It just occurred to me that if I'd gone to the "Night before the Oscars" party, Linus would have been the only one I'm 100% certain I would have recognized and been certain about his name.
You wouldn't believe it but for many of us non-native english speakers, his pronounciation is obvious and sounding naturally, while the "english'ized" one is funny if not ridiculous.. ;)
You're right. Once I learned about "Latin vowels" a lot of things fell into place in regards to pronouncing foreign names and places.
This goes far outside of just the Latin-derived languages. We use the Latin alphabet, after all. So if the language can be written with this alphabet somehow (even if the locals don't usually use it), there's a pretty good chance that you should assume they use the Latin vowels, too.
No guarantees, but I've managed to surprise more than a few people by pronouncing things correctly.
The difference is that most languages don't reduce so many vowels to schwas. If you just pronounce the vowels, you'll do much better with non-English words. And assume i = ee, a = ah, etc.
That's true, first time I heard it when applying for an internship, I had hard time to understand what the interviewer is talking about. Now I watch more conference videos.
