Jeopardy.
Probably accept it but correct them. We shouldn’t penalize people for only having read words, not heard them.
Not 100% on the rules, but I think it depends if the question is a Daily Double or not, and there’s more scrutiny if it is.
The closest example that comes to mind is when Arthur Chu pronounced Elbridge Gerry as Jerry. He ended up getting the $800 but got a lecture from Trebeck.
Earlier in the same clip he lost $5000 from the Daily Double because he pronounced Frances McDormand as McDarmand
I think that has to do with whether it is single or double jeopardy. I think they get a free pass from the host if they forget to phrase their answer as a question in single, but not double.
IIRC for Single vs Double the difference is they will enforce the “form of a question” part. In either round, they will let you mangle the pronunciation as long as you don’t insert or omit phonemes beyond what could reasonably be the result of only having read the word.
So “Alexander Dumb-ass” would be fine, though you’d likely get some gentle chiding, or maybe even have to refilm the question (“portions of the show not affecting the outside have been edited”) afterwards, but if you were expanding NASA and left the ‘s’ off the end of “Aeronautics,” it would be wrong.
I think that in the clip i shared, it was all Double Jeopardy, because the board starts at $400. It’s all certainly the same round.
Probably not as it is not close enough to the known pronunciation. Some people have been accepted despite pronouncing their answers incorrectly and received backlash. It’s usually up to the host to determine.
I once watched an episode of Wheel of Fortune where the puzzle was completely solved: “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
But the woman giving the solution, who happened to be black, didn’t pronounce the “s” is bedbugs audibly enough. It sounded more like “don let de bedbug bite” which I think was just an accent thing.
But they didn’t give it to her. Maybe she did think it was “the bedbug” as if there’s one big bad boogeyman bug out there. I dunno. But it was pretty sad. The guy next to her was given a chance and walked away with the win.
Nothing will ever be worse than Mythological Hero Achilles
Ouch. This reminds me of a coworker of mine: they were born in one country, grew up in another, and then moved to the US. Despite only being here 5-ish years they speak perfect American English with no accent. However they are missing the last 20-30 years of American culture. They’re extremely smart but every now and then a conversation will trip up and we’ll have to explain something like “these guys are as bad as beavis and butthead.”
Now Achilles is a little better known than beavis & butthead but I don’t know how much Greek mythology they read in different countries. Especially the ones pumping out STEM geniuses like my coworker. WoF is all about catchphrases and references so I could easily see how an otherwise extremely intelligent guy could totally bomb like that dude did.
I think Greek mythology is well-known around the world, but not many languages pronounce the poor man’s name as uh-kill-ease.
May God have mercy on your soul.
Good question.
I’m not sure if it would be but when he gets home he’ll be called dumb ass.
I don’t have much to add about the pronunciation question, but every time that Alexandre Dumas is mentioned, I feel compelled to recommend The Count of Monte Cristo, a work which I would describe as the mid-1800s rough equivalent to a shonen manga’s plotline. The novel starts in 1810s southern France, just after the Napoleonic era, detailing the luck, misfortune, and events that befall Edmond Dantes, a young and intelligent sailor of modest means.
Admittedly, the unabridged book is quite a long read, with some print editions exceeding 1200 pages. The 117 chapters may be intimidating, but IMO it’s a worthwhile read. It’s also available in the public domain in the USA, so Project Gutenberg has an eBook of it from the 1888 English translation, retaining much of the “antique” translations, for added intrigue.
equivalent to a shonen manga’s plotline.
It’s funny you should say that as there is actually a loose anime adaptation, titled “Gankutsuou”.
TIL. Straight onto my watch list. Thanks!
I’ll second that!
absolute banger of a book.
Favorite novel ever, I’d recommend it to anyone willing to stick with it.
It is a French name. Any “American” pronounciation is wrong.
French speakers are almost certainly not pronouncing it the way he himself pronounced it due to dialect drift. His father also lived in Haiti for a time so the pronunciation might be even further muddled.
W. E. B. DuBois
Typically, yes. Pronunciation mistakes are not ruled incorrect unless they change the spelling of the name or word, such as adding consonants. Ken corrects the pronunciation without calling the mistake out, usually, although he labors under strange conceptions, such as insisting in not pronouncing the initial “t” in “tsunami” and “tsar”.
Strange conceptions?
Tsunami doesn’t start with a T sound, It’s just a strange artifact of the romanization of the Japanese sounds. It’s not exactly a S sound either. The sound it’s supposed to be just doesn’t have an english equivalent at all, so they made up something close-ish but it does a poor job of communicating that.
The one Japanese mis-pronunciation that bothers me is that Tokyo only has two Syllables, To-Kyo, not To-Ky-O like almost all western people pronounce it as. Kyoto has the same problem, It’s Kyo-to, not Ky-O-To.
This is a strange take. In Japanese it’s literally a consonant cluster [ts], which is to say it’s literally a Japanese “t” followed by a Japanese “s”. The Japanese “t” and “s” are not exactly the same as English, but they’re close enough, and English has the same cluster in, say, the plural “mats” of “mat”.
What “tsunami” breaks in English is not really the sound, but instead just the fact that English doesn’t allow [ts] unless it’s preceeded by a vowel.
It’s not at all like the T sound in Japanese followed by the S sound. The normal T sound in Japanese is pronounced by putting your tongue behind your top teeth and flicking your tongue down a bit. Tsu on the other hand starts with your tongue below your top teeth, and your cheeks pulled together a bit.
It’s also nothing like the TS in Mats in english.
“Nothing like” seems to overstate things, at least to me.
Certainly, the sound in Japanese doesn’t sound aspirated the way English speakers do and expect to hear, but in listening to all the recordings at Forvo for this word, an initial “ts” seems like an entirely reasonable and fairly faithful approximation of the Japanese sound.
Granted, I would expect someone who has listened to significant amounts of Japanese to hear differences that an outsider like me wouldn’t notice, and consequently to judge differences as more pronounced than I would. Even with that in mind, “nothing like” seems like quite the exaggeration.
Moreover, and back to the original point, the pronouciation with an initial “ts” in English seems pretty obvious, just as dropping the “t” to conform to typical English phonotactics does. I wouldn’t see any reason to rule either pronunciation choice out.
Where are you getting this information? This “pull your cheeks together a bit” sounds completely out of left field to me.
From my time living in Japan and speaking Japanese.
Strange conceptions?
Yes. That’s humor.
Tsunami doesn’t start with a T sound, It’s just a strange artifact of the romanization of the Japanese sounds.
Yes, and English speakers have an established collective inconsistency regarding whether to pronounce loanwords anywhere on the spectrum from (somewhat) faithfully to the original language to transliterated to entirely reinterpreted with English pronouciation norms. To declare that the “t” in that word is silent (as Ken has done, at least once) overstates the situation. At most, it’s optional.
I pronounce those cities as two syllables, although it doesn’t bother me when others don’t. I also pronounce “Mangione” as three, even though I don’t overdo it on the Italian vowels.
Living on the west coast of Canada, where we talk about Tsunamis fairly regularly, I’ve never heard anyone add a T sound to Tsunami at the start. Only Sue-Nah-Me
How strange. I never pronounced it any other way. I don’t think of it as a regionalism. I grew up near Toronto.
It would if my experience of quiz shows is anything to go by…
