Apocrypha Now II: The Revenge of Samuel Pepys

It could be that they were hip-hop fans, calling out to their peeps.

Maybe if we’re lucky Nat Whilk will show up and show us his mad Lexis-Nexis skillz to offer some help here.

This seems pretty common in academia due to the combination of lots of independent reading and little contact time. I’ve heard the name ‘Keohane’ pronounced several different ways and I remain confused as its correct pronunciation. See also ‘hegemony’.

This is a problem for anyone who read above their grade level in school.

Some words that are/were problematic for me (in terms of pronunciation; I use the present tense because despite awareness of the correct pronunciation, I sometimes slip and say the wrong thing):

epitome (I was in college before I connected the word as written to the word as spelled)
mauve
lingerie
pedant
homogeneous

I’m sure there are others that my listeners have simply been too polite to point out to me.

Oh, and I only recently learned the correct pronunciation of Pepys myself.

@ #5: or who had an ethnically narrow set of friends/relations. I did not know the proper pronunciation of the word “yarmulke” until I was in college.

It dawned on me in junior high that those “naughtsies” I’d heard about were the same guys in books I’d been pronouncing (in my head) as “nazzies”…

I discovered last year (while reading the dictionary) that outside Ireland, “woman” is pronounced with the O sounded as the U of PUT rather than the U of BUT. I still can’t hear any difference in this case. Obviously I would have found out years ago if I’d used a smaller dictionary.

Re Keohane: I discovered watching Frasier that “Mickey Spillane” is pronounced (at least by effete Harvard-educated psychiatriasts) with the vowel of PLAINT rather than PLANT; the latter is standard in Hiberno-English for names ending –ANE (Strabane, Spillane, Keohane, etc.)

Re “Spinal Tap”: but did listeners identify the spoken “Peeps” with the written “Pepys”? For years I thought the USA had separate states called “arKANsas” and “ARKansaw”.

Re “epitome”: I remember a kid in “Spellbound” being drilled by his father, who intoned EPP-ee-toam, which son spelled E-P-I-T-O-M-E. If the kid had got asked to spell uh-PITT-uh-mee in the Finals, the film would have won an Oscar.

This happens to me a lot with proper names. Since I don’t watch television news, but do read a lot of political weblogs, there are lots of names of people and places that I’ve read dozens of times but have never heard pronounced. Occasionally I’ll overhear one when my wife is listening to NPR, and say to myself, “Oh, that’s how that’s pronounced.”

Two names from my graduate work (and dissertation) gave me these kind of problems: film director Frank Borzage and Congressman Martin Dies.

In both cases, I knew, as soon as I encountered these names on the page, that any pronunciation I came up with was likely to be embarrassingly wrong. At least in the case of Dies, there were only two plausible options.

Benny Hill used to sing a song about a voyeur: “…but naughty Samuel peeps”.

I was in my late teens before realizing that the (written) word “misled” and the (spoken) word “mis led” were the same word.

“not knowing how to pronounce Paul Revere.”

– I hate to ask, but how is it pronounced?

“not knowing how to pronounce Paul Revere.”
– I hate to ask, but how is it pronounced?

It’s pronounced “Throatwobbler Mangrove.”

Some mispronunciations are willful. In my youth, I met Harvard philosophy profs who pronounced Kant “can’t” simply because they could. Some of them pronounced Nietzsche as if it almost rhymed with “itchy.”

@#26: There may be some names that are more safely mispronounced than pronounced correctly, like that of the Judaic studies scholar Shlomo Pines.

A key demystification of the professoriat:

Me: “[Blah blah blah desperate scrabbling to sound smart plus various garbled terms in German]…Val-ther Ben-ya-meen in the Arcardes Project…[blah blah]”.
Fancy-pants professor: “Who? Oh. I always thought it was Walter Benjamin.”

Also, I can’t pronounce Goethe. Luckily, none of my friends are interested in him, so what I say goes.

Ben Alpers at #23:

You’re still mispronouncing it. It’s actually “Throat Warbler Mangrove”.

I did not know the proper pronunciation of the word “yarmulke” until I was in college.

This is the only thing for which I owe Adam Sandler gratitude.

As a graduate student, with an MS in Physics already obtained, I gave an informal talk in which I referred to Hans “Beeth.” An attendee pointed out in written comments that Professor Bethe’s last name wasn’t pronounced that way. But heck, I had always read it.

It’s pronounced “Throatwobbler Mangrove.”

