Győr

Yesterday’s brief mention of Brno triggered interest in its pronunciation. In Czech it is ˈbr̩no, two syllables, the first having a stressed syllabic trill. Mendel, though, being a native speaker of German, would have known it as Brünn brʏn.

Inspired by this thought, Stephen Bryant sent me a picture of the Nový Most (‘new bridge’) in Bratislava, which I show in reduced size alongside. He adds the comment

What I really like about this photo is the green panel on the sign, pointing to Brno, Žilina, Győr and Vienna, four cities in four countries, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Austria respectively.

Perhaps the pronunciation of Győr — which I for one struggle with — could be the subject of a future blog entry.

Győr is pronounced ɟ(ʝ)øːr. You can tell the name is Hungarian, since the letter ő, with its double acute accent, is used in the spelling of no other language (or at least, no other European language). The logic behind this unusual diacritic is that Hungarian uses a diaeresis, as in German, to show front rounded vowels (ö, ü), and an acute accent, as in Czech, to show vowel length (á, é, í, ó, ú): so for long front rounded vowels you have an acute diaeresis (ő, ű).

There is some debate as to how the initial consonant, orthographic gy, is best classified. All agree that it is a voiced palatal obstruent. The question is whether it is a plosive, ɟ, or an affricate, ɟʝ. The 1999 IPA Handbook treats it as an affricate, but adds this note.

In formal style /cç, ɟʝ/ are realized mostly as palatal stops, i.e. [c] and [ɟ].

Its predecessor, the 1949 Principles booklet, says simply

c, ɟ cardinal palatals.

Anyhow, the result is similar to the English gj in regular. The vowel is as in German schön; the final consonant is an apical tap, or in my experience may alternatively sometimes be fricative. Listen here.

Győr has a number of names in other languages: as well as nativized forms such as Дьёр in Russian and Đur or Jura in Croatian, it has the apparently unrelated name Raab in German. But as far as I am aware there is no traditional anglicized form of the name.