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I'm not normally a follower of fur-clad supermodels, but a linguistic conundrum clings provocatively to Gisele Bündchen.

She is of German descent, but is Brazilian born. As a German, her name is [ˈɡiːzələ ˈbʏntçən]. However, that's very un-Portuguese. Listening to the presenter on this video, her name is lusitanised as [ʒiˈzɛli ˈbĩtʃĩ]. I wonder if one person can have so different pronunciations of her name.

— Garzo has vital statistics.

Garz, none of your characters showed up on the board but from the video I take it they're saying Gisele Bündchen as "zhee-ZHEL-ee BEEN-she"? Quite an elision (collision?) on the last name. Whereas German would be something like GEE-se-leh BÜND-shin...

In a twisted way it's good to see we USAians aren't the only ones saddled with such level of vacuous TV!

Another interesting note: -chen is a German diminutive, leaving Bünd as the root of her last name. In Brazil I believe bunda is slang for derrière...

Now over to BD for more...

I've heard her name in countless ways. I don't even think she herself pronounces it as a German would (and she probably doesn't speak German, anyway), and I think that's quite normal, both the ch and the ü in her name being hard sounds to Portuguese speakers.

Brazilian dude

How about the ancient Greeks? We say [?u?s????iz] for Thucydides. They probably said something like [t?uky?dide?s].

...And that totally did not work, did it? Damn Unicode-uncompliant web apps.

Unicode not showing up here is a bit of a worry. Try changing the character encoding (most browsers will put it under the 'view' menu) to 'UTF-8'. You might need a good Unicode font like Code2000. That should help. I'm still not sure what would be the more correct pronunciation of Bündchen's name. Thanks for pointing out that she is 'little bum', which seems appropriate for a model.

As for Thucydides, I would say [θuˈsɪdʌdiz], and the ancient Greeks perhaps said [tʰuːkydidɛːs], but, of course, no one can see my beautiful IPA!

— Garzo.

[quote="Garzo"]Unicode not showing up here is a bit of a worry. Try changing the character encoding (most browsers will put it under the 'view' menu) to 'UTF-8'. You might need a good Unicode font like Code2000. That should help. I'm still not sure what would be the more correct pronunciation of B�ndchen's name. Thanks for pointing out that she is 'little bum', which seems appropriate for a model.

As for Thucydides, I would say [θuˈsɪdÊŒdiz], and the ancient Greeks perhaps said [tÊ°uË

Yes I can! Thanks Garzo!

Try changing the character encoding (most browsers will put it under the 'view' menu) to 'UTF-8'. You might need a good Unicode font like Code2000. That should help.

Should, but didn't. Often it helps to copy such passages to Word and apply the font. Slightly better but not perfect.

What doesn't work might be a length sign, and probably a stress mark at the beginnings of names. It's like some Greek quotes on other boards, where all acccented vowels fail. Tahoma had acceptable size relations between the schwa and other letters Code 2000/2001 had too large schwas.

If I switch to UFT-8, I can see the IPA, but I can't see letters with umlauts. Does that make any sense?