Oh, FOOCH! All this time I thought it was “Throat warbler,” as in “Common yellow throat warbler.” Yet another way in which I’ve been making a fool of myself revealed, and I owe it all to Ben Alpers, Hypervillain.

Jim Harrison- it is (or at least was) common in England to pronounce many foreign names as if they were English. Kant is Can’t, Nietzsche is Nicheh, Rousseau is ROO-so. Your professors had probably spent a year at Oxford and wanted to make sure you knew it.

My freshman year college humiliation was Facade.

We discussed some of these on my blog recently. My contribution was a family member, who in the 1960s when doing a EFL teacher training course, said to one of the instructors “It’s on boo-un-dowry lane’, to which he replied, “I think you’ll find its Boundary lane, my dear”

A friend contributed the apparently (others had heard it) apocryphal story of an Australian friend of his who had arrived in London and was staying with someone else. He called friend up and said, “I’m at Looger-Boorooga Junction” [Loughborough].

And my favourite was someone in the office who owned up to believing that “misled” and “misled”, but pronounced “my-zuld”, were different words.

On one of our early dates, my (now) wife corrected my pronunciation of renege. Apparently she saw something worthwhile there (or perhaps enjoyed having an easy way to lord it over me).

A couple of other words that I have not had problems with but irk me:

niche
homage
Syracuse (local pronunciation in NYS is Sarahcuze, rather than Seeracuze)

Anyone want to hazard a guess on where the accent should be located for the 2nd word of the 2nd of the Jewish High Holidays? When I was growing up, they were pronounced in good ol’ Amercun fashion, as Yom Kippur. Ever since late 1973, it seems like it’s been Yom Kippor. Along with the substitution of kippoh for yarmulke, as well as more significant things like AIPAC and the neo-cons becoming the public face of American Jewry, I feel like that part of my heritage has been stolen from me.

#37: My recollection of the Sorrow and the Pity includes being impressed with Eden’s apparently equal facility in English and French, and his pronunciation of the French city as Kalay, when speaking French, and Callous when speaking English.

He called friend up and said, “I’m at Looger-Boorooga Junction” [Loughborough].

This one is relatively common I expect, I was on a train between Nottingham and Leicester last year and the American couple behind me were talking about where they had to get off, pronouncing it LOO-burr-OO (probably going to East Midlands Airport, as theres not a lot of other reason to get off there).

Personally the worst case I remember was the group of us that played D&D as kids/young adults – we had numerous adventures into The Abyss, pronouncing it with three syllables rather than two Ab-ee-ISS or something like that. It does teach you something about language though – that version was perfectly workable for us for a decade. I guess it is more likely when using a word that is very rare in normal speech (unless you are a mountaineer or something I guess).

#43 – You sure of that spelling (kharpa)? You might want to take a gander at

http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol08/vol08.010

Search on shanda.

And stop twirling your moustache!

As a kid I was also “missiled” about misled.

My (brilliant and wonderful) diss advisor, bless her heart, could not pronounce anything French to save her life. She often made reference to the great postmodern theorist Jock DeRitta.

Darn. That would have made a great internet commenting name.

Philosophy football.

At age six, during a read through (!) for a class play about cowboys, I pronounced OK as one syllable. It still burns.

At Trinity College Dublin I spent my first term telling friends I’d be over in the Ber-ke-ley library.

As a lawyer, I find plenty of confusion over pronunciation of latin terms. The bar has its own system, like a shibboleth that marks out advocates from the office bound paper pushers. But I guess the best advice is to pronounce as if english – or, just stick to english. Mind you, the title of the Aeneid and of its hero, Aeneas, is some kind of marker of thorough education.

My favourite mispron is from the usual source:
“O Mr Homer, you are so learn-ed.”
“He he. That’s learned, son. Learned.”

And how does anyone really know that the man himself pronounced it Peeps?

Re #36, I learned that from a limerick in the Encyclopedia (1929, article on limericks, and yes, it says something about me that I #1 read it and #2 remember it.)

The lifeboat that’s kept at Torquay
Was intended to float in the suay;
The crew and the coxswain
Were sturdy as oxswain,
And as strong and as bold as could buay.

