How is "Lamy" Pronounced?

[Dr.Grace]

But if it's German, shouldn't the "y" be pronounced like u-umlaut?

[captnemo]

But if it's German, shouldn't the "y" be pronounced like u-umlaut?

No, sir. If so, then it would be spelled with u-umlaut. German pronunciation, like Spanish, is entirely rule-based with no exceptions so pronunciation is never in question, nor is spelling. It's a wonderful thing when compared to English where every rule has several weird exceptions and spelling is arbitrary and must be memorized for every word. In German and Spanish, if you can say it you can spell it and vice-versa.

[coolpenz]

According to the Lamy folks, it's Lah-mee. At least that's what they told me... I just got curious and decided to call 'em...

[rbbrock]

It looks like I'm coming to this thread late in the game, but I'll add my $.02 anyway.

 

Think of the phrase "lock me" and remove the "ck".

Or think of the word "mommy" but replace m with l ("lommy").

[Dr.Grace]

But if it's German, shouldn't the "y" be pronounced like u-umlaut?

No, sir. If so, then it would be spelled with u-umlaut. German pronunciation, like Spanish, is entirely rule-based with no exceptions so pronunciation is never in question, nor is spelling. It's a wonderful thing when compared to English where every rule has several weird exceptions and spelling is arbitrary and must be memorized for every word. In German and Spanish, if you can say it you can spell it and vice-versa.

Sorry, but I believe y IS pronounced like u-umlaut in German.

 

Don

[Hans-Peter Ording]

Sorry, but I believe y IS pronounced like u-umlaut in German.

Yes, but not at the end of a word.

 

Regards

Hans-Peter

[captnemo]

But if it's German, shouldn't the "y" be pronounced like u-umlaut?

No, sir. If so, then it would be spelled with u-umlaut. German pronunciation, like Spanish, is entirely rule-based with no exceptions so pronunciation is never in question, nor is spelling. It's a wonderful thing when compared to English where every rule has several weird exceptions and spelling is arbitrary and must be memorized for every word. In German and Spanish, if you can say it you can spell it and vice-versa.

Sorry, but I believe y IS pronounced like u-umlaut in German.

 

Don

Hi Don,

 

Well I dunno. I learned German from birth since that's all we spoke at home and in the family, but I was not formally educated in it, as I was in English. I am now many years out of practice but as I remember, "y" ("ipsilon") behaves like the letter "i" which in the case of the word Lamy would give what is, in American English, a long-E sound.

 

Phil

 

PS. When "y" occurs between two consonants, then yes, it sounds like ü.

Edited February 9, 2007 by captnemo

[KCat]

"Car" ends with that consonant-sound:

Unless, of course, you're from Bahston. My Sister-in-law (born in MA) has lived in the Southwest since childhood and still does not recognize the "r" at the end of "car" or within "park". I do *not* tease her about it - her daughter does.

 

Julie Andrews certainly didn't put an r on the end of "la". I've seen the movie a million times. Nor did anyone I ever heard in what small amount of vocal training I had in my youth.

[aunt rebecca]

hi,

 

lammy is my great nephew liam's nickname, he is two.

 

i never ask for a lamy, at fph i point to it and ,or i buy them on line. this prevents mispronunciation.

 

:ltcapd: :ltcapd: :ltcapd: :ltcapd: :ltcapd: :ltcapd: :ltcapd: :ltcapd: :ltcapd: :ltcapd:

 

:bunny1: :bunny1: :bunny1: :bunny1: :bunny1: :bunny1: :bunny1: :bunny1: :bunny1: :bunny1: :bunny1: :bunny1: :bunny1:

[ericthered2004]

In standard American English. "Tommy" sounds like "Tah-mee" (similarly, "hot" has the same vowel-sound as "hah," etc.) ... so "Tommy" rhymes with "swami" which rhymes with "Lamy."

 

I can't believe that anyone, anywhere, would pronounce "la" (the name of the musical note) so that it ended with the same sound which begins "rack, rent, rip, rod, rug," etc.:

    the /r/ sound, the same sound a dog makes.

  "Car" ends with that consonant-sound: "la" does not — at least, not in the English I grew up with.

 

As Mark Twain noted: "There is no such thing as the 'Queen's English.' The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we [the Americans] own the bulk of the shares."

 

;-)

Arrrrrr, quite right! I asked a German friend at dinner just now who did indeed second Kate's pronunciation of "la mi"

 

However, on the "/r/ sound": handily my German friend is also a linguist, and noted that I'm likely to hear "la" as "larrrr"--or seek to approximate the long "a" in "la" by using the "r" sound--because my native British West County English goes in for a lot of "r insertion" or "r epinthesis." Hence "pizza and beer" becomes "peetzer rand beer". That’s also why pirates (who do a-shirley speak fine Wesssss Country English) say "Ahrrrrrr" not "Ah". They sometimes do this in Boston too, apparently, sounding (say) "Amanda" as "Amanderrr."

