Your conclusion is a non sequitur. There is unquestionably a standard pronunciation in American English. There is at least one and perhaps two common pronunciations for British English my ate all you need nyou don’t need a global consensus or indeed any consensus beyond your own particular accent or dialect. That holds even if there are multiple ones nYour own personal dialect trumps any foreign language when you are speaking your own language.
The person said English, not American English. But I take your point, in a way - they said ‘no common pronunciation.’ There are actually 3, depending on where you are. Hence me changing from the reasonably Dutch ‘V’ng Xox’ that I would automatically switch to Van Gox because that’s what people around me (in England) will understand. I don’t think I could switch to Van Go even if I lived in the US, though.
Exactly. Three common pronunciations is not “no common pronunciations.”
Hence me saying ‘I take your point.’ I think we can stop disagreeing now. 
Depends on which definition of “common” your are using. There’s several commonly used pronunciations of Van Gogh in English, there is none that’s common to all dialects.
And none of the “three common pronunciations” really at all resemble how Van Gogh’s–a Dutch artist’s–name is pronounced in Dutch.
On a trip to Amsterdam, I was asked by a local friend whether I had planned on seeing the Van Gogh Museum, and of course he used the usual Dutch pronunciation. Of course, my reaction was “wtf is that?” I was young, it was a long time ago, what can I say. My confusion was momentary in any case, and was 100% the responsibility of my own ignorance.
What interests me the most is why some Americans act all indignant and butt-hurt if an English speaker uses (or attempts to use) the normal Dutch pronunciation of Van Gogh. How is this pretentious? What’s the pretense? All it means is one is aware of how the Dutch pronounce a Dutch artist’s name. Big deal.* What the instant negative reaction really reveals is how much Americans have a chip on the their shoulder concerning anything they’re ignorant about.
*Of course this is very different if the person using the Dutch pronunciation goes around correcting other people’s usage. That would legitimately justify the label “pompous asshat.” But I really don’t see why a otherwise non-coercive use of the Dutch pronunciation is either pompous or pretentious in and of itself. There’s no reason to be dogmatic about it either way.
Unless you’re actually having trouble understanding my posts, I don’t see any reason to bring up this trivial point.
It looked to me like some people had misunderstood it, and I thought a clarification might help.
Not really. Marcus is quite different to Mark. Maybe I’m more sensitive to that seeing as it is my name. If someone called my Marcus they would get corrected.
And anyway, I PUT UP WITH THE SWEDISH PRONUNCIATION. That’s kind of the point. I don’t correct people even though I hear my name mispronounced every day of my life.
Malmo/Malmö? I once read a story at the BBC News site that managed three different spellings of the place in the same story. Malmo, Malmö and Malmoe. I may even have written a complaint to them telling them to sort their shit out.
Hell, any place with an å, ö or ä in it.
And some people use the Swedish name in English because they may see the local name more often but speak English quite often. Like, for example, an English speaker that lives in Sweden. Not that I do, for the reasons I gave above, but it does happen. Hell, it gets to the point where I throw Swedish in because I’ve forgotten English words. My friends in the UK take the piss out of me when I talk about SMSing people instead of texting them. Basically, once you live abroad for long enough expect your command of your own language to fall apart.
But I still “mispronounce” English names when speaking Swedish. Because it feels correct. And by the same argument “mispronouncing” foreign words in English feels right.
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This likely needs its own thread, but it’s amazing that we are spending two pages in discussing the pronunciation of a name. It seems to me a failure of written language if a word can’t instantly convey to the reader how to pronounce it.
If I were the language Czar, you could pronounce a word any way you want to (as we do today), but when you write it down, you have to convey its pronunciation.
So, people who pronounce it Van Go, should write it that way, and people who pronounce it Van Goff, should write it that way. The “essence” of Van Gogh’s name is not in the specific sequence of latin characters, but in the sound of his name. If our name was the specific sequence of latin characters that make up our name, then when Chinese or Greek or Russian people write it, they would have to write it in latin characters. But, they write it using Chinese, Greek, and Russian characters, respectively, and try to approximate the sound, since that is the essence of your name: the sound, not the specific sequence of latin characters. Similarly, when we write a Chinese person’s name in English, we don’t write it using Chinese characters, but using latin characters that approximate the sound. It don’t see why it should be different with Van Gogh. We should write it, not how it looks in Dutch, but how it sounds, at least as close as we can get using English pronunciation.
This should not be restricted to names. For example, people who pronounce the word nuclear as ‘nu-clear’, should write it as nuclear, whereas people who pronounce it as ‘nu-cu-lar’, should write it as nucular. To do otherwise is removing important functionality of the written language.
I know that no one will agree with the above, especially people raised with a non-phonetic language as their mother tongue (e.g. English). Just wanted to give my 2 cents.
</Aside>
Two points.
Firstly, pronunciation has as it’s axioms the pronunciation of letters and diphthongs. We need to know how to pronounce these things before we can approach words, as anyone who has learnt a language as an adult will remember (I’ve got a diagram that I like to amuse myself with occasionally. It is from eleven years ago when I started learning swedish and is a cross section of the mouth showing where all nine (?) vowels are sounded). We cannot look at, say, a ‘v’ and instinctively know that it is pronounced like a ‘v’, all we can do is compare it to any language we already know or copy a handy native. The problem is, different languages pronounce these letters and diphthongs differently and without asking someone that does know, we have no way of knowing how they ‘should’ be pronounced.
Secondly, Regarding writing Chinese phonetically and why we don’t do that with the like of Dutch, the point is at the likes of Dutch already use the same alphabet. We have to rewrite Chinese as we are unable to write it how the Chinese do it.
English orthography was more like this in Chaucer’s time. It didn’t work out because English doesn’t work like that. It would make texts very hard to read unless you understood the writer’s accent.
