Which is also how “Star Trek’s” Walter Koenig pronounces his name.
OK this is what I was wondering about. So he used to call himself “boner.” When did he change it to “bay-ner”?
Boehner should do a buddy cop show with Ken Cuccinelli.
Boner and the Cooch
When he started to notice the snickering.
In my German classes this is how we were taught to pronounce a vowel with an umlaut: Shape your mouth for the vowel, and pronounce ‘eh’.
That wouldn’t work for ü or ä
ä - is an unrounded vowel [ɛ] as in English “bet.”
ü - comes in short and long –
– short is [ʏ], which is a rounded [ɪ] as in English “bit.”
– long is [y], which is a rounded * as in English “beet.”
ö - also comes in short and long –
– short is [œ], which is a rounded [ɛ] as in English “bet.”
– long is [ø], which is a rounded [e], which isn’t in standard American or British English, but sounds to us like the vowel in"bait" [beɪt]
It was a general guide for pronunciation. