My wife’s maiden name is French and ends in 'bois. Weirdly enough, even their family do not seem to agree on a pronunciation. My wife pronounces in boice (rhyming with choice). Her younger sister pronounces it as 'boys (as in boys and girls) Her brother in law pronounces it 'boy, dropping the final s all together.
Stephen Colbert pronounces it differently than his own brother Ed. See this video for proof (3 minutes in).
“See you in Hell!”
I know of such a person. When calling for takeout or making dinner reservations, he avoids awkward comments or people thinking it’s a prank call by saying his name as “Cockran.”
There’s one little branch of my father’s family that spells and pronounces the name differently. We were always told that there was a mistake at immigration, back when my grandparents’ generation came here.
After my father passed away we were going through his things, and discovered his birth certificate. The last name was spelled like the way that one little branch spells it. A little more research indicated that at some point back in the 20s, every single person in the family changed the spelling and pronunciations of their name . . . except that one little branch that held onto the original.
I told this story in the recent “Ethnic Origin” thread:
My grandmother traced our family back to its roots in Ireland, and the two big family names that cropped up were Friel and Moran.
Here in the states, we would pronounce the later surname mor-ANN. But in Ireland, it’s more common to pronounce it MOR-un.
So the family joke is that we’re all descended from morons.
Ask a Yank who the principal members of The Kinks are, and the answer will be Ray and Dave Davies (DAY-veez).
It’s only within the past decade or so that I learned that a Brit’s answer, and the correct one, would be what we in the states would write as Ray and Dave Davis.
Let me preface this by saying that I grew up in England, and my father was Welsh.
I was once acquainted with a guy (a white American, in America), who introduced himself as “Rise” (first name). I thought it an unusual name that I had never heard before, but I put it down to the fact that he probably had ancestral roots in some obscure corner of Europe, where it might well be quite traditional. Later, I heard someone else questioning him about it, and asking how it was spelled. He told her that it was spelled RHYS, and that it was a name of Welsh origin that his parents had found in a book of baby names, and had picked because it was so unusual.
Rhys is indeed a Welsh name, but it is pronounced “Reese,” as in Reese Witherspoon, or Reese’s Pieces. I went to high school with a boy named Rhys. “Rise,” was something of a bumptious jerk, and I was seriously tempted to tell him that he didn’t know how to pronounce his own name. (I chickened out though. :()
Incidentally, Reese Witherspoon and the Pieces people are not misspelling the name (or, indeed, mispronouncing it). Welsh names can often be written in more than one way. (My father’s first name was Howell, pronounced “Howl,” but others use the spelling HYWEL, although it is pronounced the same.) Some Welsh people do spell their name REESE, REES, is also common, and there may be other versions, although I must say that RHYS is the most authentically Welsh looking spelling. Anyway, all the spelling variants are pronounced the same way, and it is nothing like “rise.” Like many Welsh names, Rhys can be a first name or a last name (or both, which is quite common in Wales: my grandfather, for instance, was named Thomas Thomas), although I think, as a first name, it is exclusively male: I doubt that any Welsh girl would be given Reese as a first name. (To be fair to Reese Witherspoon, however, apparently it is not really her first given name, but a middle name she uses as a stage name. She, or her parents, clearly have more clue about it than “Rise” and his.)
Incidentally, couldn't you just eat up Reese with a spoon? :DActually, I think the standard British pronunciation would be somewhere in between those two: more like Daviz (i.e., with a short final vowel).
Davies is, I believe, a name of true English origin, distinct from Davis, which is Welsh, and correctly pronounced as Americans generally do pronounce it, with a final S rather than a Z sound.
This has reminded me of another similar example. There used to be an independent supermarket near where I lived in California called Lewis Foods. Lewis is another Welsh name, pronounced, pretty much as “Looiss” (or actually, it seems to me, pretty much as it is spelled). I do not know how the owners themselves actually pronounced it, but my California born wife always insisted on saying what sounded like “Louie’s Foods” (or perhaps “Louis,” as in Louis XIV, king of France).
On the other hand, the trumpeter Louis Armstrong, despite coming from the the most Francophone city in the USA, seems to have pronounced his own name as “Lewis” (i.e., the Welsh way), and most Americans, including its natives, seem to refer to the city of St Louis (named, I believe, after one of those French kings, who had a reputation for being holier than the others) as “Saint Lewis.” (I do not know if there was ever a Welsh saint of that name.)
