Born and raised in Mumbai, India, and a speaker of no less than five languages, Pinky Thakkar found herself referring to the city of San Jose as “San Joe’s” – an experience that sparked the idea for a reference site for pronunciations. In 2006, the San Jose State University computer engineering major gathered a group of friends to brainstorm the foundations of pronouncenames.com.
Though she had received her education in India primarily in English, Thakkar says that the English spoken there used different pronunciations. Upon her arrival to the United States in 1998, she found herself mispronouncing words, as well as others’ mispronouncing her name.
“It’s a great idea… I can see it being a very useful thing,” said Alexander Malcolm, a first year student at De Anza College who was pleased with the results of looking up his own name on the site.
“You sometimes think people are going to use the Web site in one way and then they end up using it differently. [So] usability was one of the problems, how to make it really simple to use,” Thakkar said.
Many people, it turned out, aren’t familiar with phonetics or comfortable submitting phonetics. Now users can explain how they want their names pronounced using rhyme suggestions or words containing similar syllables. Short sound files were later included as well.
The site has received primarily positive feedback, even featured on the site teacherresources.com, though some visitors, according to Thakkar, get very angry when they can’t find a pronunciation.
“I cannot do anything because we don’t submit data; the users submit pronunciations. We believe that users will know how to pronounce their own names,” said Thakkar.
“Sometimes the names are spoken too fast, sometimes it’s a little garbled,” said Oleg Shabrov, another De Anza user of the site.
In the future, Thakkar hopes the site will be linked to Facebook and online rosters, so that teachers need only click on a name in their roster in order to hear or read its pronunciation. She believes the site will also be useful to businesses including airlines or even hospitals.
“It is especially important if you have an unconscious patient,” said Thakkar.
Additionally, she hopes she will be able to add pronunciation descriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and in multiple languages to assist those who might just be confused further by descriptions written in English. She also hopes to add a sound synthesizer that produces sounds from listed phonetic descriptions to avoid relying solely on user-produced sound.
“I think it’s beneficial, but it ought to have a larger database of names,” said Sapphire Fein, a first year student at De Anza, who contributed an entry after searching for her own name and finding no results
Today, Thakkar’s site includes roughly 75,000 to 80,000 words, some of which might be multiple spellings of the same name.
