Barbara Streisand - for years I pronounced it the way I commonly heard it, which was roughly stry-zand. I saw her in an interview several years ago in which she asked the interviewer if she minded if she corrected her pronunciation and stated it’s stry-sand.
NFLer Tony Dorsett, mentioned above, reminds me of former New England Patriot player Ronnie Lippett. The team and media pronounced it li-PET, but Lippett kept insisting it was LIP-it. People thought he was messing with them only to later have it verified that it really is LIP-it.
Baseball manager / general manager Jack McKeon was always mi-KEE-un. After the Florida Marlins won the World Series in 2003, he was on the David Letterman show. Letterman explained that before the show, Paul Shaffer indicated he thought the name was pronounced roughly mi-KYOON (with the second syllable matching Kuhn as in former baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn.) McKeon disclosed that Shaffer was correct. His name really was mi-KYOON, but ever since he entered minor league baseball, everyone pronounced it Mi-KEE-un and he didn’t fight it.
Bobby Knoop was a slick-fielding infielder for the Angels and White Sox in the 1960s. I was well aware of him from reading game accounts and baseball cards, but it was several years before I learned his name was pronounced kuh-NOP and not NOOP.
Is it? The front page says “Sources of the transcriptions: Most of the material was reaped from MontyPython.net, and converted to the color coded table format used in this collection. The rest was added by the editors of this collection.” No mention of the official script book. And MontyPython.net is an unofficial fan site.
Actress Dana Wynter’s first name was pronounced as ‘Donna,’ although I have also heard it pronounced ‘Danna.’ But ‘Dayna’ is definitely further from her pronunciation than ‘Danna.’
Spanish never has two accent marks. Even if words which are long enough to have secondary stresses such as esternocleidomastoideo or supercalifragilísticoespialidoso, there can only be one mark at most. If there is a stress mark, that’s the syllable with the greatest stress. And I’m reasonably sure I can say aragonés without choking (I better, my brother’s wife is aragonesa…)
Then again… uh… how do you pronounce those vowels? The as are supposed to be like in cat, not like in Kate. Given that you don’t know about the “only one stress mark” rule, I don’t think I can assume you know how to read Spanish out loud without mangling the vowels as well as the stresses.
Interesting; had never heard that. I remember when that juror read the verdict she was mocked for messing up his name, but perhaps she didn’t? All I remember for sure now is that she didn’t pronounce it as I expected.
(New) Berlin, Whatever state it’s in, is often cited as an example of us pronouncing American city names differently from their Old World name (or almost name)sakes. But nearly ever German I’ve met at work (I see a lot of Elsewhereans on the job) says BER-lin, Germany. Not quite all of them, though, which makes me suspect some are just pronouncing the way they think I expect to hear it. Which ones, tohugh?
AIR- tells me how to pronounce the “a” sound. a- is ambiguous. Rhymes with cat? Crate? Craw? (Same issue with ra-, but to a lesser extent. Rhymes with the sun god Ra, yes?)
I don’t speak Spanish, and do not know what the simple, never-changing vowel sounds are to begin with. (Nor am I particularly interested. Just pointing out that when you spell a name phonetically, it’s best to use unambiguous phonemes.)
“Air” is hardly unambiguous. I can think of three common ways to pronounce it in American English. (And it’s not a phoneme, although it is an attempt to identify a phoneme.) If unambiguous is what you’re looking, for then you should be using IPA.
[a ra go 'nes]
(Of course Spanish vowels are so straightforward you don’t even need to use the special IPA character set for them.)
And it seems a little odd to be offering advice on pronunciation of a Spanish name without basic knowledge of Spanish pronunciation.
Thank you. Exactly. Nava and Acsenray are referring to some rules that apply to SPANISH syllable division locations. This has some importance for Spanish speakers, when speaking Spanish.
It has no bearing at all on how best to convey to English speakers how to clearly approximate a Spanish word or name. In English, the precise location of syllable boundaries almost never matters at all*, certainly not for pronouncing, and is in fact debated by experts.
The important thing here was to find common English words, whenever possible, to unambiguously convey the sounds, without forcing anyone to learn IPA.
(*They are sometimes important for knowing where to put a hyphen when a word is broken between two lines of text, but only so as preserve etymological parts, like “trans—mute.” Even then, it’s not about pronunciation.)