To ask how you would pronounce this name?

[Notss]

Hi all,

Sorry if this is the wrong place:

My little sister is expecting her first child and if it is a girl wants to call her “Sian”.

She sent it to me in a text and I replied “What - like See-Ann?” And she told me I was being daft.

So how would you pronounce such a name?

It's not a silent R to people of some regions. Can you not accept that some regions will pronounce an R if it's there?

There is no R In Sian. There's no need to put an R in there. 3 simple sounds Sh...elongated A...N. No R!

It's a silent R. Stop telling English people how to pronounce a silent R

English people put a silent letter in the English pronunciation of a welsh name and then bitch at people for calling them out on it??

Sharn is a Scottish word. It means shit. Sounds apt.

The pronunciation is Shan. Or Shaan if you want to be phonetically pedantic.

Is this still happening?

Look, I am not an authority on the subject, but I have a keen amateur interest in languages in general. In a past life, I spent more hours than I care to think about closely reading pronunciation guides of varying qualities and listening to recordings of native pronunciation in multiple languages, in efforts to produce a decent accent by the time of my A-level orals!

Can we just take it as read that almost everyone on this thread is probably pronouncing Siân correctly, other than the sigh-annes and the see-annes?

Fact is, recording pronunciation in a written form that is 100% accurate and also 100% legible to any reader, whatever their own linguistic background, is a professional speciality. No nasturiums need to be thrown at anyone in this thread for not managing it. All the votes for shaans, sharns and shahns are people trying to describe the same name. It is true that tways are more location-specific that others and would be actively misleading to a reader raised elsewhere.

We can also take it for granted that any Welsh MNer who votes for shan is also going to be pronouncing it correctly. Again, exactly like the controversial sharn, their method is grounded in their linguistic background. It probably works for anyone local to them, just like sharn works for a Londoner explaining to another Londoner that it isn't bloody sigh-anne. Shan would be actively unhelpful in the latter situation, exactly as writing sharn is unhelpful to any Scots MNer with a rhotic accent.

I have absolutely no idea what is going on with shan advocates who are not Welsh. Maybe they're pronouncing it correctly, maybe they're not.

English people put a silent letter in the English pronunciation of a welsh name and then bitch at people for calling them out on it??

This seems a bit oxymoronic. You explicitly can't put a silent letter in the pronunciation of something. They're putting the r in to clarify that it doesn't sound like a short a. In this case, the r serves the same function as the silent o in Phoebe- take the o out, and you have phebe which looks like the split digraph e_e and gets pronounced feeb.

Look, I know it looks wrong, and when you read it, it is automatically not Siân, but these are English people who are at least trying to work out how to pronounce it. At least they are not blindly and arrogantly insisting that it looks like sigh-an, and so it must be.

Shaan and sharn are pronounced identically in my accent.

Its Shan.

It's not a silent R to people of some regions. Can you not accept that some regions will pronounce an R if it's there?

I will accept that if you can accept the point that when other people are writing "Sharn", they do not mean the say "Sharrrrrrn". They are describing how they would say the word, which is an identical sound to "Shaan" and "Shahn" (as distinguished from "Shan" as in "shandy", which is not how they say the name.)

[rolls eyes so hard they hit back of head]

This seems a bit oxymoronic.

You could even say it puts the "moronic" in "oxymoronic".

Shan would rhyme with can, ban man etc.

I wonder how French people feel about seeing bonjour transcribed as bon-zhure and so on in children's phrasebooks.

"This seems a bit oxymoronic. You explicitly can't put a silent letter in the pronunciation of something. They're putting the r in to clarify that it doesn't sound like a short a. In this case, the r serves the same function as the silent o in Phoebe- take the o out, and you have phebe which looks like the split digraph e_e and gets pronounced feeb."

But if you were writing Pheobe phonetically for the benefit of something who didn't know how to pronounce it, you wouldn't bother with the "o", would you? It'd be something like Feebie.

Just as I was writing any word phonetically with a silent letter, I wouldn't put the silent letter in. So the "r" causes confusion because it's NOT being said, and "r" does nothing to denote an elongated "aaah" sound.

I understand that it might SOUND like "Sharn", but I can't get my head around WRITING it if it's not actually being said that way.

Sharn
Welsh for Jane
Scottish for shit

Actually Llama - unless you pronouce llama l-am-a as in the am bit makes the same soumd as am, bam, wham.
Its l-arm-a to isnt it

Actually since it's a Peruvian word (but our spelling comes from the Spanish) the 'll' is pronounced 'y' and the 'a's are both short so it's yama.

So the "r" causes confusion because it's NOT being said, and "r" does nothing to denote an elongated "aaah" sound.

Yes but the confusion should have disappeared about 17 pages ago when people said that for them, "Sharn", "Shaan" and "Shahn" are identical sounds.

Sharn to rhyme with yarn, which has a silent R to indicate that it's not pronounced "yan".

Bum I don't understand what you are talking about- if sharn sounds like Sian why wouldn't you write it that way if trying to explain the pronunciation to someone?

But. You're. Not. Saying. R.

Sh-aah-n

And r does everything to denote an elongated r sound. It's the difference between ban and barn, yan and yarn, dan and darn etc.

Dave

The point is that pairing two letters together (as in Phoebe, another word that used to have a ligature, as discussed up-thread) can be more clear than having one, even when the second letter of the pair is silent and apparently actively useless.

Now let's go on to why else people might plump for ar over aa or ah. Frankly put, I'm been thinking about it since last night, and I think phonetic transcription that look like familiar words are more successful. Shaan? Looks really foreign. Shahn? Looks really foreign.

Sharn? Easy and familiar, capitalising on the instant recognition factors of common English words. It's actively unhelpful for too many people, but this is specialist knowledge.

And finally, this photo is from a Welsh dictionary for the English written by Heini Gruffyd...

GoneForFood how very dare you! It’s clearly Drave (silent r )

If I had never come across the word Sian before and read this thread I wouldn't think that Sharn = Shahn. I would think that Sharn = ShaRn. Obviously I'm in the minority on this one.

I don't say rrrr in any words though unless it is the initial letter which I imagine is the same for most British accents. Those that roll the r are in the minority aren't they?

*Heini Gruffudd, sorry.

Those that roll the r are in the minority aren't they?

I'm 50, I've was born and have lived in Scotland my entire life. In that time I have met only one Scot who didn't roll the r. She had a speech impediment.

So when we see Sharn, it is the same as Sharon! The r is not silent!

Sharn to rhyme with yarn, which has a silent R to indicate that it's not pronounced "yan".

A silent r for some perhaps - mostly in some parts of England. I and other Scots pronounce the r in yarn. The silent R is not a thing here!