How do I pronounce Zbigniew Brzezinski?

Factual Questions
1

Well? :slight_smile:

2

THROATWARBLER MANGROVE!

(You knew it was going to happen sooner or later.)

3
4

I saw him on Bill Maher once.

As I recall, it’s basically what it looks like

zuh-big-new breh-zin-ski

5

He wasn’t saying “nyef” on the end of the first name, like Contrapuntal’s link indicates.

6

Choking on a fish bone might improve your accent, though.

7

MS Bookshelf 98 has a pronunciation feature. It sounds like:

spig nee oo (the nee-oo bit is somewhat like a spanish enya, a quick turn with a slight ye’ sound. Accent is on the first syllable)

Bre shin ski (the shin bit is more of a Slavic z/sh sound. Slight accent on the middle syllable)

8

Well, you can call him Ray, and you can call him Jay, and you can call him…

9

That’s how his daughter says it too. She is on MSNBC

10

I guess he has Anglicised the pronunciation somewhat, as in Polish it would be something like “SPIG-nyef Bzhuh-ZIN[sup]j[/sup]-ski”. Or, in IPA, 'zbigɲev bʐɛ’ʑiɲski.

There’s a diacritic on the n of Brzeziński which softens the sound, kind of like the “ni” in “onion”.

Edit… looks like the coding messed up with the IPA characters. It’s on the Wiki page: Zbigniew Brzezinski - Wikipedia

11

I like that folks who know him call him Zbig. No clue if that’s a common Polish nickname.

12

  1. I have no idea how you pronounce it; I try to avoid pronouncing it.

  2. Wrong.

Remember that in Polish, as in German and some transliterations of Russian, the letter “W” codes for /v/. Crakow is, more or less, “Crock off”; “Wladislaw” is the same name as Russian “Vladislav” and pronounced nearly identically.

13

The way I say it, the first “ZB” is voiced, so it’s more like “ZBEEG-nyef.” (The “ee” isn’t quite as long as in English). For the last name, a “z” preceding an “i” gets softened, so it’s more like “bzheh-ZHEEN-ski.”

But that’s in Polish. I’m not sure what the accepted American pronunciation is. My last name, which is Polish, is pronounced differently in English. There’s no “correct” way to pronounce it in English, and I don’t particularly care how people say it, but there is a general pronunciation we settled on because it seemed the easiest and most popular to English speakers.

Kraków in Polish is pronounced more like “KRAH-koof.” “Władysław” has those funny little slashes through the "l"s in Polish, so it’s pronounced a bit differently than “Vladislav”, i.e. it is pronounced “vwah-DIH-swahf.” As you may have noticed, voiced terminal consonants often get unvoiced in their uninflected forms.