In 1864 the French author, Jules Verne, published his novel “Journey To The Interior of the Earth”. In this book 3 men explore volcanic tunnels that lead miles beneath the Earth’s surface, and have a number of strange encounters along the way. One of these is the discovery of a massive ocean, deep underground. Now, 150 years later, it seems that Monsieur Verne’s imagination may have been more accurate than he knew.
An enormous reservoir of water, roughly 3 times bigger than all of the Earth’s oceans put together, has been detected 400 miles below the surface. The water is trapped inside a layer of blue rock called ringwoodite, in the layer of hot rock between the Earth’s core and its surface) that is known as the mantle.
Do you ever wonder why people can’t pronounce your name correctly? Or struggle to say a friend’s name right sometimes? Here Avani tells us about her experiences, and how we can make the effort to pronounce things as best we can!
Do people always get your name wrong?
My name is Avani and let me start by saying: I get it.
Sometimes I spend ages teaching someone how to say my name properly (Uvni would probably be the best way to write how it’s pronounced) and other times I really can’t be bothered. I wish I had an easier name, or that people would just work harder to get it right!
Why do we find some names really difficult to pronounce and others really easy?
Here in England, people have names which come from all over the world. These names might be from places where a different language is spoken, and the different languages may also use different letters or characters to those we use for English.
My family, for example, come from a part of India called Gujarat. The Gujarati language uses a syllabary (a set of sounds) rather than an alphabet, but the syllables don’t always match up with English letter. The ‘v’ in ‘Avani’ (વ in Gujarati script) should actually be pronounced somewhere in between the English ‘v’ and ‘w’ sounds, but there isn’t an English letter that sounds exactly the same and this makes my name harder for people to remember! Also the ‘a’ and ‘u’ sounds in Gujarati are written using variations of the same symbol (અ (u) and આ (a)), which is why my name is spelt with an ‘A’, but pronounced using a ‘U’. Here’s what ‘Avani’ looks like written in Gujarati: અવનો – cool, right?
Languages which do use the same letters as those in English, may not pronounce all of them in the same way. This means that names that look similar on paper may be pronounced differently depending on where in the world someone lives. In Spanish, for example, the ‘j’ and ‘x’ letters are more like (but not identical to!) the English ‘h’, and in German, the letter ‘j’ sounds more like the English ‘y’ – can you imagine all the different ways people around the world must pronounce ‘Jesus’? You can listen to a few here!
It’s not only names from other countries that are hard to pronounce though! Have you ever thought about which common English names might be tricky for someone learning the language to get their head around? What about the name ‘Thomas’? We say it with a hard ‘T’ (like the one in ‘tree’, rather than the one in ‘three’) even though it is spelt with a ‘Th’, and we say the name ‘Charlotte’ with a ‘Sh’ sound (like in shop) even though it is spelt with a ‘Ch’ (like in chop). It must be hard to keep up with which names follow the usual pronunciation rules (like Theo or Charles) and which ones don’t!
What can I do if I think I’m pronouncing someone’s name wrong?
It is always worth checking with someone if you think you’re saying their name wrong – even if you’ve known them for ages and are embarrassed about asking, chances are they’ll be really glad to have an opportunity to correct you! However, it’s also important to remember that even if you know that the way someone says their name is different to the traditional way of saying it, you should always say their name like they have asked you to. Many people living in England, for example, prefer to go by a nickname or a more ‘Anglicised’ (English-sounding) version of their name to make things a little easier – so if you know a ‘Jesminder’ who prefers ‘Jess’, or a ‘Paulo’ who prefers ‘Paul’, you should respect their decision!
If you’ve just met someone new and have forgotten how to pronounce their name (or even if you’ve met them a few
times) – don’t despair, they probably won’t mind if you ask them again! If you are too embarrassed, though, there is a huge variety of pronunciation websites out there which will be able to help you. Click here for a good one!
Do you have a hard-to-pronounce name? Or have you ever been in an embarrassing situation over getting someone’s name wrong? Do you live in another country – which English names do you really struggle with? I’d love to hear your stories!
