South African city of Port Elizabeth becomes Gqeberha

[Saruku]

The ANC don't really give a sh**t about what the whites or Coloureds think.

That must be why the disparity between the average white and black South African has increased since the end of apartheid.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Having a name almost no one can pronounce is sure to do wonders for the local economy. I can understand the desire to rename the city, but the chosen replacement is idiotic. Very few languages involve clicks.

I'm sure the 35% of South Africans who speak Xhosa as a first or second language will be pleased to know that you consider them "almost no-one".

In any case, people who don't speak the language will find a way around it. English (it applies to every language but it seems that especially English) speakers already have great experience with butchering names that sound weird to them. They could also, y'know, try to approximate the correct pronunciation, but... haha.

So I read the new name as "ge-KEH-ber-haw". How close am I?

[Estrella]

Having a name almost no one can pronounce is sure to do wonders for the local economy. I can understand the desire to rename the city, but the chosen replacement is idiotic. Very few languages involve clicks.

I'm sure the 35% of South Africans who speak Xhosa as a first or second language will be pleased to know that you consider them "almost no-one".

In any case, people who don't speak the language will find a way around it. English (it applies to every language but it seems that especially English) speakers already have great experience with butchering names that sound weird to them. They could also, y'know, try to approximate the correct pronunciation, but... haha.

So I read the new name as "ge-KEH-ber-haw". How close am I?

The IPA transcription is [ᶢǃʱɛ̀ɓéːxà]. The most complicated part is the ᶢǃʱ at the start, aka voiced alveolar velar click, the pronunciation of which is... hard to describe in text (it's Zulu, not Xhosa, but it still applies). A good approximation would be (click)e-be-kha, with e as in get. But you also have tones there (falling ɛ̀ and à, rising é)... and you see where the problem is: describing the pronunciation of one (1) word took me a whole paragraph.

But that doesn't matter at all because this is going to become like, say, Johannesburg. The name is obviously from Afrikaans and the "technically correct" pronunciation is [juəˈɦanəsbœrχ], but [dʒoʊˈhænɪsbɜːrɡ] has become the accepted English version. Who knows, maybe something like your version will get chosen.

For the record, I don't actually think that would be bad. I'd love if non-Xhosa speakers would try to pronounce it "correctly" (quotes for a reason), but it has long been an opinion of most linguists that people who like to hector others that This Is How You Must Say Stuff can fxck right off.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Having a name almost no one can pronounce is sure to do wonders for the local economy. I can understand the desire to rename the city, but the chosen replacement is idiotic. Very few languages involve clicks.

I'm sure the 35% of South Africans who speak Xhosa as a first or second language will be pleased to know that you consider them "almost no-one".

In any case, people who don't speak the language will find a way around it. English (it applies to every language but it seems that especially English) speakers already have great experience with butchering names that sound weird to them. They could also, y'know, try to approximate the correct pronunciation, but... haha.

Especially since English speakers torture millions of English learners with that archaic th sound.

Also, it is not uncommon that there are different names for the same place in different languages. Munich - München, Cologne - Köln, Venice - Venezia, and all those exonyms you can think of.

It is fully within the right of the self-determined people of any place to do this if they wish.

Spanish and Greek have both /th/ sounds.

Yes, I know. Still, most languages don't.

Yes, dental fricatives are uncommon among world languages, but are generally easily approximated by other consonants close in articulation. Clicks are even less common, and not easily approximated by anything else. That said, the problem isn't giving the city a new name in Xhosa, but imposing it upon other languages that don't include the phonemes in the new name.

[Amanda Huggenkiss]

Having a name almost no one can pronounce is sure to do wonders for the local economy. I can understand the desire to rename the city, but the chosen replacement is idiotic. Very few languages involve clicks.

I'm sure the 35% of South Africans who speak Xhosa as a first or second language will be pleased to know that you consider them "almost no-one".

In any case, people who don't speak the language will find a way around it. English (it applies to every language but it seems that especially English) speakers already have great experience with butchering names that sound weird to them. They could also, y'know, try to approximate the correct pronunciation, but... haha.

Especially since English speakers torture millions of English learners with that archaic th sound.

Also, it is not uncommon that there are different names for the same place in different languages. Munich - München, Cologne - Köln, Venice - Venezia, and all those exonyms you can think of.

It is fully within the right of the self-determined people of any place to do this if they wish.

Spanish and Greek have both /th/ sounds.

Yes, I know. Still, most languages don't.

Yes, dental fricatives are uncommon among world languages, but are generally easily approximated by other consonants close in articulation. Clicks are even less common, and not easily approximated by anything else. That said, the problem isn't giving the city a new name in Xhosa, but imposing it upon other languages that don't include the phonemes in the new name.

I don't know much about the process of renaming cities in South Africa; if that was a decision made against the will of the majority of the populate, it is of course wrong. But I don't see why self-determined people should not be able to name something just because English speakers (or speakers of other languages) don't like it. It will work. People will find a way. People have always found a way to pronounce foreign places.