Pronunciation of names

You may possibly be right! I can do Fred Smith though.

More in keeping, what about Craig Chaquico. Chack-ee-coe?

My family surname is a grossly simplified version of the original Hungarian. My grandparents used the Hungarian pronunciation (despite the different spelling) and my father and his brother pronounced the Americanized spelling with emphasis on different syllables.

I don’t much care how you pronounce my name, but please make an effort to spell it right. That’s why we simplified it!

A friend with a long Serbo-Croat-sounding name, when asked how to pronounce it, would reply in a classy Stephen Fry accent:* “As a matter of fact, there are seventeen ways to pronounce our family surname. Unfortunately, they are all… incorrect.”*

Many languages share the same alphabet, they do not all assign the same phonetic value to each letter, and often, a language is bound by edict (or law) to comply with national phonetics. So two names in different languages can very often be conflicting names by mandate. If your name is Eugen and you live in Germany, you are pretty well stuck with oy-gun.

One of the most outlandish examples is the Brazilian name Railde. By Brazilian Portuguese phonetics, it is pronounced Ha-ewj, or High-yooj. Initial R = H, IL = EW, and terminal DE = J.

To go with Brett Favre, there was an NHL pllayer who calledl himself Dustin Bufflin, ,with his last name spelled Byfuglien.

It’s a Finish name, and one of the easier ones. :wink: I worked with someone years ago who grew up with him and, supposedly, he hated his “odd sounding” name as a kid, but once he became a rock star it was “way cool”.

I grew up in a community with a large Eastern European population and I attended a Catholic school. I was surrounded by classmates with difficult last names - some still spelled and pronounced the Old Country way and others Americanized. The biggest head scratcher in my experience was Prbyszys, pronounced SHEE-vish.

Some of the least recognisable names have to be Irish ones. Who would guess that Siobhan would be pronounced Shiv-awn?

Neil Peart’s last name is correctly pronounced “Peert”, not “Purt”.

Then there’s the golfer Chy Chy Rodreegweez. :smiley:

Doperalski, Stodolski, Wozniak, Krohemenhack, these are names of people I grew up with, or encountered in the wild (or both) and it always amazed me how many people could not get the pronunciation right. Well, Wozniak not so much these days but back then…

Someone familiar with Irish spelling conventions? Who would guess that Thames is pronounced Tems and Worcestershire is pronounced Wustehsher. If you’re not from the area, chances are you won’t pronounce a lot of the cities and towns around Boston “correctly”.

RE: Freiberg, Stein, Heinlein, etc.

In German words and names with two vowels next to each other the first vowel is silent and the second vowel is long.

My wife is of French descent. Her maiden name ends in -bois. She has always pronounced it -boyce. Her brother pronounces it -boys. One of her sisters pronounces it as -boy.

I think the proper French pronunciation would be -bwha

That’s not really true. (Plus it works with an outdated definition of “long” that is specific to English phonology.) It may help in remembering “ei” and “ie” in that in those combinations (and it happens to work for “ai” as well), the “second vowel says its name in English.” But it doesn’t work for combinations like “au,” “eu,” “ãu,” “ey,” and “ay.”

There’s only 18 letters in Gaelic, so they do a lot of tricks to get more phonemes. Thames and Worcestor are not Gaelic, so I can’t answer that.

I’m more familiar with Scottish Gaelic, as I have a Scottish Terrier and wanted to give him an authentic name. I borrowed and adapted the following to help explain it. There’s MUUUUCH more, but this should be a good start.

Gaelic has broad vowels (A, O, U) and slender vowels (E, I). These affect consonants like E and I do C and G in English. What’s odd is it can fall before or after the consonant and affect it.

For Broad vowels:
F, L, M, N and S are like English.
P, T, and C are like English but get a slight “kh” sound before them (slight breath/cough).
B, D, G are like English if beginning a word. Otherwise they are P, T, and C.
R is rolled.
H is like English, if in isolation, but if after a consonant, it changes the sound.
BH = V
CH = Like German Bach
DH = Similar to GH below.
FH = Silent
GH = Kind of a vocalized CH. Picture how G is the vocalized C.
MH = W or V
PH = F
SH = H
TH = H

For slender vowels (e or i):
Usually, just add a Y after the consonant. Like B becomes BY (beauty), C becomes CY (cute), P becomes PY (puke), SH becomes HY (hue), L becomes LY (million), BH becomes VY (view).

There are exceptions.
Si or Se = SH
CH = like German ich or a HY with a bit of force.
GH and DH are voiced as above, but with vocal chords vibrating.
And a few more that get really involved.

The biggest problem is that a lot of vowels aren’t even pronounced, but are there to alter the consonant’s sounds. For instance, the name Siobhan. S is followed by the slender i, so it gets the SH sound but you don"t pronounce the i. BH is surrounded by broad vowels, so it gets the full V. The O gets a soft almost schwa pronunciation. So we get Siobhan as “SHUH-von”.

BH/DH/GH/MH are the most confusing as they kind of go silent after a lot of vowels, but not always. Dubh “doo”, labhar “laa-uhr”, sidhein “shee-in”, buidhe “buuy-uh”, mheadhoin “vey-in”. But then there are words like abhainn “av-in”, laogh “luwgh”, damh “dav” and caoimhin “kuw-vin”. Then there’s a word like Samhain, which gets the MH slur to a W instead of a V. The A after the MH is there as a broad vowel and gets no pronunciation of itself. So we pronounce Samhain as “SAH win”.

As I said, I named my dog Seumas “Shaymus”. Gaelic has a genitive tense, so it changes when you address the person. This is accomplished by lenition (adding H) of the first Consonant and slenderizing the final one. Sheumais, which gets pronounced “Hamish”. His middle name is Ruadh (Rrrroo) or red. Gaelic does not really have last names. It’s Mac (son of) the father. His father was Barnaby, which is not Gaelic, but it is Biblical, so that’s allowed. Barnabas gets the same genitive treatment. MacBharnabais “Mac Varnapaish”. Seumas Ruadh MacBharnabais or James the Red, Son of Barnaby.

Just to be clear, I was not implying they were Gaelic, but just pointing out how unphonetic English can be. Otherwise, thanks for the explanation about Gaelic pronunciation. I’ve had it all explained before, but I did’t retain it.

English spelling is famously unphonetic, and not just with respect to proper names. Everybody’s familiar with the diverse pronunciations of through, bough, cough, enough, lough, etc. Irish spelling is very regular by comparison - there are settled rules, with far fewer exceptions than you typically find in English. It’s just that, to someone from an Anglophone background, the rules are very unfamiliar.

Thee players named Lefebvre playhed major league baseball. They pronounced their names Bill Lefevv, Jim Le-fever, and Joe La-fay.

Lafayette is pronounced at least four different ways locally by people who live in American cities or towns of that name. Including la-feet in Florida.

That one always confuses me. It seems to me that it should be “Part”, rhyming with “heart”. Or “Purt”, as you mention.