 

I confess I did myself read "lamy" as "laymee," without really being sure how others might hear it.

 

I confess too that I asked about "correct/common" pronunciation because things in German might be different in English. I was surprised once to hear a German TV Ad pronouncing "Neutrogena" as something like "noy-troy-gaynor," which is doubtless correct in Germany, but hasn’t caught on much in Ohio.

 

Many thanks for the info. Eric

[saintsimon]

Part of the confusion is that Lamy is not really a German(ic) name, the original (?) French should have short "a" and "y" - as with Pascal Lamy, the former European Commissioner for Trade and current boss of the WTO /:)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_Lamy

Edited February 10, 2007 by saintsimon

[Dillo]

Hi,

 

Yes you're right, it's not German, it's French.

 

Dillon

[ericthered2004]

And now I think of it the French name of the German company would also rhyme with "army", "farmy", or "barmy," hence "larmy" yes?

[Jerome Tarshis]

Not "army" with the "r" sound. Eric, your earlier post had it quite right. Thanks to your linguist friend. No "r" sound. There is indeed a tendency to insert that "r" in one or another regional English.

 

No need to insert it in "Lamy."

 

La ci darem, as in opera. La Jolla, as in a town in Southern California. La plume, as in French for a feather or a kind of pen.

 

We actually have at least one town called "Lamy" in the United States. The one I know about is in New Mexico and is named for the distinguished archbishop who figures (IIRC) in the novel "Death Comes for the Archbishop." We Americans are a nation of nations, and "Lamy" isn't as exotic as all that.

[captnemo]

And now I think of it the French name of the German company would also rhyme with "army", "farmy", or "barmy," hence "larmy" yes?

I believe the French and German pronunciations would be the same for this word -- still rhyming with mommy and not marmy.

[KateGladstone]

Re:

 

> German pronunciation, like Spanish, is entirely rule-based with no exceptions so pronunciation >is never in question, nor is spelling. ...

 

Hmmm ... if German has no such irregularities, then does the "y" in "Lamy" stand for the same sound as the "y" in "Sylt"? (an island in Germany: the "y" in its name represents the sound that German elsewhere represents by "u")

 

When I studied German in high school (admittedly, only for three years), the teacher (who grew up in Germany) informed me that the German word for "barber" ("Friseur") sounds exactly as if spelled "Frisör" — the "eu" in this word does not stand for the sound that "eu" represents in any other word in German. (To me, having "eu" stand for one sound in "Friseur" — while standing for a different sound in all other words in the German dictionary — sounds an awful LOT like having an exception!)

 

Admittedly, "Friseur" came into German from French (and kept its French spelling), but a great many of the English language's spelling-exception words make their exceptions for the same reason (they came into English from French or other languages, and kept the original spelling or some approximation thereof). So when a word has an odd spelling because it came into one language from another language, we can call this an "exception" if the word came into English but we do not call it an "exception" if the word came into German? To me, that doesn't seem quite fair ...

 

Speaking of foreign-origin words and the spelling-exceptions they create, what about the many English-language words that have become a normal part of spoken and written modern German? The word "Baby," for instance — not as slang, but as a normal word which appears in German dictionaries (meaning the same thing it means in English) and which even appeared in the German textbook (published in Germany) that my high school used: I remember to this day a sentence about "kleine Babys" (= "little babies"). The "y" in "Baby" or in another English-to-German word now ubiquitous ("Handy," which German uses as its word for "cell-phone") certainly doesn't sound like the "y" in "Sylt" or "Rhythmus" (And if German really didn't have any exceptions in spelling, wouldn't it spell "Rhythmus" without those "h"s ... because this word in German sounds exactly as if spelled "Rytmus"?)

 

If I recall correctly — over the past 30 years or so, more and more English words have become part of German: they now appear in German dictionaries, but still spelled like English words. (For instance — at least one German dictionary [i confess that I forget which one — includes the word "Interview," spelled and pronounced just as English spells and pronounces this word.)

 

As I recall, the importation of English words into German and other languages shows no signs of abating, and will probably continue to increase. As English exports more and more words to German (and to other languages), won't this have to mean that German (and other languages) will have more and more spelling-exceptions because of having more and more common words which come from English and which retain their English spellings? If a language (like most languages) really does have no spelling-exceptions whatsoever (I presume that this once held true of German), then as soon as the language borrows "interview" (or any other word whose spelling does not fit the language that borrows the word) that language loses its orthographic virginity ...

