Yes, at least as I understand NRLEP. It's her real (middle) name. Ditto for Neil Peart.
Edited by offa
What about the trope Bowdlerise, which is sourced from the real name of Thomas Bowdler?
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I would say Bowdlerise is a bit different since people who mispronounce the trope name are not directly referring to Thomas Bowdler himself, and may in fact be unaware of who/what the trope is named after. That is definitely a potential grey area though.
I dispute Twilight Lord's recent entry about the pronunciation of Mario. Many, many people in the UK and some even elsewhere who have played many of his games and heard him say his name in an Italian accent hear it as "Marry-o". To my own ears that's what it sounds like. The claim that it is just "people who know the game but haven't played it" who use this pronunciation is clearly false, as the implication that the "Mah-rio" pronunciation should be obvious to anyone who hears Mario saying his own name. It sounds like that to a lot of people, but not to everyone, as it depends in large part on the listener's own accent what they approximate it to.
Most Americans and Canadians have something called the Mary-marry-merry merger
, meaning they pronounce "marry" as "merry" and to them it clearly won't sound right. But to people without the merger, it's much less clear cut.
See this video of a native of New York City (one of the few places in the US that doesn't have the merger), of Italian descent to boot, explaining that "Marry-o" sounds closer to him.
As Official Nintendo Commericals in the UK use the "Marry-o" pronunciation and always have done, and as far as I can tell Nintendo has never proclaimed "Mah-rio" as the only true pronunciation.
I think the entry should be removed, and I would do just that now if I hadn't already removed a similar entry once.
(To be clear: I'm not saying that "Marry-o" is the only correct version either. I'm saying that the way that English-speakers approximate the Italian sound (which is somewhere in between the two versions) will vary depending on their own accent, that both "Marry-o" and "Mah-rio" are legitimate pronunciations, and there should be no entry about Mario on this page).
Edited by offa Hide / Show Replies
To be clear: Charles Martinet et al have always pronounced the a as in "far". The British pronunciation, in which the a is as in "marry", is incorrect for this specific Mario.
The incorrect pronunciation being rendered here as "Marry-o" is the cause of the problem, because of the aforementioned Mary-marry-merry merger. But at the same time, "Merry-o" doesn't make sense on my side of the pond.
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Martinet does indeed say "Mar-rio" like in "far" when speaking in his normal American accent. But when he puts on an Italian accent to voice Mario, he says it differently. You can hear both within the first 13 seconds of this video. To my ears, the way he says it in his Mario voice sounds more like the "A" I would use in "marry" than the "A" I would use in "far".
I don't see how the rendering as "marry-o" is the problem. For people without the merger who use the alternative pronunciation of Mario, "marry-o" is the most accurate representation of how they say it, not "merry-o" or "Mary-o". (I have witnessed online discussions where an inaccurate rendering as "merry-o" by North Americans with the merger has caused a lot of confusion, but that's not what's happening here).
To people without the merger, the way that people with the merger say all three words sounds like "merry". The way unmerged people say "marry", and hence "Mario" is not replicable in merged accents because that sound combination just isn't "allowed".
This is why merged speakers can see it as "wrong", because they mentally translate what they hear from unmerged speakers to "merry-o" without realising they're doing it, and "merry-o" is indeed pretty far from what Martinet says in his "Mario voice".
But to many of those who don't say "marry" as "merry", the way Martinet says "Mario" in his Mario voice sounds closer to how they would say "marry-o" than anything else they could say with the combinations of sounds that exist in their accent, including "mar-rio".
And I think that it is surely the way Martinet says "Mario" as Mario, not as himself, that should be the key here. As a California native, he couldn't say "marry-o" as distinct from "merry-o" in his own accent anyway.
To claim that "mar-rio" is the only correct pronunciation, I think you would need something from Nintendo proclaiming it as such, not just North American Nintendo employees with the marry-merry-Mary merger saying it like that. And, I'll say it again, "marry-o" is used in official Nintendo commecials in the UK.