Some of my greatest embarrassments, a couple of which I believe I’ve mentioned here at CT before: pronouncing authoritatively on the ancient Greek philosopher Soakraits; trying to figure out from a freshman dorm friend without revealing my ignorance the difference between those two hot-new 80s Australian bands, “Inxs” and “In Excess” (heard the latter on the radio all the time, but it was the former’s albums which I saw in the stores); and, my favorite, spending a year or two when I was around seventh grade showing off my pseudo-European sophistication by shouting down the school hallways some hip Italian parting that I had learned everybody in New York City said, at least according to my Spider-Man comic books: “Kaiyo!”

Kirkcudbright.

PS- ben alpers, I wouldn’t say that the adoption of Hebrew pronunciations “came along with the triumph of Zionism in American Judaism since World War II.” The older pronunciations are Yiddish. The demise of Yiddish as a living language has a well-known cause that cannot be attributed to Zionism.

And more to the point of the thread – I learned early on to say Bor-hess, with the appropriately gutteral “h,” but I still managed to embarrass myself by pronouncing his first name as “George.”

oops. That’ll teach me to not read the previous frickin post.

*For years I thought the USA had separate states called “arKANsas” and “ARKansaw”*

I had the same problem but could never find ARKansaw on the map. I finally learned the correct way to say the word, but when we moved to Wichita, had to change my mind since the river than flows through is pronounce arKANsas until it crosses the Oklahoma border.

I got through a whole early medieval PhD on the Carolingians wrongly pronouncing them with a hard rather than a soft G. While that’s not as blatantly a different pronunciation as the Pepys, it arose despite the fact that I did hear the correct pronunciation frequently. Whether the loose connection was ear to brain or brain to mouth I don’t know. I only changed because a friend of mine commented on it and I consciously worked at the different pronunciation.

But any continental medieval historian encounters so many of these problems you just get innured to it. For example, however you pronounce ‘Rheims’ it won’t make sense to some of your audience. And what counts as the correct pronounciation anyhow of the Medieval Latinized version of the Germanic name of a person who would now be considered French, like ‘Angilbertus’? You just have to smile sweetly, give it a try and put the key names on your handout.

I wouldn’t say that the adoption of Hebrew pronunciations “came along with the triumph of Zionism in American Judaism since World War II.” The older pronunciations are Yiddish. The demise of Yiddish as a living language has a well-known cause that cannot be attributed to Zionism.

It’s the triumph of modern Hebrew (an extraordinary instance of the revival of an essentially dead language) that I attribute to Zionism, not the (near) demise of Yiddish. Those Yiddish pronunciations were also, of course, used for (Biblical) Hebrew and Aramaic by Jews across Eastern Europe.

And on a subject similar to Arkansas…

Is there any rhyme or reason to the fact that there’s a town in Michigan called Mackinaw City that sits on the Straits of Mackinac, and both Mackinac and Mackinaw are pronounced “Mackinaw”?

Anyone from Dublin will be familiar with the sight of baffled tourists gazing helplessly at signposts to Dun Laoighre.

jim harrison at #70:

Well, Xueqin is “Shue-Chin”. I have a friend whose first name is Xuequn.

ben alpers at #42:

Remember it’s pronounced as Throat Warbler Mangrove, but it’s actually written as Raymond Luxury Yacht [yatched] !

Unfortunately, all my best mispronunciation anecdotes involve western foreigners mispronouncing Kanji, which are Chinese characters adapted to the Japanese language, in which each character has two (or more!) readings depending on context.

Remember it’s pronounced as Throat Warbler Mangrove, but it’s actually written as Raymond Luxury Yacht [yatched]!

Dinsdale!

I live 20 miles from Buena Vista (byoonah vista), but a couple thousand miles from Buena Vista (bwaynah veestah).

Pepys Road is in New Cross, just up the road from Greenwich. I’ve not been there lately but the locals all pronounced it “Peppis”. Of course, it doesn’t date from the 17C, but even so.

This is off topic to the main conversation, but:

The demise of Yiddish as a living language has a well-known cause that cannot be attributed to Zionism.

The disappearance of Yiddishkeit in the 1950s is attributable to the success of political Zionism, McCarthyism, and the closure of US immigration in 1924, in that order of importance, I’d say. The choice of Hebrew as the language for Israel and the imposition of political Israel as the sine qua non of American Judaism is by far the greatest cause for the decline of Yiddishkeit among American Jews.

“The disappearance of Yiddishkeit in the 1950s is attributable to the success of political Zionism, McCarthyism, and the closure of US immigration in 1924, in that order of importance, I’d say.”

I would say that the disappearance of Yiddishkeit in the 1950’s is attributable to the murder of 5 and half million native Yiddish-speakers and the systematic destruction of the sources of Yiddish culture, but that’s just me.

