How to Pronounce Your Favorite Director's Name

[knives]

I have to imagine if English speakers would have a clear assumption on pronunciation would also be important. Bergman looks like something you’d see in America, but Ingmar looks decidedly foreign and pronouncing it correctly is something you can get away with.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I'm so used to hearing some directors' names mispronounced that when I hear them pronounced correctly I'm not always sure who's being referred to, even if it's the pronunciation I use myself. "Jia Zhangke" especially.

I recently spent more time than I probably should've figuring out how Pema Tseden's name was actually pronounced, since the Mandarin rendition 万玛才旦 Wanma Caidan is so different from the romanized spelling that I couldn't help but wonder. Eventually I determined that "Pema Tseden" reflects the pronunciation in Lhasa Tibetan, but in his own dialect it was "Walma Tseden." But I also decided that calling him "Walma Tseden" in English-language contexts would be needlessly confusing, so I can't exactly do much with the information.

[knives]

This is a more general thing, but right now I’m watching Jude’s amazing The Exit of the Trains and while most of the time the surname is said second several time the family name comes first. Does anyone know the reason for this?

[Matt]

My understanding is that using the given name first is a more familiar form of address. Using the family name first is more formal. So it’s contextual, and similar to the difference in French of using “tu” to say “you” with family and close friends and using “vous” with others.

By the way, how does one pronounce “Radu Jude”? Is it just like it’s spelled?

[knives]

That’s interesting but might not work in context as it’s usually in the film with family members talking about one another.

His name should be pronounced something like Ra-doo Sood-e. The J is somewhere between an s and a z.

[Lemmy Caution]

I'm so used to hearing some directors' names mispronounced that when I hear them pronounced correctly I'm not always sure who's being referred to, even if it's the pronunciation I use myself. "Jia Zhangke" especially.

I recently spent more time than I probably should've figuring out how Pema Tseden's name was actually pronounced, since the Mandarin rendition 万玛才旦 Wanma Caidan is so different from the romanized spelling that I couldn't help but wonder. Eventually I determined that "Pema Tseden" reflects the pronunciation in Lhasa Tibetan, but in his own dialect it was "Walma Tseden." But I also decided that calling him "Walma Tseden" in English-language contexts would be needlessly confusing, so I can't exactly do much with the information.

Things can get tricky with Chinese. Pinyin is the dominant romanization system as it's s used by mainland China. But there are two earlier romanization systems, Yale and Wade-Gilles. I think it's the latter which is standard in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong. For example, in pinyin there is the family name Xu, written as Hsu in W-G, both referring to the same surname character and pronounced identically as Shoe.

Then further complications ensue when using other Chinese languages aside from Mandarin. In your example above, Caidan is clearly using pinyin and mandarin, while Tseden is likely neither. But they both approximate the same/similar sound. Caidan would be sigh-don; Tseden looks like seh-duhn or seh-den. And it is entirely possible the director uses both a Chinese and a Tibetan name.

A similar case is Chiang Kai Shek, a cantonese name rendered in an older romanization system, which no mainlander would recognize at all. They know him by his mandarin name Jiang Jie Shi. He used both names depending on context.

Notice the family names tend to be similar, as there are only a bit over 100 common Chinese family names. Which have been set to verse. And one way to refer to the masses in China is "Old Hundred Names."
One significant exception is the very common surname Wu, which is written and pronounced Ng in the south of China, if you know how to pronounce Ng.

Pinyin is relatively easy to use once you learn a few basics. Q = ch sound; X = sh etc. Pinyin utilizes a lot of the lesser used Roman letters, so Chinese wind up with unusual initials such JZK for Jia ZhangKe, which is pronounced basically Jah Johng-kuh. The g and k kind of get blended together with the g partly/mostly disappearing. And technically the Jia is Jee-AH, but the initial ee sound after the J is veryshort and subtle, so it sounds close enough leaving it off altogether (unless you pronounce it slowly -- the trick with Chinese is it sounds better and is easier to understand if you speak quickly. Or conversely if you speak slowly you need to get the tones and sounds correct, while in faster speech such concerns can be elided. Of course when first learning Chinese it is hard to speak quickly, so learning phrases is encouraged).

Hope that helps some...