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Camera IconAdrian Barich for STM.Credit: Michael Wilson/The West Australian opinion
Adrian Barich: Splutter season is upon us, cue your favourite mispronunciations
Adrian Barich STM June 30, 2024 2:00AM
Comments TopicsOpinion
It’s a challenging time in Barra World. I’m being tested on a daily basis and my powers of concentration are being called into question. Don’t panic though: this is not about what you might term a serious life problem but about a difficult, demanding, exacting, taxing need to be correct. It happens every year at this time — I call it “splutter season”. And this year it started with the French Open women’s champion.
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Her name is Iga Swiatek. I’m sure you’ve heard of her but I’m equally sure you’ve been mispronouncing her name for years. As a sports presenter it’s my job to get it right and help spread the correct pronunciation. (Don’t worry, it was news to me too). The first name Iga is actually EE-ga like eager and the surname is shvee-YONE-tek. (Bet you can’t get it right first time).
As my friend with a Polish wife keeps telling me, stress is almost always on the penultimate (next-to-last) syllable in Poland and there are actually three sounds in Polish that do not exist in the English language. Imagine my surprise when I googled “Polish for Dummies” and a book popped up. If ever a book title suited a reader, this was the one.
And while I’ve got you, when he was in Perth, Novak Djokovic confirmed that his name is in fact pronounced: “NO-vak” “JOKE-oh-vich”. Similarly Alex de Minaur helped us out with this phonetic spelling: “AL-eks” “duh-min-OHR “.
Not everyone is open to this type of advice though, I must say. One of my favourite memories of the great media commentator George Grljusich was an argument I had with him over how to say the name of Russian tennis star Anna Kournikova. George was adamant her surname was pronounced Cor-nick-o-va. This despite me telling him that Anna herself had said it was Corn-nee-cova. George’s response? “Well, she’s wrong.”
It probably won’t surprise you to hear that myself and some of my colleagues at 7NEWS
