I guess I could be offended..

Aw, don’t leave us hanging, Eszter. How DO you say “big whoop” in Hungarian? Inquiring minds that distrust babelfish want to know.

And how do you pronounce the new French President’s name?

nagy kiáltás, which retranslates as mickle cry, with mickle being an archaic version of great or large

Ah yes: but in Minneapolis, as of this summer, you won’t need Cingular: http://www.startribune.com/154/story/1164471.html

What does it mean “big whoop” in American slang? Just an ecstatic cry, or something else?

I had some difficulty working out how I would say “Big Whoop” in English.

Michael O’Hare has a post about “Sarkozy” at the Reality-Based Community. I think he’s taking standards that might reasonably apply to immigrants and unreasonably trying to apply them to descendants of immigrants.

Oh, I agree with you, Eszter, but that wasn’t my understanding of what O’Hare was saying. He quotes someone else saying “Sarkozy’s real name is whatever he calls himself”, but he doesn’t seem to fully embrace that himself.

I was the person who e-mailed him about German names, saying that no one pronounced Einstein, Kissinger, or Schwarzegger as they would be in German (or even with a reasonable adaptation of the German pronunciation to the American tongue), but as far as I know those people weren’t bothered by it. And they, unlike Sarkozy, were immigrants.

But the basic point is that it’s irrelevant how the name is pronounced in Hungarian. What’s relevant is how Sarkozy himself pronounces it.

The question is a bit complicated, though, since presumably there needs to be some allowance for dialectal variation at least. If I know someone from England named Mark, I as an American am not going to pronounce his name in a nonrhotic way (something I might hear as more like “Mock”) even if that is the way he pronounces it. And it’s not completely based on the existence of names that apply to more than one person, since if he were named “Splark” I’d still pronounce the “r”.

Basically you’re translating your first name, which seems like a common option, especially when the two versions of the name aren’t that far apart in sound. Unfortunately, some of us have untranslatable names, which can even, like “Keith”, contain sounds that are completely foreign to lots of languages. Whether to use /t/, /f/, or /s/ as the closest approximation to the sound at the end is a quandary.

I had a Spanish teacher who persisted in reading “Keith” as if it were a Spanish word, so it came out something like “Kate”. But when I tried getting her to read “Quiz” as a Spanish word with a Castilian accent, she ended up reading that as if it were English. I guess I should have just been Carlos.

I guess, except that there is a common American first name Esther to be a translation. It’s like a Russian named Aleksandr going by Alexander in the US, or a Frenchwoman named Stéphanie going by Stephanie, or even an Israeli named Binyamin going by Benjamin — unless your Eszter has nothing to do with the biblical name.

But maybe Mariska Hargitay has become well known enough that her last name can count as a translation. Then again, I don’t know how she pronounces her name, and I see from IMDB that she’s sometimes had to spell her first name “Marishka” to get a reasonable pronunciation.

Well if we are to believe some random source on the internet, mickle and muckle (well okay its the OED, or claims to be at least) are the same word and both mean a large amount, and that the saying ‘many a mickle makes a muckle’ is a misquotation that has lead to the mistaken impression to some that a mickle is a small amount.

Hi Eszter,
I’m here via Kispad:)Just want to say hello!Szia!Zsófi