Since there has been no further response, I will take that as implicit consent to remove the entry. I did send the Troper who added it back a PM with a link to this discussion, but they have not raised any objection.
Responding very late to this discussion, but I think there's a more solid basis for the "far" pronunciation being the correct one (even if Wikipedia goes with both). In addition to Martinet's example in the games, other portrayals of the character in both English and Japanese media (e.g. the DiC cartoons, the live-action film, and various Japanese-language works) consistently use the "far" pronunciation. The only official media that doesn't use the "far" version, as far as I can tell, are various North American ads from the '80s, similarly to Giygas' example. As for the Mary-marry-merry merger, one suggestion I heard to get around it and similar dialectal issues is to use IPA symbols to transcribe pronunciations (e.g. mɑːrioʊ), since those have a clearer standard.
Be kind.
Would you not consider Nintendo commercials broadcast in the UK to be "official" media?Because they say "marry-o".
(In case it wasn't clear, that was intended as a genuine question, not a sarcastic rebuttal).
As I said before, the way Martinet says Mario (in his pseudo-Italian accent) in the games sounds closer to "marry-o" than "mar-io" to British ears.
Edited by offa
Yeah, I overlooked the UK commercials, sorry about that. That said, ads on either side of the Atlantic aren't really decisive factors considering the aforementioned issues with Giygas' namenote . Regarding Martinet's pronunciation, it and other actors' renderings are derived from the Japanese pronunciation (マリオ), so I guess the real deciding factor is whether or not a Japanese "a" sound would lean closer to "far" or "marry" among UK listeners. The closest reference I have for that is MasakoX, who uses the "far" pronunciation when reading Japanese names (e.g. Masako Nozawa, which is where his handle comes from; he reads out said handle here, to give an example).
Well that will depend in part on which UK accent you're talking about, as the actual sound quality of the "short A" in "marry" (as well as "cat" etc, linguists call this the "TRAP vowel" and "far" the "START vowel") can vary quite a bit in different UK regional accents!
According to Wikipedia (so take with the necessary pinch of salt), the "a" vowel in Japanese is IPA [ä] , i.e. an open central vowel that lies roughly equidistant between the fronted [a] of "marry" and back [ɑ] of "far" in London accents. This would make the two vowels in question equally close approximations of the Japanese "a", with neither being a perfect match.
But elsewhere in the UK, these vowels can vary. In much of Northern England, the "marry" (TRAP) vowel is a more back [ä], i.e. similar to what Wikipedia claims is the normal Japanese <a> vowel. The "far" (START) vowel can be a rounded [ɒ:] in parts of the North East and East Midlands, which is not a good fit for the Japanese "a" at all.
See this commercial voiced by someone with a broad Northern English accent. If you're not used to hearing this accent, it might sound like he's using the "far" pronunciation for Mario but he's not, he's saying "marry-o"; notice that when he says "Mario magic" the "a" in "Mario" sounds exactly the same as the "a" in "magic", this is a North East England "TRAP vowel"note . We don't get to hear his START ("far") vowel in the advert, but he sounds like he's from the North East where it's often a rounded [ɒ:].
Sorry, I know this is a lot of complicated phonetics, but I hope it demonstrates why determining the "correct" pronunciation of foreign names for English speakers can be complicated, and vary for different accents of English. Some accents have vowel mergers that are not present in others, and even when no mergers are involved the actual sound quality of vowels can vary, meaning the vowel that closest matches the one in the "foreign" name can vary.
If you have the marry-merry-Mary merger, as the majority of North Americans do, then the "far" pronunciation is clearly the closest match for "Mario", but if you don't (no British accents have this merger) then it's much less clear cut and the answer may not even be the same for all UK accents.
I think an example should only be listed on this page if it is clearly, unambiguously a mispronunciation, and I think that this case is too ambiguous, open to interpretation, and dependent on regional accent to be listed on the page.
Does the Rihanna example violate NRLEP, because it's the real name of a person who happens to be a musician?
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