I just remembered it. Caughron. Apparently it’s a common last name, and is usually pronounced like one pronunciation Cochrane, i.e “cock-run.”
Most people I know pronounce air and err the same way, which can be written as either /ɛər/ or the more common /er/, since we don’t distinguish between [e] and [ɛ] in front of /r/, like everyone else with the Mary, marry, and merry merger.
I can see where she’s coming from. Speaking from a Swedish perspective, she’s got the ending rightish (“i” is pronounced like an English “e”, but some people would give it a long “e” sound and other give it a short one) but the beginning seems all wrong. The “K” is pronounced as a “sh” but the “e” would be pronounced as in English.
I used to work with a Norwegian called Kersti that pronounced her name “sher-stee”.
Scandinavian languages are pronounced nothing like one would expect. Finnish, on the other hand, is very predictable.
Bolding mine. Just to point out, this is Irish and pretty close to the correct Irish spelling. The surname comes from Irish Ó Meachair
M goes “mj” as in Swedish mjölk > M
E is to indicate that the M is palatal (mj above) > E
A is a vowel that sounds like “a” > A
CH is a gutteral consonant so difficult for English speakers that they ignore it. > GH
A is a vowel that sounds like “a” > E
I is a warning that another palatal consonant is coming. > Ø
R goes “r-sort-of-zh” as in Dvořák > R
The gh is the way the English used to spell Irish ch (as in “Bach, get out of the loch!”). Depending on your dialect of Irish, of course, but the CH sometimes gets simplified to H and sometimes drops out altogether.
ETA: the Irish dialects are also what simplifies the vowels to “uh.”
Living in Sweden and being able to speak Swedish, I’m guessing that I may be able to make a decent guess.
Okay, you convinced me. I’ll allow for exceptions on the part of people who actually know one of those languages.
I worked with Deirdre – deer-drah, no? Dee-AH-dray, and don’t you forget it!
The beautiful and incomparable Sade pronounces her name ‘Shar-day’. I never was able to figure out how that works.
While I’ve heard the pronunciation with the “r”, I always thought is was more like “Shah-day”. FWIW, Wikipedia agrees. Still, that doesn’t explain how “Sade” becomes “Shah-day,” but that’s one less sound to explain away. (If it were a Hungarian name, I actually could explain the pronunciation, as their “s” represents what we call an “sh.”)
I wonder if the “r” came from some UK English phoneticization of her name. In UK English non-rhotic accents, “shar-day” would indeed sound something like “shah-day.” So if a UK pronunciation guide said Sade (“Shar-day”) and some American picked it up, there might be some confusion. It’s perhaps a stretch of an explanation, but that’s exactly what’s happened to me when reading UK English foreign language books. For example, in a guide to Hungarian written for UK speakers, the sound ö was explained as being similar to the ur in fur. So, the word for thank you, köszönöm was rendered phonetically as “KUR-sur-nurm.” It confused the hell out of me, as there are no "r"s in that word and I didn’t hear any "r"s when I heard natives use it. It only dawned on me much later that this book was for UK English speakers, and in Received Pronunciation, “KUR-sur-nurm” will actually get you in the ballpark of the Hungarian, but as a US English speaker with a rhotic accent, “KUR-sur-nurm” makes you sound like an idiot. I also have the sneaking suspicion that that’s how the “r” got into some American pronunciations of “Goethe.”
Predictable, but different than English, especially when it comes to which syllable gets the emphasis.
Heck, this whole damn country can’t figure out how to pronounce the word ‘sauna’. What do you expect them to do with lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas?
I came in to report the three families in our town with the last name Koch; each pronounces it differently:
COE
KOTCH
and
COOK
but definitely no “cock”
Coke -Cook
Had a teacher in medical school named Frankenstein, but he insisted it was pronounced Fronk-en-steen.
This hasn’t gone away… my niece born in 2008 is Mikaylah. A friend of mine has a daughter born in 2002 named Makayla. So many variations of one name, it’s enough to make your head hurt.
I worked with a lady whose name was pronounced Eh-vah-deen and when I asked why her name tag was spelled Evadne she got very annoyed and told me that’s just how it’s spelled. Maybe her parents were good southerners like my grandparents who didn’t spell so pretty good. My aunt Katherine’s name was spelled Kathern and my mother’s middle name Lorraine was spelled Lorene. My aunt Novella’s name was pronounced Noveller and my aunt Avis was pronounced with a short “a” as in “bad”. And my mother had an Aunt Icydoe which has nothing to do with the thread but I always thought it was a very imaginative name.
Ev—Vet
And someone who came by the Savage surname by birth talks about wieners a whole lot!
She got it from her middle name, Folasade, so I suspect it might be something from the Nigerian pronunciation. (Just a wild-ass guess because I know nothing of how that name “should” be pronounced.)
That doesn’t seem significantly different from the pronunciation that Matt M. was asking about.
i live in the southwest jaime would be said hi-may, because that is how the Mexicans use it. I went to school with one and worked with another.
