ဆွေးနွေးချက်:ကမ္ဘာပေါ်တွင် နေထိုင်ရန် အကောင်းဆုံး မြို့ကြီးများ

Name translations

Hello, I've made some pronunciation changes mostly along their English pronunciation. Just wanted to explain why I've made the changes, and more importantly, how you can use it going forward...

Please note that:

• The sounds of "k", "p", "t" in English are aspirated in most cases. That is, they should be pronounced with "kha", "hpa" and "hta" sounds (as opposed to Burmese English's "ka", "pa" and "ta" unaspirated sounds.) Only in certain cases--e.g., a short sound following another letter: sky, sty, spy, etc., are unaspriated sounds used in Standard English (British and American). In American English, the letter "t" when not stressed can sound like a "d" as in "letter". The British Received Pronunciation (RP) is much more careful about enunciating/aspirating the sounds than in American (or Canadian) English.
• The letter "s" corresponds more to the Burmese letter "sa" not "hsa". I haven't made changes to "Sydney" or "Mercer", (and won't make the changes because they're close enough.)
• The sound "er"/"ir"/"ur" doesn't have an equivalent sound in Burmese. The closest is "ah" in Burmese. (So "Perth" can only be approximated with "Parth" in Burmese translation.)

Tip: Check out a dictionary for the pronunciation. When I'm not sure about the pronunciation of a word, I reference an online dictionary for its pronunciation. A lot of English Wikipedia entries also have their native and English pronunciations.

Cheers, Hybernator ၁၅:၃၀၊ ၂၇ နို​ဝင်​ဘာ​ ၂၀၁၀ (UTC)

Thanks for your correction. This is a wiki spirit anyway. ပုံမှန်အားဖြင့်တော့ ကျွန်တော် forvo လို Website တွေမှာ Native Speaker တွေအသံထွက်ြပတဲ့ အသံကို နားထောင်ြပီး မြန်မာလို ပြန်ရေးပါတယ်။ Zawthet ၁၈:၀၂၊ ၂၇ နို​ဝင်​ဘာ​ ၂၀၁၀ (UTC)

You make a good point about using the native pronunciation as much as possible. I see some of you have already done that with China related articles (using Mandarin pronunciations.) That's also in line with the Burmese journalistic tradition of using native names where possible: E.g., Paris (Paris), Roma (Rome), Praha (Prague), etc. But I suspect we'll continue to translate most foreign names from English since most of us are familiar with English only. Hybernator ၁၆:၁၇၊ ၂၈ နို​ဝင်​ဘာ​ ၂၀၁၀ (UTC)