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Erdős

I was told by a hungarian, that hungarian written spelling and spoken pronunciation is pretty precisely aligned compared to, say, english. Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random!

Why not do the bloke the decency to spell his name correctly? Those diacritics are important.

Anyway, I was told that Paul's name is very roughly pronounced by an anglophone as: "airdish".





(I saw this on a math department bulletin board about 1960)

A theorem both deep and profound States that every circle is round But in a paper by Erdos Written in Kurdish A counterexample is found


I take it that that's a palatalized ending? I read your comment at first and was like "airdish" wtf? Then I palatalized the 'os' ending and realized oh yeah... that does sound kind of like airdish!

Is not American so nobody here cares...

Irrelevant. Cf. Diogenes on death

I could be wrong, but FWIW I doubt Hungarians include diacritics that don’t exist in Hungarian (like ñ) when writing foreign names.

Depends. There are names that are "romanized" to Hungarian pronunciation rules, like Dosztojevszkij (Dostoevsky), or Kolumbusz Kristóf (Cristoforo Colombo - Hungarian puts the family name first), though it is no longer the practice, it's mostly used for historic names only. That is, Trump is written like that, and not as we would pronounce (something like "Trámp")

In general, if the source language has a latin alphabet, we try to stick to the original spelling in most cases, but it is not uncommon to replace non-Hungarian letters with the closest one. It's a bit more complicated in case of non-latin alphabets, especially Cyrillic due to a lot of shared history.


You are wrong.



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