IPA help with names - Lithuanian and ?Bangladeshi

[tortipede]

I'm doing some ESOL teaching at the moment, and I thought it'd be a nice idea (& one that might help students get a bit of a grip on IPA) to give them out name-tags with their names on in IPA

Comments

[shupa]

[ˈgraːʒʲʋʲiːdɐs], with end-firm accent (tvirtagãlė; also called continued, rising, circumflex)

[tortipede]

That's fabulous: thank you!

I'm actually not going to worry about attempting to get the circumflex accent right, though -- while I'd like to in principle (partly because it's now nearly three decades since I first saw references to Lithuanian circumflex accents in grammars of Old Germanic languages, and I still don't know what it sounds like), in practice this is about convincing the students that IPA is potentially useful to them, because it really does spell sounds, and so could help them with English pronunciation (rather than helping me learn Lithuanian!).

Hmm. There should be more punctuation in that reply, but it's early here & I'm in a rush. Once again -- thanks!

[shupa]

the accent is easy: graAžvidas

circumflex is aA and the acute is Aa (the easiest way I can show it...)

[panjomin]

Your Bengali may be Tasnim, stress on the nim. (And the language is Bengali too.)

[tortipede]

Thank you -- I'm guessing at Bengali because she's South Asian, Muslim, and I believe there is a reasonable Bangladeshi minority here in Oxford. However, there are also Pakistanis of various descriptions, so it could in fact be Urdu or something else. (I can't ask, as I wanted to have it ready for the next class!)

All I know is that she spells it with a final -a in Roman letters (Tasnia), and that I've tried stress on 'Ta and on 'ni without her correcting either of them -- and one of them must be wrong!

[panjomin]

I must be wrong then about Tasnim. If you find out let me know!

[tortipede]

Well, because I didn't know, I printed out some options - and asked the student :)

I got her to choose between 'tasnia and 'taznia (the former); and then between 'tasnia and tas'nia (also the former), and now I know how to say her name correctly (to a first approximation, for certain values of 'correctly'). Still didn't check where exactly she's from, though...