I would say that the disappearance of Yiddishkeit in the 1950’s is attributable to the murder of 5 and half million native Yiddish-speakers and the systematic destruction of the sources of Yiddish culture, but that’s just me.

Again: In the United States. There was a vibrant Yiddishkeit culture in the US before World War II, and the Holocaust (which didn’t kill any American Jews) cannot explain its disappearance.

Jim @ 71: In pinyin, the C at the start of a syllable is what Wade-Giles writes with a “ts'”. So Cao is more or less like “it’s sour” with the first and last sounds nipped. Xueqin is “shway-chin”, more or less, as Garymar already said. Tsao Shway-chin. Thus indeed do many things come to pass.

Jacob: Exactly the same thing happened to Yiddish culture in the US that happened to thriving cultures in Gaelic, German, various kinds of Spanish, and more. It’s often called “assimilation” and it’s been studied a bit.

I’ll follow Bloix’s lead and drop out of this thread-hijacking after this post. But I do want to point out that assimilation does not explain what we were originally talking about, which was the substitution of Hebrew for Yiddish–the replacement of shabbat for shabbos, kippah for yarmulke, synagogue for shul, etc. That is to say, contrary to Bruce Baugh, what happened to Yiddish was decidedly not what happend to Gaelic, German, and the like.

Further, to the extent that a cutting off of fresh blood is responsible (and that was, remember, my tertiary reason for Yiddishkeit’s decline), the Holocaust cannot explain it, since that cutting off happened because of American immigration policy, not the Holocaust. One might recall the refusal of the US to allow European Jews into the country in the ’30s and ’40s. Again I repeat that American Yiddish culture was not just a repetition of what was going on in Europe. The Yiddish film, theater, music, politics, etc. in the United States was indigenous and specifically American. (Indeed, the dialect of Yiddish spoken here was also specifically American.)

But ok, that’s enough, I agree. We can go back to embarrassing mispronunciations.

Indeed, the dialect of Yiddish spoken here was also specifically American

Jacob @91: There was/is no such thing (unless you mean appropriating American slang or simple mispronunciation). All dialects of Yiddish arrived here from Europe (see Jacobs, Wex, Katz, etc.).

And just to get back on topic, my most embarrassing “mis”-pronunciation involved trying to get to Beauchamp Place in London using a normal French-Canadian accent.

I grew up half a block from a street called Cowper and mispronounced it until I was twenty-something — and when I was told the correct pronunciation I didn’t believe it.

By the way, what was “ah – nay – oohs?” If it’s the illegitimate son of Mrs. Hephaestus, the first and last syllables are wrong.

Is it possible that the correct pronunciation was not discovered until now and that all his life poor Samuel pronounced his name incorrectly?

Max Vapor and the Pronunciation of Doom.

16 July, 2007. Hollywood, CA. Revolution Studios and Sony Pictures announced today that Ridley Scott would direct and Vin Diesel (as Max Vapor) would star in the adaptation of the cult graphic novel, “Max Vapor and the Pronunciation of Doom.” Michael Caine is slotted to play Vapor’s father, a professor, and Gerard Butler will take a turn as his arch-enemy, T. W. Mangrove. In the graphic novel, Mangrove attempts to steal the government’s monopoly on the use of force, so that he can seek revenge for a childhood encounter with Max Vapor’s father, who was Mangrove’s headmaster at Phillips Exeter, and who caned Mangrove silly after he overheard Mangrove remarking of Vapor Senior’s pet student, “Now there’s the face of Phillip’s exciter.” When asked about the production’s reach, studio head Joe Roth effused: “It’s ‘Harry Potter’ meets ‘Spider Man’ at a tea party with ‘The History Boys’!”

#46:

As someone with a personal interest in the matter, may I assure you that the replacement of “gut yontif” with “chag sameach” has spared me endless repetitions of a tiresome joke.

Let those named “Sameach” carry the burden from now on.

I had a teacher who not only assigned readings by Khalil Gibran (bad enough), but pronounced his name “CAY-hill JIB-ran”. She was otherwise extremely proper in her pronunciation, even pronouncing “wh” in the unvoiced way and doing demonstrations of how Chaucer would have spoken.

Yeah, I worked a little bit on the English Catholic poet Robert Southwell in the last chapter of my dissertation (read: didn’t spend much time in the advisor’s office at that point). Fortunately a kind-hearted woman at church, of all places, gently informed me that it was pronounced SUH-thull, not South-well. And kindly added that mispronunciations reliably identify avid readers.

