Don't you find that those of us with English as our mother-tongue have a strong tendency to be lazy and/or unadventurous with unfamiliar foreign names?
Yes and no.
I've been reading through my brother's lingustics textbook, and I came across discussions of importing words. Speakers of any language tend to subconsciously know the patterns which are "acceptable" in their language, and often adjust imported words to suit the "rules" of sound which are acceptable.
As an example I offer you "yogurt". This is originally a Turkish word, spelled identically but with a little line over the "g" (this is called "soft g"). This letter is not pronounced in Turkish, but just blurs the "O" and "U" sounds together so it sounds like "yo-oort" - similar to the French pronunciation of their version of the word. English speakers find this a difficult pattern to pronounce, and I guess since the "g" was there anyway (and we didn't know that the symbol above it softens it), we decided to pronounce the g and ended up with "yo-gurt".
This does happen in other languages. When we lived in Italy, my brother Daniel was generally referred to as "Daniele" (dan-ye-leh) because Italians prefer words to end in a vowel sound, and Daniele is the Italian version of his name. Also it seems the Italian word for "click" (as on a computer mouse) is "clic". It is not pronounced with the short "i" - this doesn't exist in Italian - but is prononouned "kleek" - since our letter "i" says "ee" in Italian.
In spite of all this, I like to try and pronounce my friends' ethnic names more or less accurately. I agree that it's annoying that most people don't really try, but I guess I can see why. Some names just don't follow the innate "patterns" which English-speaking people have grown up with. Still - I love having friends from other cultures - and I think we'd go farther at fostering some international understanding with a little effort!
