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capmidnite
Asianometry
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Comments by "capmidnite" (@capmidnite) on "How The Soviets Split Carl Zeiss" video.
To everyone trying to point out the correct pronunciation of "Jena", it's like expecting an English speaker to pronounce Paris as "Paree".
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6:48 I think the Ship of Theseus analogy applies only to physical objects, not corporations and foundations which are essentially creatures of legal fiction.
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For English speakers, it would be pronounced with a hard "J." Do you expect an English speaker to pronounce the capitol of Bavaria as "Muenchen"?
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@indahooddererste Well, it depends on if there's a commonly accepted word for an American place name in your language. And I'm sure if a native from your country that couldn't speak English at all pronounced "New York", it might come across as something different.
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Except J is never "Y" in English. Why don't English speakers pronounce Munich as "Muenchen"?
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@arsic094 "Uneducated people see a familiar letter in a foreign word and pronounce it as if it was their own language." But what if the English-pronunciation of the foreign place name has been long accepted and used by everyone from journalists to diplomats? Examples: Paris, Munich, Moscow. Pronouncing "Jena" with a hard "J" sound is a far less butchering of the original than the examples I gave. 99% of the time an English-speaker will pronounce it with the hard "J."
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Not mentioned in the video is how after WW2 major German corporations had to give up their patents and IP as part of war reparations. Zeiss lost patent protections for their lens designs and cameras such as the Contax. The Japanese manufacturers Nikon and Canon swooped in. The Contax formed the basis for the Nikon S cameras which in turn formed the basis of the F cameras. After the F cameras came out, the Germans played second fiddle to the Japanese in the professional and mass consumer SLR camera market. Zeiss's current dominance in the lithography machine market at the expense of the Japanese seems like a bit of sweet revenge.
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This question has been covered in the discussion thread. That's the German pronunciation. You wouldn't expect an English speaker to pronounce Paris as "Paree"?
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@MichaelT_123 Is pronouncing Muenchen as Munich a mis-pronunciation of the German?
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@kurt9395 Um, that's exactly what I've been trying to say. And even for so-called obscure place names, an English speaker looking at the word "Jena" in print would pronounce it with a hard "J".
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The hard "J" is how it is pronounced in English. Like how Nurnberg is pronounced Nuremburg, Muenchen is Munich, Braunschweig is Brunswick. Jena is Jena in written English because I guess it's a simple name.
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