I worked with a guy named Nagy, pronounced “naggy”. He said that when his grandparents came over from Hungary they tried to keep the correct Hungarian pronounciation but gave up after several years of correcting people.
We used to have a customer with the first name Deborah. None of us gave her name a second thought until one of the tellers greeted her with “Hi (deb-rah)”. She snapped back “IT’S (DEE-BORE-AH)!” Oookay… We put a note in her account with the correct pronounciation so no other poor teller would get yelled at. Maybe that’s why she closed her account, we kept saying her name wrong…
My first name is Mikel. My parents spelled it phonetically so people could pronounce it. It’s very simple: Mike with an “l” on the end. Think “Michael.”
I have spent a good deal of my life correcting people who call me MICK-el (hate hate hate that pronunciation) or, even more bizarrely, Michelle. What kills me is that I will say, “HI, my name is Mikel.” And the person will look right at me and say, “Michelle?” Why would they think I mispronounced my own name?
I never gave this one much thought until my daughter Erin brought home her boyfriend Aaron. I can hear the tiniest difference in the pronunciations: “Aaron’s” first syllable rhymes with “hair”, and the second is almost like the word “on”, while Erin has less “a” in the first syllable and kind of a soft e or i sound in the second. I usually refer to them as Daughter Erin and Boyfriend Aaron though, because the difference is so subtle.
Erin is more or less pronounced “air-in.” The initial sound in “Aaron” sounds like the a sound in “harrier jet.” Assuming you don’t say “hairier jet,” which is a creepy image.
I would pronounce it that way assuming it’s some sort of European name, and thus pronounce it with the “i” sound most common to European (and other) languages. Interestingly enough, apparently it is a Basque name, and is pronounced close to what I would have guessed.
(Not saying that your name is Basque, but there is a “Mikel” which is a Basque name.)
Pretty much the same with my grandparents. If anything, they didn’t emphasize any syllable, at least no more than any other. My father ended up in Texas, where everyone decided to push the second syllable for a sometimes lilting, sometimes screeching rise-fall pattern. The rest of the family pushed the first syllable. After my grandparents, mother and father died, I shifted the accent to hit the first syllable, to match my surviving uncles.
I have no idea. But some clue may come from the WWI veterans who came home, and told of their participation in the battle of Wipers. (Ypres, of course.)
Just for fun, I dug up Sunspace’s vocal samples thread from 2007. In this thread, there are links to Dopers reading passages that incorporate such words as “Erin” and “Aaron,” and "“Don” and “Dawn,” and so forth. It’s interesting to hear how people from different parts of the world pronounce these, and other, words.
Not quite on point, but I know a “Bridget” (pronounced normally) who went to college and decided her name was to be pronounced Bri-ZHAY when she came back from college after a couple weeks away.
Actually, the citation you’ve given is somewhat ambiguous because of its failure to use IPA, but also note that it gives a second pronunciation for Aaron that seems to incite the pronunciation that I and others have been indicating.
As a high school teacher, I get to see a lot of variations on names.
I’m guessing that 1994-1996 or so was a big name for the name Michaela. Within the past two years, I’ve seen:
Michela
Michaeala
McKayla
Mikayla
Michelea
I can’t really complain; I have a 10-letter Finnish last name that’s half vowels. Very few people get it right the first time, even in our slightly modified American pronunciation.
Yes, it does give that pronunciation (and there is an IPA option.)
For Aaron, it is: /ˈɛərən, ˈær-/
For Erin, it is: /ˈɛrɪn/
However, the poster I was replying to said “Erin” is pronounced “air-un” and that’s not given as an option. I was mistaken in characterizing the pronunciations as being reversed, though. “Aaron” with a short “a” (æ) sound is also fine. I actually pronounce both names as “'ɛər ən”