As well as trying to get people to say her name right, Avani Shah is currently working on a book for 8-12 year olds. She also blogs about her childhood and teenage experiences (Away with the Mice) and writes about words, etymology, and spelling for a website called Spellzone.
Where else can you find great Science Resources for Kids? You can browse our archives here on Jump! Mag or you can check out the following sites.
We will update this list in the coming months, and will concentrate on resources you can access online – lectures, TV Shows, YouTube channels, online archives, websites and blogs with science tutorials so that you can roll up your sleeves and get stuck into science.
We will update this list regularly, so if you have something cool to add, let us know.
Sparxx is an initiative bought to you by the Women’s Engineering Society (WES).
Their aim is to bring you all the latest news, views, events, opportunities, careers, interesting stuff, fun stuff and freebies to help girls find inspiration for future careers. Sign up for their newsletter here.
The CHRISTMAS LECTURES® are entertaining and informative science events for young people, broadcast on UK television every year. You can watch them online here. Prepare to be amazed
UPDATE
The Royal Institution have just launched Experimental, a series of YouTube videos with great and simple experiments for parents and children to try at home. Find their YouTube Channel here.
Real science, online – The Zooniverse is home to the internet’s largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. You can choose to help researchers characterize bat calls, or explore Mars, without leaving your house.
Six awesome courses in one awesome channel: John Green teaches you US History and Hank Green teaches you Chemistry. Check out the playlists for past courses in World History, Biology, Literature, and Ecology
Bill Nye is a scientist, engineer, comedian, author and inventor. His mission is to make science fun, and help people understand the science that makes our world work. Here are the Home Demos, the experiments you should try at home sometime. Keep clicking around and you’ll find the Episode Guides.
Edheads is an online educational resource that provides free science and math games and activities that promote critical thinking. You can design a mobile (cell) phone, repair a weakened aorta or learn about simple machines, and much more.
This is a site that links to lots of other sites – we loved the Amusement Park Physics – design your own roller-coaster but be careful because if you get the science wrong… DISASTER!
Silvia is a young girl from California, USA and she’s been making Super-Awesome webshows on making cool stuff since 2010. She demonstrates science experiments, and great craft projects. You’ll never be bored, when Silvia is around!
The kids pages on Nasa are awesome, and that is before we get to the videos of ELMO at NASA. Science and Sesame Street. It doesn’t get much better than this.
Veritasium is a science video blog featuring experiments, expert interviews, cool demos, and discussions with the public about everything science – these are at times more advanced, but well worth a look.
Engineering is Elementary is a project of the National Center for Technological Literacyat the Museum of Science, Boston (MOS). They have fantastic resources for teachers and home-ed families, on a range of topics. Some of the content is free to use, and the teaching guides and stories can be purchased on the site.
If your parents are on Twitter, get them to follow @realscientists – a rotational twitter account featuring real scientists, science writers, communicators and policy makers talking about their lives and their work. Tweeters from different fields of science and science-related fields.
Have you got a favourite painting? Mine is ‘A Portrait of the Countess Golovine’ painted by Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, sometime around 1797. It is, unsurprisingly, a portrait of Countess Varvara Nikolaevna Golovine, a talented musician and artist from Russia. Elisabeth and the Countess became great friends and I love the way the Countess is smiling in the portrait, with a red shawl draped around her shoulders and her dark curly hair swept up in behind a scarf. The painting belongs to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, which is one of my favourite galleries.
I love going to art galleries and looking at paintings, but at first I found it quite a daunting thing to do. Have you ever been to an art gallery and not known where to start? Or heard art critics talking about symbolism, composition and form but not understood? Sometimes looking at art can sound difficult, and talking about it can be a whole other language!
But looking at art doesn’t have to be complicated. Things like symbolism, where objects in paintings are used to represent something that’s happening, like a skull symbolising death, can be important and the composition, or the way things in the painting are arranged, can tell us a lot about the artist and why the painted what they did.
If you have learnt a foreign language, or if you are bilingual in another European language, you may have noticed that there are a number of words that are similar to words in English. Perhaps you may even have been told that some of them are derived from Latin or Greek, or that they have Germanic roots. But why is the pronunciation so often so different in English?
