mistakes on tv

Georgian TV commentators lack elementary geography skills.eg this morning one state TV reported about one Australian sky diver that dived from 38 kilometers ,another private TV reported it as Austrian skydiver.a few days ago a reporter on state tv was speaking about the UK and said the kingdoms of great Briton.a couple of weeks ago one reporter on state TV said,Sydney the capital of Austria,and many more.my football addict friend told me that sport commentators always incorrectly pronounce footballers names.how is the case in your countries?

The confusion of Austria and Australia happens, sometimes through inadvertence and sometimes through ignorance. I have seen T-shirts on which there are an image of a kangaroo and the words "There are no kangaroos in Austria."

As to the pronunciation of names, it's always a pleasant surprise to me when a Slavic name gets pronounced correctly.

British news coverage of the Olympics managed to scramble "Khinchegashvili" and "Modzmanashvili" beyond recognition.

I don't know how well announcers do with NFL players here, because I don't know whether my pronunciation of Umenyiora, Houshmanzadeh, Ayanbadejo, Ngata, etc is any better than theirs.

A series of prank airport announcements went viral on the net about years ago. The jokers set up their recording microphones in the lounge, asked the information desk to announce "please will Makollig Jezfahted and Lefdaroum Dabasted just arrived from Cairo please make their way to the information desk where your driver is waiting."

Another announcement requested the attention of "Arheddis Varkenjaab and Aywelbe Fayed".

There's a tv ad in Canada promoting Kraft's new cheese product, Habenero Heat. The same ad mentions jalapeños. The error in pronunciation in the ad is with "habanero" that is repeatedly pronounced as though it were "habañero" with the enye sound as in canyon. Not. The word is derived from Havana.

Note, dear Vinny, that so is Carmen's "Habanera," NOT habañera. And all your life.... What?

Same problem in reverse with piña colada, being incorrectly pronounced as peena rather than peenya. Well, AND jalapeños being pronounced jalapeenos. And and and. Or maybe we should just stick to OP's tv ads here.

Mixing up Australia and Austria isn't uncommon. Neither is Switzerland and Sweden. But, that happens outside Europe (and Australia I guess).
I remember reading an article in a newspaper in New Orleans, reporting results of rowing competition during the Olympics in Athens. It was only by the German names of the winning team that I could understand that they weren't Australians, as they were called in the newspaper.

There were mixups between Slovenia and Slovakia at the time they were joining the EU.

British news coverage of the Olympics managed to scramble "Khinchegashvili" and "Modzmanashvili" beyond recognition.

When I was a child, I remember seeing on Blue Peter - a BBC magazine program for children that often included BBC propaganda - that the BBC has a pronunciation unit that would instruct newsreaders and other script readers on how to pronounce names - and not just foreign ones since British ones can also be a problem. Since they usually got their scripts without time to practice, they needed to be prepared, and cool enough not to flunk on complicated looking names, to English eyes. They would often borrowing a newsreader and get him/her to read a fake passage with lots of long names. I recall that back then the Zimbabwean politician Ndabaningi Sithole was considered a particular test of a newsreader's composure, and of course reading Llanfairpwllgwyngyll... in the long form would be the tour de force.

It was my observation that even quite recently most football commentators made a reasonably good fist of pronouncing footballers names in international matches, such that one presumes that they must have been coached in it, despite otherwise adopting a rather low register form of English that is compulsory for those involved in football, unless they are not British. (Thus Arsene Wenger speaks more schoolishly "correct" English than Jimmy Redknapp.)

However recently many BBC sports commentators, and indeed many news reporters and documentary presenters, seem to have had no coaching whatsoever, and commit appalling solecisms. I suspect this may in part be a function of the fact that increasing quantities of footage is contracted out, and thus these people do not have access to central pronunciation services. But there also seems to be an increasing use of lower register forms of English by commentators and the like, and perhaps making a hash of foreign names is seen as part of that register, despite my prior comment on the football commentators until recently.

