Have you known people who pronounce their names in a way completely at odds with standard English phonics rules (I am flexible on the latter requirement in case any Thread Lawyers come along)? I can understand if they’re French or Thai or something and naturally their names will follow the rules of their native language, but what is the excuse of those who mangle Anglo names (yes I know about Gaelic et al.)?
I knew a prof who spelled his name as “Meagher” (so you think, “meager”, which has some Unfortunate Implications I guess), but he said it as “Mar”. You then wonder what the point of all those extra letters is.
I went to school with a young lady named Sisciscer, pronounced “Cecelia.” Her story was that her barely-school-age older brother was allowed to fill out her birth certificate.:dubious:
My husband once worked in a place where the client’s info would be on the screen by the time the call came to him. When a call from “Michelle” (that’s how it was spelled), he did the polite thing by saying “how can I help you Michelle?”
The response?
“Beach um” is the standard way to say that in US English.
I recently worked with a guy whose last name is Brough.
Is that Bro, or Broo, or Broff or ??? Whatever you think, you’ve probably got it wrong.
He pronounced it “Brook”, which rhymes with kook, not book or cook.
His story was that it was originally Brauch in German and it was bastardized by the immigration authorities when his great grand-dad came over to the US. So he’s restoring the original pronounciation. Nice guy, but a tad eccentric.
My favorite has always been Cholmondeley AKA Chumlee (Cholmondeley - Wikipedia)
It is foreign (Asian) but the last name Nguyen is the nemesis of unsophisticated customer service people all over the U.S. (it is simply ‘Win’ in case you don’t know). I grew up in Louisiana where there are lots of French names floating around but I grew up the area that was mainly American Southern Redneck. Most of the Du Boise family there just gave in over time and accepted DewBoys as their standard pronunciation. The Hebert and Thibodeaux families never had the same issue oddly enough. We were also ground zero of unique black names. The spelling usually got you close enough but the absolute correct pronunciation according to their families required really specific and non-intutive accents on certain syllables. Yvette was E-VET! and Lainger was LA-inGER.
That must be a Northern Louisiana thing. I’ve never heard DuBois or anything else ending in “bois” pronounced anything other than “bwa”.
We have a lot of Nguyens here in New Orleans, and everybody pronounces it “nwin”, but every time I’ve ever heard the name on TV (VietNamese characters on TV always seem to be named Nguyen) the pronunciation is butchered in several different ways. Either it’s pronounced differently in other parts of the US or there aren’t large Vietnamese populations in these areas and the producers didn’t bother to do any research.
I have a female friend named Cassie, but pronounced Casey. Her parents wanted to name her Casey, but felt the spelling looked like a boys name. She’s spent her entire life correcting people. When she went away to college she just went by Cassie (pronounced as it looks) for fours years just so she wouldn’t have to deal with the aggravation.
My suggestion is that when she gets married and changes her name, she might as well use that opportunity to change the spelling of her first name as well. Oddly enough, her last name presents a similar problem in that it’s a slight variation from a very common last name so people see it and automatically say the common name. So she’s spent a lot of time correcting people on that…funnily (IMHO) the person she’s in a serious relationship with right now has the common last name so if she does end up marrying him she end up having the name she’s been trying for 25 years to get people to stop saying.
The other one I can think of is the Marchese’s. I know two families with this last name. One of them pronounces it Mar-cheesy the other Mar-cazy (like crazy without the r).
All right, how come “Nguyen,” pronounced as “Win,” isn’t just spelled “Win”? Or Wynn, or Winn?
I mean, it had to be translated from Vietnamese, right? Which has a different alphabet. So how does it end up in ENGLISH as “NGUYEN” is this some French thing?
I knew a guy who pronounced his name as Caw-Horn, but it was not spelled where the R was in that position, and I believe it had an extra C in it. But I can’t remember the actual spelling.
I do remember that people would often mistakingly pronounce it as they would Cochrane.
There’s actually an “ng” sound at the beginning. It’s more like “Ngwee-in.” The “ng” at the beginning is a little difficult for native English speakers to get at first. Practice saying “singing, singing, singing, inging, inging, nging.”
Unlike Thai, Cambodian and Lao, Vietnamese does not have a different alphabet. For centuries, it was written in standard Chinese characters, as a classical education was immersed in all things Chinese. (Peasants were completely illiterate always.) In the 17th century, a Latin-based writing system called quoc ngu was developed by a French Jesuit scholar, and it has been in widespread use since about World War I. It uses the same Latin letters as English, and always has, albeit with lots and lots of accents. This actually helped undermine the position of the Mandarin officials eventually, since writing became accessible to everyone.
Our family name is originally German, but we have Americanized it by eliding the first letter, consequently making it’s pronunciation rather opaque to the average American who reads it. Actually, I am surprised by the number of people who get it right the first time. Not sure if this qualifies for the OP, hence the comedic introduction.
Roddy
