Tim Chevalier writes:
... I think the usual convention is to pronounce names in the manner of the language that the person who has the name speaks. (Preferably just to pronounce people's names the way they say them.)
(The first convention doesn't work with my last name, though the second one does.)
Oh, people! I try hard to degenerate this discussion into a pure delirium traemens, and you still keep its serious intellectual contents intact! I bet that you don't even smile, writing your terrible off-topic postings! If you wish so... Tim, there cannot be any USUAL CONVENTION, unless you are conditioned by your anglo-saxon keyboard. There is no truly established way to translate non-standard diacritics. Even without, there are pronunciation variants, look how many versions of "Mustapha" names there are in the world. Try to transmit my family name to a Japanese, using Katakana (which, being syllabic, gives you many choices...) The information world today is far from a purely oral tradition. I think that the only sane attitude is just let people distort everything as they wish, and don't get nervous. Those distortions are unavoidable, languages are evolving creatures. ... And a good part of English has been established by those Francophone Vikings who won the battle of Hastings in 1066, beginning their campaign from where I usually live and work. ... Not forgetting that before them there were Danish Vikings, coming from the place where I sit now... Arigato gozaimasu. Jerzy Karczmarczuk. PS. If you think that "arigato" is a genuine Japanese word, well, check how the appropriately translated word is spelled in Portuguese...