Some people do just seem to do it quite deliberately, even when they are academics, and do know better. There is a certain fashion in some corners for affecting complete ignorance of foreign languages, that extends even to some academics who specialise in foreign matters. For example, I recall someone complaining that a certain academic with expertise in Icelandic matters routinely referred to the Icelandic location Thingvellir, spelled in Icelandic with the Icelandic character thus Þingvellir, as Pingvellir. He must surely have been perfectly aware that saying Pingvellir is a terrible solecism (after all it is perfectly normal to write Thingvellir if you don't find typing using Icelandic characters convenient), and thus must have persisted in doing so deliberately. Maybe he even thought, falsely I think, that doing so made him easier to be understood by his English-speaking audience.

Another common situation is that the commentator appears to solve the more difficult pronunciation problem, while getting the easier problem completely wrong. The golfer José-María Olazábal routinely suffers this at the hands of English-speaking commentators, both British and American. Of course all sorts of different mispronounciations are heard, but the oddest occurs when the commentator correctly produces a Castillian J and a Castillian Z, but puts the accent on the wrong syllable, ie, they say Olázabal (but typically with very un-Spanish vowels). You'd think if you could get the J and the Z right, you could also put the accent just where it was rather obviously marked (though of course maybe they don't usually see it correctly marked). But however mispronounced, I don't think I have ever heard his name accented where marked by a TV commentator.

an increasing use of lower register forms of English by commentators and the like, and perhaps making a hash of foreign names is seen as part of that register, despite my prior comment on the football commentators until recently.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "lower register." I associate "lower register" with music--the lower tones of a voice or musical instrument.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "lower register."

That should have been "less prestigious/formal register". Registers in linguistics are different forms of language for different social situations. I used the term register because I am implicitly accusing the broadcasters of deliberately adopting less formal/prestigious forms of speech, and registers are different forms of speech a user chooses. But plainly there is also an issue of dialect here, with more and less prestigious dialects across different social groups.

Actually the French news/sportscasters have become pretty good with Slavic names, because the French sports world is full of them now, as all of the children who came to France as refugees from the Balkan wars are now of the age to be in professional sports.

What always got me, though, was how they have always called Greg LeMond "Greg Lemon."

Maybe the sportscasters are better, but the regular newsreaders are not, especially with Slavic names.

What always got me, though, was how they have always called Greg LeMond "Greg Lemon."

He has a French name and they pronounce it in French. Hardly surprising.

I expect Spanish speakers in Los Angeles pronounce the name of the place where they live in the original Spanish way.

No, they say lemon like the English word lemon! They do not pronounce it in French at all.

I saw that Zac Efron also pronounces his name a peculiar way.

There are real trip-ups with some HIspanic names. I have known people named Chavez who are CHA-vess and those who are shuh-VEZ. Gomes can be Gomes (rhymes with homes) or GO-mes.

Someone got hold of the 2008 guide to baseball player names from ESPN which has three ways to pronounce Flores
Randy FLORES (floor-ez)

Jesus FLORES (FLOW-rays)

Jose FLORES (FLOR-es)

Maybe the sportscasters are better, but the regular newsreaders are not, especially with Slavic names.

A local radio news station has a running joke between the news broadcasters and the sports broadcaster about tennis tournaments and how well the sports guy will do with the names.

I think Gomes is Portuguese (or Brazilian or, as with the late Harvard chaplain Peter Gomes, Cape Verdean, etc).. The Hispanic equivalent would be Gomez.

Peter Gomes surprised me by making it one syllable.

There was a Gomes hereabouts who developed political ambitions and decided that it would be to his advantage to be distinctly Hispanic, so in his mid-40s, he suddenly became go-mess. Apparently worked--he got a nice gubernatorial appointment.

Around here, it's most likely to be Azorean.

There are real trip-ups with some Hispanic names

I once met someone in London called Suarez, who I was aware was a fairly recent immigrant. So I pronounced his name as in Spanish. He asked me not to, and then explained to me that actually he was Portuguese. They had changed their name from Soares to Suarez, since the way most English read Suarez was more acceptable to them than the way most English read Soares.

I know a Serbian who is a Professor at a leading British university. If you ask him his name, he tells you something which an English person might read his name as. For those who also know how to pronounce it in Serbian, he asks them not to use the Serbian, as he doesn't want to confuse people.