And it’s not necessarily true that the “essence”'of a word is its sound. Written language is it’s own species of communication in many contexts.
I think you are underestimating the scale of the problem. A couple of points that merely hint at the size of the iceberg whose tip you have seen:
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No two people pronounce any particular word identically. That’s how we can tell people’s voices apart. Do you want a spelling system that allows millions of slightly different spellings of the same word? If not, how do you decide which spellings are acceptable?
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We do, in fact, have ways to convey, in writing, how words are pronounced, such as IPA. Such systems have many more symbols than regular alphabets, are unwieldy and difficult to understand for all but linguistics specialists, and still don’t by any means cover all the subtleties of speech articulation.
I disagree. A ‘v’ in English should be pronounced the way we pronounce ‘victor’. If a word from French, or Dutch, or Icelandic uses a ‘v’ to be pronounced as a ‘p’, ‘r’, ‘s’, or whatever, then, when you write it for an English audience, you should replace that ‘v’ with ‘p’, ‘r’, ‘s’, or whatever ‘v’ is supposed to be pronounced as.
If the word written as ‘Mary’ in Polish is pronounced ‘Paul’ in Polish (of course, an exaggerated example), then I think it’s ludicrous for Polish people to write that word as ‘Mary’ in English text meant for English speakers, and then try to educate the English speakers that it is actually pronounced ‘Paul’. They should just write it as ‘Paul’.
I disagree on this one too.
I agree that the Dutch use the same set of characters as Englilsh, but they don’t use the same ‘alphabet’, if we define an alphabet to be a set of characters plus the way to pronounce them.
If some country pronounces a ‘v’ like a ‘p’, an ‘s’ like a ‘t’, etc, then they are not really using the same ‘alphabet’ as English.
My favorite example is when I was visiting Lithuania, I saw a restaurant with the word ‘Pica’ written on the door. In Lithuanian, a ‘c’ is pronounced like ‘ts’, so ‘Pica’ is pronounced ‘Pitsa’, i.e. pizza. I like how the Lithuanians did not write ‘pizza’ on the door, and then have to educate people that, for this particular word, ‘zz’ is pronounced ‘ts’. They wrote it in Lithuanian, and not in Italian, even though Lithuanian and Italian use the same set of latin characters.
Did you read what I wrote? To recap:
“We cannot look at, say, a ‘v’ and instinctively know that it is pronounced like a ‘v’, all we can do is compare it to any language we already know or copy a handy native”
So someone coming from a non-Latin alphabet, for example, has absolutely no concept of what a ‘v’ is. That is the point. Your argument may - and that is a big ‘may’ - work for when transcribing sounds from a foreign language but it fails miserably when it comes to reading a foreign word - or the other way round. The very basic problem is that there will be no connection between the way a word is written when heard and way a word is spoken when read. You’d end up with two different spellings for the same word.
And that’s without getting into the problem of accents. I’m from the UK, people pronounce diphthongs and letters differently in different parts of the country. If I was to read a word as written phonetically by someone in, say, Yorkshire there’s a very real chance that what I would say would be quite different to how the original writer expected it to sound. You really seem to be assuming that everyone pronounces things in an “alphabet” the same way. They don’t and that is exactly why your idea fails.
I’m really not sure what your point is here at all.
I was talking about Chinese where people that have no experience of that language have no idea whatsoever how anything is pronounced. Thus there are two options, learn the new alphabet or approximate the sounds using your own language.
Regarding Van Gogh, the problem is that the exact sounds to get it perfectly right do not exist in standard English. They just don’t. Some dialects, such as certain Scottish ones, can approximate it but for the most part the sounds just don’t exist, which is why English speakers probably have so much difficulty with his name. We are just not used to making those sounds.
Examples that I come across a lot in Sweden of sounds in English that Swedes struggles with includes “w”, “j” and “th”. Hell, Irish people can’t even manage “th” 
It works both ways.
This is why I don’t like the American pronunciation of Van Gogh. It isn’t an approximation, it is just giving up. “We don’t know how to say that so we won’t say it at all”. As others have pointed out, dropping the “gh” part of the name doesn’t follow English pronunciation at all. At least the British “Goff” pronounces that name as written in English.
No, it shows that Van Go is considered correct in American English, and one of Van Goff or Van Goch is correct in British English. Or, to quote Wikipedia:
See, he was used to quite a few pronunciations in his lifetime. If you insist on pronouncing it the way he did, you actually get a pronunciation that hasn’t even been listed here. I can’t even transliterate it into English sounds. The closest I can get is von lloch, where ll is the Castilian Spanish sound that sounds like a French J, the o is the sound in caught in accents where it’s different from cot, and ch is the sound in lich, not loch.
As for the stuff about spelling: if we can accommodate different sounds and realize they are the same, why can’t we do it in writing? I actually came up with an answer before.
I propose is that, first off, speech is innate. Writing has to be explicitly learned. It makes sense that we have natural adaptations to one and not the other. Secondly, writing was originally done by hand, and there were already a lot of differences in handwriting, so different spellings just made it harder to read. Thirdly, up until recently, people only knew how others from around the world wrote, and not how they spoke, so writing became more easily standardized. The technology for long distance vocal communication is still rather new, relatively speaking. Finally, it’s just easier to change your spelling than your pronunciation.
We would need to first say things the same way, then we could spell them the way they sound, and actually have it mean something. Destandardizing spelling is moving backwards.
“Van Go-yiddish”. As if I might loogie.
“Ho"ch"ing” a loogie, if you need mnemon9cs.
Reminds me of a Soviet tanker that ran aground outside Stockholm. In Swedish media the name was always translitterated as Tsesis from the Cyrillic Цесис that was written on it. The problem is it was from Latvia and named after a town called Cēsis.