to be a bit fed up with all this Anna/ARNA business

[itsnotjustastick]

Its finally getting on my tits!

I can cope with the songs
I can cope with the invasion onto EVERY product

I can even cope with incessant begging on FB 'does anyone have a spare...?'

But really hearing people say 'ARNA' instead of Anna just tips me over the edge and makes me lose my Christmas spirit.

I know that that's how her name is pronounced in the film, but i live in England and we say ANNA.

[trots off to open the christmas sherry early]

No they don't say Ahna (we pronounce our r's so Arna doesn't work as a phonetic rendering.) We say Anna as in the name Ann then the a. It was my great grandmother's name and now my granddaughter's. But we do have quite a few people with the name Ana (the Spanish counterpart). That name is pronounced Ahna (or Arna if you have a non-rhotic accent)

Dd (4) thinks that the characters in Frozen are called Elsa and Arnold

Many people here have suggested that "ahna" must be the Nordic way of saying "Anna". I don't think it is. Americans have an odd myth that the letter "a" is pronounced "ah" in all languages other than English, and that myth seems to be spreading over here now too. I did a little research.

All the Norwegian pronunciations of "Anna" on forvo sound closer to our short "a" than to "ah": forvo.com/word/no/anna/#no

as do the Swedish ones: forvo.com/search/Anna/sv/
and the Danish: forvo.com/search/Anna/da/

I am enjoying this thread, spending lots of time trying to work out the difference between Arna, Ahna, Barth, Baaath etc. No idea where everybody is from but none of these sound "right" in my accent!

If you say 'fill ay' in Britain people will, rightly or wrongly, think you're a pretentious twat.

In French they don't pronounce the s on the end of herbs. So Americans have a sort of French- English hybrid pronunciation with 'erbs', not a French one.

I am enjoying this thread

Have you been enjoying it for 3 years, because that's how old it is.

steff