Amazing what a little discussion can do, huh? I only mentioned it because I had been a fan of Sergio’s work for decades, both in Mad and on Groo the Wanderer, before I’d found out I’d been mispronouncing his name all those years.
Here it is from the horse’s mouth:
Comic historian/editor/miscellaneous book guy Mark Evanier, who worked with Sergio and Stan Sakai on Groo (and, along with Stan, frequently found himself drawn into crowd scenes and background art in Sergio’s work) said Sergio was the only cartoonist he knew who, when he drew a caricature of himself, made himself look less handsome than he was in real life.
The way Craig Ferguson pronounces it at about the 1:13 mark in this clip is how the Kaczmarek family I knew in Ohio pronounced it – basically kaz-MARE-ək.
Once again, there is in English. The poster said they were having trouble figuring out how to say the word, because in English, a four-syllable word has to have secondary stress on one of those syllables. Forcing an Engkish speaker to ignore this habit of speech would be appropriate for Lesson 5 in speaking Spanish, right after Lesson 4 (pronouncing “r” with a tap or flap – why aren’t you harping on that “mistake,” for example?).
…Think about it. If I hadn’t suggested putting secondary stress on the first syllable, an English speaker wouldn’t know what to do. Most likely, they would put the secondary stress on the SECOND syllable (to rhyme with “interrogate”), which is even further from the correct Spanish pronunciation.
If you’re concerned only with speaking English, there is no reason to refer to refer to the pronunciation of a native Spaniard. There’s no reason to pick up the syllable stress incompletely. Just go ahead and pronounce like you’ve always pronounced it.
I see your point. The man thing here would be to prevent the questioner from putting secondary dress on the second syllable – doing so would be a natural thing for an English speaker to do, but would render the word almost unintelligible, in either language. This could be conveyed in various ways, and I tried to convey it in the simplest terms for English speakers.
The question was about how does SA pronounce his name.
Which he does not do in English.
Once you move from saying aragonés to saying something else there can be extra stresses, extra letters and even more than one word. But if you’re doing that, you’re not saying it like Sergio Aragonés does.
Thanks. Now that I hear it, I guess I have heard it correctly before, but didn’t really notice. As I remembered the Monty Python thing as soon as you mentioned it.
I see that my “though” came out wrong. Mainly, though, I wanted to report that I interrogated another German more thoroughly and she said they say “behr-LIN”, more or less as we do, except with a hint of a long A in the first syllable and a bit of a long E in the second. Apparently, they tell Americans they are from “BER-lin” only because they think that’s how we say it.
Martin Scorsese whose name I have always pronounced as Scor-say-zee. I always assumed that was correct everyone else says that. Then in Entourage Vince is hoping to get an opportunity to work with Scorcese. They talk about it and, like me, all pronounce his name Scor-say-zee. Vince receives a phone call and this is what he hears: Martin Scorsese. The boys ask who was on the phone and Vince tells them “Martin Scor-say-zee.” Huh?
I don’t know whether this is an example of keeping it real in that no-one pronounces Scorsese’s name properly ever or perhaps an attempt to point out to Scorsese that he doesn’t know how to pronounce his own name. But apparently Scor-sez-zee is correct so google now tells us. Well done Martin.
As I said, if you google it his name is rendered as Scor-sez-zee over 4,000 times. No reference for Scor-sess-zee but it sounds like that. It isn’t Scor-say-zee though.
Not quite a celebrity, but if you’re a boxing fan, you might be familiar with Muhammad Ali’s cornerman, loudmouth extraordinaire Drew ‘Bundini’ Brown. I would have pronounced his name as ‘boon-DEE-nee,’ or maybe even ‘bun-DEE-nee,’ but I have heard both Ali and Brown himself pronounce it as ‘bo-DEE-nee.’
Only very recently did dictionariess start giving a pronunciation for “Keynesian”, the econmic formulated by John Maynard Keynes. Since the philosophy of DeCartes, called “Cartesian” and pronounced ‘kar-TEE-zhun’, I wondered if it Keynesian would be ‘kee-NEE-zhun’. But no, apparently, it is "KAYN-zee-yun’.
Three famous people whose last name is spelled Kerr, were Deborah Car, John Cur, and Clark Care.