I once had to ask what “surfit” was when I’d always read it as “sur-feet”

My mother in law spent her teens in China. She was once very upset when the help refused to carry out a simple household task despite repeated requests. She ultimately found out she was actually telling her to “throw the baby away”.

Ceci n’est pas une peep

There was also a novel by John Sladek in which two characters conversed mutually incomprehensibly at a party, one referring to Rodin the sculptor, the other to Rodan the giant pterosaur.

As to Quixote: some of the titles of Dalís paintings render it as “Quichote”, which would accord with the usage of “x” in northern Spain (and with Pinyin, conveniently). “Txipirones” sounds somehow tastier than “chipirones” (a heckuva lot better than “squid”, anyway).

As to whether Byron pronounced “Juan” as “Jew-Ann”, I’ll note that a friend of mine whose father came from Georgia had an uncle whose name had the latter pronunciation, but I found “Hwan” accomodating when I read the silly thing.

To poster No. 111. That second “m” in accommodating is now available.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_names_in_English_with_non-intuitive_pronunciations

Jim Parish @ 66: I believe “Wipers” was an in-joke among British servicemen at the time. Seem to recall some byplay along those lines in David Jones’s In Parenthesis.

Round these parts (Hampshire, England) we’ve got a great line in calling places by fancy French names and then pronouncing them as if they weren’t French at all – take for instance Beaulieu (“Bewley”!)

bad jim – I am indeed caslon, born in a lower case neighborhood but with upper case tastes. As to the missing Wyoming on your map, it has so few inhabitants that its absence hardly mattered.

There’s still a fairly common ironic usage of “Quiksut” among literature/Spanish students, at Oxford anyway.

To revert to the topic of the post for a mo, and specifically as to the likelihood of this story being true … fairly late on in the Diaries Pepys has a run-in with some builders working in his house who call him ‘Mr Peppis’ and whom he is obliged to correct. Surely somebody who specialised in Pepys, even if they’d never heard another person pronounce the word, would have read far enough in the Diaries to know this. Accordingly, I disbelieve the story.

“Quiksut” ain’t ironic: it’s the standard Brenglish way until the age of cheap holidays in Spain.

Two words I mispronounced avec une intonation française: “avoirdupois” (forgivable, I think) and “anglepoise” (AWNG-gluh-pwoz: just funny)

I was led to believe that “Kant” rhymes with “pissant.”

I’ll tell you what’s controversial: how to pronounce “controversy”.

“Garage” doesn’t just divide Americans and Brits. It divides Brits too. Where I come from (and I mean this more in terms of socio-economic origins than geographical ones), “garage” rhymes with “marriage” and “carriage”. But not for those who speak the so-called “Queens English”, for whom it rhymes with “barrage”.

Re: 135 – That’s why I just call it a “carhole”.

Also, I had the same problem with “misled” that others have noted. I guess it must be fairly widespread.

to misle — (1) to be mistaken about the erotic potential of an acquaintance

“That chick completely misled me!”

to misle — (2) to fall prey to to shady financial dealings; usually by a miser

“That skinflint investment advisor totally misled me!”

to misle — (3) to bamboozle others about the efficacy of high-altitude missile defense

“The Reagan administration misled the American people about the Star Wars program.”

In American English it’s mizel. And note the preterite is mizeled, not mizelled

#50 – it’s true that we don’t say Marley, but we do say John Dun and if you say Don you’ll be put down as ignorant.

#137

Actually, the famous Harvard scholar Harry Levin always pronounced “Quixote” as Kwiksit because, he explained, the word had been Anglicized as quixotic, ergo, Anglophile that he was, the name was now back-changed to Kwiksit.

Meanwhile, when I was in Barcelona two years ago, all I heard was “KEE-shoat.”

As for the various comments above the prof and the dissertation student who didn’t know Pepys is supposedly pronounced Peeps when actually it might not be the proper way to say it at all — the point of my anecdote still stands, however the name is supposed to be pronounced. That is, the two didn’t even know that there was an issue about it.

Scott, by the way, didn’t include the full supporting anecdote. For those who didn’t follow the link, not only did the lit prof not know about Peeps, he didn’t know about William Cowper (Cooper) and that 18th-century poet WAS in his specialty.

book/daddy

Re: #133-135

Pronounce that Central American country that had a left-wing revolution in the late 1970s, you know: Nicaragua. I first heard the wierd pronunciation from TV newscasters when spending a summer in London in the early 1980s. I’ve been giggling/snickering about it, on and off, ever since.