I have a Spanish friend, now living in The UK, from Malaga called Carlos.
He prefers to be called Charlie.

I have always been intrigued by the pronunciation of the extremely common Vietnamese name Nguyen. In the U.S. I think it is generally pronounced "new-yen" but in France everybody says "en-gwee-yen" which seems totally incorrect, but the local Nguyens do not seem to mind...

Apparently, even the Vietnamese do not agree about the pronunciation.

Le nom Nguyen, issu du vietnamien Nguyễn (Prononciation en vietnamien du Nord : /ŋwiən˧˩˥/, en vietnamien du Sud /ŋwiəŋ˧˩˥/ ) écrit 阮 en caractères anciens, est aujourd'hui le nom le plus courant parmi les familles d'origine vietnamienne.

Its quite common in the UK for foreigners to adopt versions of their name that are easier for English speakers to pronounce. My uncle (by marriage) Boudewijn is known by his middle name, Felix, for this reason. My former neighbour, Stanisław, likes to be known as Stanley. Immigrants of Chinese origin usually adopt English first names unrelated to their Chinese names, but retain their chinese surname.

in France everybody says "en-gwee-yen" which seems totally incorrect...Prononciation en vietnamien du Nord : /ŋwiən˧˩˥/

I'd say that was not too bad actually.

I'd always taken it to be something like ngoo-yen. I'm now please to learn it is something like ngwee-en.
Starting words with ng is something lots of English people think is too difficult to be attempted, but it isn't difficult at all if you make a bona fide attempt. A lot easier than saying Thursday in Czech (čtvrtek).

in addition to andrew's contribution above, i met a chinese girl from the US once while travelling, and her first name was Doris. i thought that was really bizarre, and she explained that her parents, who did not speak english well and were not too familiar with english / american first names thought Doris was a beautiful, fashionable first name for an american girl, so they decided to call her doris...
... and poor doris will be forever asked how she come to have that name...

on a different note though, as part of my degree in geography i went on a field trip / excursion to china. that was ten or so years ago, and there are many things i don't remember well. however one thing i do remember that really struck me was that at the time i was there, there seemed to be a fashionable thing to do on, which was that - and i am not exaggerating - everyone walked around with their eyes only half opened. and this was really everywhere and everyone.

i don't know if this is still a fashionable thing to do in china to only open your eyes partly, but i wonder how this fashion or fad came about. were they all imitating some pop stars or some person they look up to, who also happen to only partly open their eyes?

if you have never been to china, it will be difficult to understand what i have described above, but believe me, they walk around with their eyes half closed / open, even when they sun has gone down and it is dark.
i wonder how they can see anything when driving a car at night.

has anyone else noticed this super bizarre 'custom'? what was your experience, what did you think?

A lot easier than saying Thursday in Czech (čtvrtek).

What's so hard about that?

*25....

You know a Chinese girl called Doris.... I know a Chinese lady called Dorothy. She is my sister-in-law.
Before she married, she was Dorothy Wong. She's now Dorothy Hughes.
About as non-Chinese as one can get, I reckon.

i thought that was really bizarre

Why would it be bizarre for a Chinese-American to be named Doris?

and poor doris will be forever asked how she come to have that name...

I doubt it very much. "Doris" is a rather old fashioned name, but it is not at all unusual.

Often, when the Chinese go to language school, they are assigned a 'local' name that tries to be not too far from their real name. (This is true in plenty of other countries, too.) Therefore, my Chinese colleague Jue-Fen became Joséphine, and she kept this name for ordinary usage when she moved to France.

doris herself told me that most people found it amusing that she had that name, especially because it just did not suit her, and that she often got comments from people looking surprised.

I haven't read all of this so please excuse me if I'm repeating myself. He was an Austrian skydiver. His name is Felix. He did his dive in Southwest New Mexico. Just so you know.

just heard it on tv now
Illinois,the capital of chicago state

Illinois is definitely not the capital of Chicago state, nor is Chicago the capital of Illinois state. Springfield is the capital of the state of Illinois. Tell your TV announcer!