Is John Boehner’s last name pronounced bay-ner instead of bo-ner because of the desire to avoid sounding like the word boner?
If Boehner is in fact supposed to be pronounced bay-ner, are there any other words/names with similar spelling & pronunciation?
The closest I could come up with is the last name Schroeder, which is pronounced shro-der and not shray-der (i.e. these seem to me both German-origin names, and both have an oe in them, but in one case it’s pronounced ay and in the other case o)
A vowel followed by an “e” in these names is typically an indication of a German/Germanic last name that was once spelled with an umlaut. So Schroeder and Boehner were once spelled Schröder and Böhner. Since we don’t have umlauts in English, the pronunciation tends to get corrupted over time. The way that Boehner’s name is pronounced is no worse than the way you pronounce Schroeder, that is, they’re both sort of “wrong” but that’s the way it’s said now, at least for Americans.
It should be pronounced, depending on the German dialect of his ancestors, something like “beur-nuh” or “behr-nuh.” Maybe “Boy-nuh.” “Schroeder” is “Shroy-duh” in some German dialects. But there’s a great deal of variation in Deutsch pronunciation, & then the “oe” got completely mangled in Anglicization. (My ancestors had an “oen” sound mutate into the sounds of the English name “Ann.”)
Not ‘oy’. That’s the sound ‘eu’ makes. As in Freund (froynd) or Eugen (OY-gen).
What I’m saying is it varies. In standard High German, it should be a bit like “burner,” or like English “book” with the “k” knocked off & “nuh” added, but Deutscher politician Gerhard Schroeder does pronounce his name almost like English-spelling “shroyda.”
That said, for Boehner’s dialect as a Midwestern German-American, “Baner” is correct. Anglo “ay” for German “oe” is a pretty common vowel shift. In my hometown a bit to the west of Boehner’s, there’s a road spelled “Goetz” & pronounced “gates.”
If I understand correctly from the comments in that other thread:
[ol]
[li]For some Germans, it’s pronounced like “burner”, without the ‘r’[/li][li]For some Germans, it’s pronounced like “boy-ner”[/li][li]For some Germans, it’s pronounced like “bay-ner”[/li][li]For Americans, it’s pronounced like “bay-ner”[/li][/ol]
Are the above statements correct?
I was once puzzled over how to pronounce “eu” in German. Was my face red when the penny dropped and I figured the word “Deutschland” ought to have given me a clue. :o
Since there’s a thread in GQ, I’m going to close this one.
twickster, moderator