I know a Beauchamp = Bo camp
Met a Diane = Dee Ahn’ (who hates her name)
Leaffan said:
It’s not our fault that French is goofy. You guys ignore the letters that are there and pronounce ones that aren’t.
My grandmother’s maiden name is Haughey. For a long time I didn’t know that was how it was spelled and thought that Haw-hee was a dumb name.
Michele, pronounced mee-keh-lay, is a relatively common Italian male name. The English female 1-l version is much less common than 2-l, but they both seem to have at least 3 pronunciations.
It seems there’s a greater tendency for Scots to use “Mac,” but yeah there’s no way to determine the origin unless you know the root name. O’ is of course only used in Irish names. But will all this cross-immigration, you can’t be sure of someones nationality.
Menzies originally had a yogh, “Ȝ” in place of the “z.” The pronunciation preserves the original spelling.
If they’re borne by Americans of French descent, then they’re American names, and we pronounce them however the hell we want.
Two brothers of my acquaintance, patronym McElroy.
One is MACK-el-roy, the other is mc-EL-roy.
I call them by their first names.
In korean, it’s spelled… Ee.
But translated to English it goes to Lee, Rhee or Yi…
So that’s 4 ways of saying Ee.
When I was in college, there was a nearby street - McElroy.
Most people pronounced it Mack-el-roy. One TA I had said it should be muk-El-roy.
There is also a hockey player named Miroslav Satan. He pronounces it - if I recall correctly - “SHAH - tahn”. As opposed to the Father of Lies, the Destroyer of Worlds, the Beast Who Is Called Apollyon, Moloch and Beelzebub, who pronounces his name “SAAATAN!” (with lots of overdub and reverb).
Always thought it was a shame Miroslav Satan never played for the New Jersey Devils…
If by “should”, your TA meant “in accordance to Gaelic phonology”, then it should have been “muk el ROY”, I think. The original name is mac ghille ruaidh, or “son of the red(headed) boy”, and in Gaelic names the stress falls on the adjectivial element (ruaidh, “red”).
I am no expert in Scots Gaelic, so this may be wrong; but I get this from David Dorward’s Scottish Surnames.
There’s a local dentist with the last name Fluegge who, based on his radio ads, pronounces it “floogy”. Kid I went to school with had the same last name, but pronounced it “fleegy”, and would get completely bent out of shape when people pronounced it “floogy”.
I might have mentioned this before, but–when I was teaching, I was reading the class roster on the first day. I came across a Jane Ng. I pronounced her name “Eng,” which is how other Ngs I have known have pronounced it. She snapped back “It’s pronounced ING!” :rolleyes:
I guess this ties in to my other post–it bugs me when you pronounce their last name in what you think is the more usual or common way, and they get all mad at you for it. I don’t give a shit if the girl wanted me to pronounce her name Ing, Eng, or DiRienzo. I’ll pronounce it like you tell me. Just don’t get mad at me for not guessing right.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never seen a Nguyen get annoyed at someone choosing the wrong pronunciation. Maybe I’m just lucky, but in my experience, Nguyens seem to get that a. there’s no obvious way to pronounce it in English, and b. There is no consensus out there among Nguyens about how it should be pronounced in English, so nobody can be expected to know how a particular Nguyen prefers his or her name to be pronounced. Personally, I’ve heard “noo-win” most often, so I default to that. Some have told me that they pronounce it some other way, but nobody has seemed mad about me guessing “noo-win.”
Slow Moving Vehicle said:
I would have thought it was from “son of the king” (mc = [Gaelic] son, el roy = [Latin] the king).
But that’s not a hodge podge, so you may be correct.
Green Bean said:
I give leeway for little kids, who may not be aware that their pronunciation is not some universal standard. Hey, it’s the way they learned it. So they get frustrated that nobody ever gets their obvious name correct. Hey, they’re little, they will learn.
Know a kid with last name Shi = Shɤ (as close as I can find here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-mid_back_unrounded_vowel )
I’ve heard nwin and win. Also nuh gyoo in, but only from guessers.
I always thought it was pronounced “Hedley”.
Or at least “Dee-Moan-Ay”.
MOR-in and MOR-awn have different pronunciations. 