Whether they or other white people count themselves as white, it's still about othering the indigenous, descendants of slaves, and so on in order to maintain their higher class position which is tied to having European ancestry, speaking a western European language, and being Christian. This feels like a distinction with a difference that only matters once they've left their countries for one that doesn't count them as white or when interacting with the imperial core.
I got a warning for endorsing violence after responding to a person justifying the shooting of Renee Good. They asked why an ICE officer should risk bodily harm standing in front of a moving car and I said something to the effect "because they're a scumbag and they would be doing everyone else a favor by rendering themselves unable to perform the functions of their "job"." Apparently it's endorsing violence to answer someone's dumb hypothetical question about an officer getting run over, but it's not endorsing violence to say it's cool and good that they for real shot someone in the face.
That's completely normal based on how French allows syllables to be structured compared to English. In French, the name is one syllable, /favʁ/, with the /ʁ/ on the outside of the syllable. That is really unusual across languages, and English doesn't allow it. It's even kind of weird in French, and when a word starting with a vowel comes after words that are structured like this, the /ʁ/ actually gets shunted over to start the next syllable so that "Favre est" is really more like "Fav rest". English speakers have a few options to fall back on if they're trying to pronounce the name according to English syllable structure, because they are overwhelmingly not going to keep the original French structure intact. They can:
delete the /ʁ/ and just say /fɑv/, prioritizing syllable count over keeping all the segments
add an extra syllable with a schwa on either side of the /r/, making /fɑvrə/ or /fɑvər/, prioritizing keeping the segments over keeping the syllable count
metathesize the last two consonants to say /fɑrv/, prioritizing both syllable count and keeping the segments while sacrificing the exact ordering of the segments
All of these are common strategies in borrowing loanwords across different languages.
Most people don't pronounce the /h/ and I guess some of them flip it with the /r/, so I don't think they actually are saying it the way that he does. Both of those are completely understandable changes to make based on English's syllable structure rules because /h/ is only allowed before vowels in English. So it's kind of a matter of deciding whether you delete the /h/ or keep it and put it in the wrong place if you're not used to hearing or saying it at the end of a syllable.
Ah, gotcha. Even with Mamdani, I can see why people might flip the consonants on the first try. English tends to assimilate nasal consonants - /m/, /n/, and /ŋ/ (as in song) - to match the mouth position of whatever consonant follows them. In the case of /d/, that would mean the expected nasal before it would be /n/, because they're both pronounced with the tip of the tongue and /m/ uses the lips, so flipping the place of the /m/ and the /n/ makes it fit better with the expected phonetic structure of English words and I would believe people doing it accidentally because the brain likes familiar patterns. BIG HOWEVER, we still do allow clusters of /md/ in some rare words like Camden and where two morphemes (units of meaning) meet, like in ram+-ed becoming rammed /ræmd/. So if you consistently fuck Mamdani's name up when he's your biggest political opponent, you are probably being an asshole and probably playing it up for racists, because after the first correction it should not be a problem to straighten out the consonants in his name
I'm not at all joking about the autocomplete thing, to be clear. Kids learning to read have literally been taught to guess words based on the first couple of letters and the surrounding context. The rules of spelling to pronunciation correspondence - however complex they are - are treated as a fallback for when context and guessing don't work. I see it all the time. If they don't have the instinct to sound out words in a random paragraph, they're probably not going to start doing it for some random person that they aren't ever going to directly interact with.
in his name? That's not really a thing in American English - /h/ can only appear before a vowel, not before a consonant or at the end of a syllable. The pronunciation of the
<a>
is also a tossup between /æ/ as in hat, /ɑ/ as in spa, and for traditional New York accents, /eə/ as in man. So while it isn't too hard to guess since /ɑ/ is the most common match for foreign words with
<a>
, it's not a 100% guessable name even using the English rules.
Japanese has a lot of Chinese words due to borrowing and its writing system is modified from a Chinese base, but the language itself is not derived from Chinese. We have no evidence that they're even in the same language family.
Whether they or other white people count themselves as white, it's still about othering the indigenous, descendants of slaves, and so on in order to maintain their higher class position which is tied to having European ancestry, speaking a western European language, and being Christian. This feels like a distinction with a difference that only matters once they've left their countries for one that doesn't count them as white or when interacting with the imperial core.