When I was a boy, I would sometimes complain about getting a “migratory” headache.

I heard a story from a Paraguayan friend about a university lecture by a famous South American writer — Borges, maybe? Anyway, the lecturer, who was speaking in Spanish, pronounced Shakespeare as “Shak-eh-spi-YAR-re”.

One of the students asked, “Sir, isn’t it pronounced Shakespeare?” in the English fashion.

At which point, the lecturer turned on a dime and conducted the rest of the talk in perfect English, to the complete bafflement of the student, whose English was none too good.

Urban legend or contemporary myth? You decide. Sounds like Borges, anyway.

Is there any rhyme or reason to the fact that there’s a town in Michigan called Mackinaw City that sits on the Straits of Mackinac, and both Mackinac and Mackinaw are pronounced “Mackinaw”

It’s from an Ojibwa (aka Chippewa, aka Anishinaabe) placename, which I’ve seen romanized variously as “michinimakinong,” “michilimackinac,” “mitchimakinak,” “mishi-mikinaak,” etc. although I’m sure there’s a scholarly transliteration that has all kinds of crazy inverted letters and superscripts and whatnot. IIRC, it means “great turtle,” and refers to nearby Mackinac Island, which somewhat resembles a giant snapping turtle rising out of shallow water.

The ac spelling comes from French attempts to transliterate the Ojibwa word using French phonology, and the aw spelling reflects English attempts to imitate Frenchmen trying to speak Ojibwa.

Apparently no one here has been to Ohio, where

Versailles = Var-SAY-uhls
Lima = LIE-ma
Toledo = Toh-LEE-doh
Delhi = DELL-hi
Bellefontaine = BELL-fown-tan

When I moved to Massachusetts, I needed to find Worcester, Mass on a map. I called to my roommate, who kindly pointed it out. “Oh, WUR-ches-ter,” I replied.

This is a problem for anyone who read above their grade level in school.

Indeedy. There were a few embarrassing moments during college tutorials when I realised that my written vocabulary outstripped my spoken one.

Being part of a transatlantic marriage means there’s still, years in, occasional linguistic amusement. ‘Quay’ popped up a few months back. Placenames are fun: who knew that Macon, GA rhymes with ‘bacon’? And I now live near a road named ‘Leicester’, which very-locals know as ‘Lester’ but everyone else pronounces ‘Lie-chester’ or ‘Lie-cester’. Oh dear.

“Garage” doesn’t just divide Americans and Brits. It divides Brits too.

The most divisive word among Brits, pronunciation-wise, is ‘scone’. My sixth-form EngLit teacher was laughed out of the classroom for using the long o.

Here’s one of the most common mispronunciations I know of. “Menestration” for menstruation.

Or the Québec village where my dad spent a good part of his working life, St-Roch (read: San Rock).

The smartest girl in fourth grade indelibly, laughingly, superiorly impressed forever on my read-above-level young mind that the class we were going to take in fifth, after summer vacation, toward which taking I’d just expressed keen anticipatory excitement, was not and never would be homonymically parallel to the magazine called National Ge-o-graph-ic.
Some few trains came and went in the London tube before I figured out in my early-on visit what Marylebone was, as it came crackling through the loudspeakers in those clipped polite syllables they have over there.
Bloix is wilfully ignorant as well as neurotically rude.

Genuinely true well-it-might-have-happened anecdote:
Sir Vivian Fuchs (rhymes with “books”), the mid 20th-century Antarctic explorer, was once about to give a public lecture in the north of England. He was taken aback, in a stiff-upper-lip way, to hear himself introduced by the compere as “Sir Vivian Fucks”. After the lecture, he took the compere aside and said quietly: “Look, that’s not quite the correct pronunciation of my surname, you know.” The compere replied [insert Yorkshire accent here]: “I know that, Sir Vivian, but we couldn’t very well call you Fooks oop here now, could we?”

#140 —
A former City Councilman in Los Angeles, Gilbert Lindsay, was for years designated to read off the ceremonial welcomes to representatives from Los Angeles’ many sister cities. And so when it came time to salute the delegation from Fukui City, Japan. . . .

Also let’s not forget El Duh RAY do, an oil town in Southern Arkansas. [Of course, Los AN jell us and Los AYN gull us must sound funny to a native Spanish speaker too. As would the fact that a town named Manteca exists, however it is pronounced.]