 

... or (using another metaphor) we can say that English spelling has a sort of disease (a "spelling-irregularity virus") and that other languages have begun "catching" this virus (like catching a cold) because of contact with English.

[KateGladstone]

Re:

 

> Lamy ... the original (?) French should have short "a" and "y"

 

Calling "Lamy's" vowels "short" will confuse and mislead people who grew up in the USA and who learned to read in that country.

 

In the USA (I don't know what happens other English-speaking countries),

when a reading-teacher or reading-textbook says that

"The 'a' in this word is a 'short a',"

by this the teacher/textbook means

"The 'a' in this word stands for exactly the same vowel-sound as in the word 'hat' " —

 

if the teacher/textbook says that

"The 'y' in this word is a short 'y',"

in the USA that means

"The 'y' in this word stands for exactly the same vowel-sound as in the word 'rhythm'."

(the same sound that gets spelled with an "i" in "rip,"

in which case the teacher/textbook calls it a "short i" instead of "short y")

 

The very bizarre (but very taken-for-granted!) system goes like this:

 

"short a" — names the vowel-sound of "hAt, cAp, pAst, mAd"

"long a" — name the vowel-sound of "hAte, cApe, pAste, mAde"

 

"short e" — names the vowel-sound of "tEn, bEd, thEft"

"long e" — names the vowel-sound of "tEEn, bEAd, thIEf"

 

"short i/y" — names the vowel-sound of "bIt, stIll, rhYthm"

"long i/y" — names the vowel-sound of "bIte, stYle, rhYme"

 

"short o" — names the vowel-sound of "hOp, gOne"

"long o" — names the vowel-sound of "hOpe, gO"

 

"short u" — names the vowel-sound of "fUn, bUg, Up, sOn, lOve, rOUgh, blOOd"

"long u" — names the vowel-sound (actually /y/+vowel-sound) of "fUse, pUce, Use"

 

"short double o" — names the vowel-sound of "bOOk, fOOt, gOOd"

"long double o" — names the vowel-sound of "bOOt, fOOl, gOOn, rUle"

 

Any vowel-sound that doesn't fit the "short/long" naming-system (which, as you see, has nothing to do with length/shortness of the sound anyway!) gets called a "diphthong" in some cases (e.g., the "oi" in "cOIn") or in other cases it has a particular name (e.g., the "a" in "fAther" gets called "the broad 'a' " in most versions of the system). In many versions of the system, anything spelled with two vowels gets called a "diphthong" even if the system acknowledges that the two vowels together spell only one sound (e.g., teachers will say things like "the diphthong 'oo' is a short double 'o' diphthong in 'book' and a long double 'o' diphthong in 'boot.')

 

To me, calling any occurrence of the letter "a" long or short or broad makes about as little sense as calling it laminated or square or blue — I got into a lot of trouble for this as a child, because, in at least some USA schools/classrooms/reading-curricula, even if you read perfectly you can still fail reading-class if you have any problems with the terminology and cannot always remember exactly which adjective the system assigns to a particular letter-name/letter-pair name at a particular moment.

[Bradley]

(Sa)lami?

[ericthered2004]

Not "army" with the "r" sound. Eric, your earlier post had it quite right. Thanks to your linguist friend. No "r" sound. There is indeed a tendency to insert that "r" in one or another regional English.

 

No need to insert it in "Lamy."

 

La ci darem, as in opera. La Jolla, as in a town in Southern California. La plume, as in French for a feather or a kind of pen.

 

We actually have at least one town called "Lamy" in the United States. The one I know about is in New Mexico and is named for the distinguished archbishop who figures (IIRC) in the novel "Death Comes for the Archbishop." We Americans are a nation of nations, and "Lamy" isn't as exotic as all that.

Hmm, yes I think we might be talking at cross purposes here. I guess I was indicating why I tend to hear the "r" sound when, in truth, as you say, it isn't there.

 

I venture to add that this is why linguists use those phonetic thingys. Would that I knew them too! For as you say /ˈbɑrmi/ and /ˈɑrmi/ aren't /ˈmɒmi/, but my UK yokel's ear can only hear the difference in the "ahr" sound when I try very very hard.

 

Best, Eric

[lisa]

(Sa)lami?

Yes, you got it.

 

BTW, I don't think it does matter if you pronounce it German or French. It sound almost the same.

German Lamy would be 'la' 'mi' , or (sa)lami with a German sound to it.

French Lamy would be the same but with a French touch.

 

Dutch would be basicly the same but a tiny bit more Dutch sounding.