As in baseball player Gus Suhr.
From this link it looks to be soo-er.
The pronunciation seems to have been later changed by the family. SF Police Chief Suer was related and the following is extracted from the interview with him at above link.
Pole vaulter Jenn Suhr, who won the gold medal in London, pronounces it “Sir.”
Old ball players’ surnames were not know with exactitude, in the era before radio broadcasts of games. Players were talked about based on newspaper accounts of their performances, and local people adopted their own pronunciations, whicn may or may not have bee agreed upon in any given bar.
It is not unusual in America for a certain surname to be pronounced differently in different parts of the country. There are several recent ball players with surnames that are pronounced by broadcasters differently from the way kids I grew up with pronounced their own names which were spelled the same. The White Sox have a rookie catcher named Hector Gimenez, whose name is pronounced “JIM-i-nezz”. John Kerr, Clark Kerr and Deborah Kerr all pronounced their last names differently. As did MLB players Joe Lefebvre, Jim Lefebvre and Bill Lefebvre. I know relatives of Congressman Pete Hoekstra who pronounce their own names differently than than I hear on the news.
My dad rhymed Gus Suhr with “poor”.
There was a guy in my boot camp company named Suhr. He told me the correct pronunciation was “Sir,” but for Navy purposes he was telling everyone it was pronounced “Shir” (rhymes with “sir”). Said it wouldn’t seem right for officers to be calling him “sir”…
I assume you’re pronouncing that as “poo” with an R on the end?
To me, poor is pronounced identically to pore and pour…
Sewer.
I’m not familiar with the name, but, having taken high school German, my instinct is to pronounce it to rhyme with the German words/names Uhr or Ruhr—basically, like a one-syllable version of “sewer.”
I can imagine the Army rejecting an enlisted man whose last name is “Sir.” Just too damned complicated.
At various times, I’ve known of the name Koch to be pronounced as either Cook, Cock, or Coch (to rhyme with “botch”). That is, at least, if we trust the pronunciations by TV/radio newscasters when they mention certain prominent persons of that name. The “Cook” version comes from a kid of that name when I was in jr. hi school.
Major Major Major did alright. He made major. (I guess that was the Air Force, though.)
My goddaughter (and her father’s family) prounounce it Sir. They hail from Nebraska and Kansas.
And I know people with that spelling who pronounce it ‘coke’ & ‘coach.’
The origin of the name is undoubtedly German. The German pronunciation would be: soo-er (but with the “s” being pronounced like the “z” in cozy, thus: zoo-er).