I remember being puzzled about the much-under-used word “awry”, which as a bookish autodidact (yawn) I always thought was pronounced “AW-ree”

Further to the “garidge” vs “gararzhe” (this would all be a lot easier if I knew the phonetic alphabet), I’ve noticed an odd pronunciation regularity in popular music. If you have a sampler with speeded-up two-step beats and an MC with an estuary accent, you’re making “UK Garidge”, but if you get a bunch your mates together and play rock music in your mum’s house, you’re in a “gararzhe band” – seemingly regardless of who’s speaking. Or is that just me?

An odd newsreader pronunciation thing (creeping off topic) is that I swear in the 80s that the SSR of Ukraine was pronounced by Moira Stewart and the like as “You-cry-EE-na”, which is presumably a fair approximation of what its residents call it. Now everyone calls it “You-CRANE”. Did I miss a meeting?

Anyway, fear not, folks: when I fear making a fool of myself on this kind of question (and having been a teenage autodidact etc. etc.), I consult one of my favourite books.

OK, I’ll bite: how does one pronounce “Derida”? I had always heard it said “DARE-ee-dah”, but recently I heard “Duh-REE-da”…

170: “You-cry-EE-na” — it sounds much like the weird trend for some 80s newscasters to pronounce “Nicaragua” with an exaggerated Spanish-ish accent, which was much mocked on SNL (I think). It’s not quite a rendition of the local pronunciation, but it’s close–it would be transliterated as “ukraina” (oo-cry-EE-na). The English word, however, is Ukraine (the familiar you-CRANE), just as we know the country of Rossiya as Russia. Whatever you do, though, don’t put a definite article in front of Ukraine, at least if you’re talking to a Ukrainian.

FWIW, Russian also has many words that aren’t pronounced exactly how they are spelled, but I’m not sure how opaque that is to native speakers. But since there are no hard and fast rules for deducing which syllable is stressed (which has a major impact on pronunciation), I suspect that Russian-speaking autodidacts have problems similar to English-speaking autodidacts.

Worcester, Mass is, of course, known as ‘woostah’.

But you see, abb1, Ohioans like me and Marlboro know that any town by that name should be spelled “Wooster,” like the town in Ohio. Presumably founded by pioneers from War-Chester, MA.

Kentucky has “AY-thens” for “Athens,” “Ver-SALES” for “Vare-sigh” and, craziest of all, “Paris” for “Paree.” What will those crazy bumpkins think of next.

I always mentally pronounced “misled” as a homophone of “mizzled”. Similarly “anxiety” had only three syllables… “anks-it-ee”.

You’re on a loser with British-originated place names, though. My personal favourites are Towcester, which is pronounced “toaster” (honestly), and “Mousehole”, which is obviously pronounced “mowzul” where the “mow” rhymes with “cow”.

Great thread! I’ve got a number of responses, so bear with me.

15. Two names from my graduate work (and dissertation) gave me these kind of problems: film director Frank Borzage and Congressman Martin Dies.

Borzage said his name “in three syllables, and g in get, bor-zay’gee” (I got this from a great little book I found at a library sale: Charles Earle Funk, What’s the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936 — Funk contacted celebrities and asked how they pronounced their names); Dies is just like the third person singular of “to die.”

50. I can’t get excited about anachronistically pronouncing early modern names. How many people make a point of calling Christopher Marlowe “Marley” or Edmund Halley “Hawley”? Why should they, except for pedantic snobbery? or Leveson-Gower as “Leeson-Gore” for that matter?

You’re mixing apples and oranges. With names from the distant past, all that matters is how most people say them now; it would indeed be pedantry to call Marlow “Marley” or Cromwell “Crummel.” But current names should be pronounced as their bearers prefer; it is politeness, not snobbery, to pronounce Leveson-Gower as “L(y)ooson-Gore” or “Leeson-Gore” (depending on the preference of the particular bearer of the name). If you don’t know how the person says it, you have to take a chance (this is frequently the case with Ivanov, which can be either ee-VAH-nuhf or ee-vah-NOF, irritatingly for the Russian student, since Ivanov is the most common Russian surname), but to pronounce it in a way that bearers of the name do not use simply because you don’t like their pronunciation is just plain rude.

70. Lawyers just don’t know how to pronounce Latin

I’m hoping this was a joke (it’s so hard to tell around here…), but just in case it’s serious: that statement is meaningless. There is no one way to pronounce Latin; Italians do it one way, Germans another, English classicists a third, English traditionalists (if there are any left) still another… Americann lawyers have their own standard pronunciation, which is just as good as anyone else’s.

82. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with pronouncing foreign names as if they were English. It’s just convention – you say whatever will be understood and not attract attention to yourself. If the convention is Van Go you say that even if you know he said Fon Koch.

I can’t tell you how strongly I agree with every word of this (except that it’s actually Fahn Khokh).

105. I had a teacher who not only assigned readings by Khalil Gibran (bad enough), but pronounced his name “CAY-hill JIB-ran”

That’s a pretty common pronunciation, but I find it hard to get exercised about it, since he himself used “Kahlil” as the English version of his name istead of what I would ordinarily call the correct Khalil (since kh represents the first letter of his name in Arabic). It annoys me much more that people outside of Ireland pronounce Caitlin (the Gaelic version of Catherine) as “KATE-lin” (it should be cat-LEEN). If only Dylan Thomas had married someone else this wouldn’t be a problem!

107. a kind-hearted woman at church, of all places, gently informed me that it was pronounced SUH-thull, not South-well.

The name is pronounced both ways by its bearers; Viscount Southwell apparently says it the way your church woman preferred, but I don’t know if there’s evidence for Robert Southwell’s usage. In any case, all that’s important is how scholars today say his name; my Webster’s Biographical Dictionary gives both South-wull and South-well but no Suth-ull, so I’m guessing your church lady was wrong.

111. As to whether Byron pronounced “Juan” as “Jew-Ann”, I’ll note that a friend of mine whose father came from Georgia had an uncle whose name had the latter pronunciation, but I found “Hwan” accomodating when I read the silly thing.

I’m not sure what you mean by “accom[m]odating,” but I’d say it’s inconvenient to use what is obviously the wrong pronunciation for the poem. How did you get through the first stanza, in which “Juan” is rhymed with “true one”?

165. But what’s the mystery in pronouncing “Kristeva”? I always assumed that her native land stressed the penultimate syllable and her adopted France the last one, so you could say it either way. Am I wrong?

You can’t assume anything about Bulgarian names; the stress can fall on any syllable, and (annoyingly) it’s very hard to find out the correct way — Bulgarian reference works, unlike Russian ones, don’t tend to provide stress marks. Her name in Bulgarian is Юлия Кръстева, for which a standard transliteration would be Yuliya KrÅ­steva (another version of the last name would be Krasteva: see Wikipedia); since the Russians stress the name on the first syllable, I make the risky assumption that the Bulgarians do too, in which case it would be pronounced in Bulgarian CRUST-eh-vah. I don’t know why she chooses the i vowel, but I say KRIST-e-va, and that’s the way I like it.

Shut up, or I’ll Nicaraguan!

If you’re among physicists and pronounce ‘de Broglie’ correctly, no one will know who you’re talking about.

I suspect geoGRAPHy.

I’ve had a few of these. One I haven’t seen mentioned yet: I thought “segue” was a verb, and that when you segued between two things you created a “segueway”.

#185: I’m quite pleased that Katelynn and variants seem to be replacing Caitlin. I’m not sure whether people promote Katelynn as a cute spelling or as the response to a cutesy spelling.

#186: segue is a verb, pronounced like the noun.

#187: Merriam-Webster lists trow-ma ahead of traw-ma, though American Heritage reverses that.

LH, you’d probably be unsurprised to know that the pronunciation of Caitlín as Gaeilge is more like “KOTCH-leen” (or “KAWTCH-leen” if spelled Cáitlín).

A few years ago when I lived in Los Angeles a woman (dark and I presume from Mexico) on the TV news spoke English very well. Yet she usually gave nouns in Spanish. With much emphasis.

Thus one heard El Presidente, Espana, Mehico, Cuidads this or that, Estados De here and there. Holidays and dates were liable to come out either way.

I visited LA a few years later and she was using English for the same words. That seemed odd since the local majority is now Spanish speakers.

Anyone who is embarassed about not knowing every word and how others think it should sound has an immense ego problem. No one has ever had such knowledge.

As a native Spanish speaker I’ve never really understood why in English people add the final “y” in “Donkey Ho-tey”. Something closer to the Spanish pronounciation would be “Don Ke-HO-teh”, where the “O” is … mmh … hard for me to explain to English speakers.

Easy, that’s because in English words don’t end with the “eh” sound. Not a single English word ends with that sound; it’s only found between consonants.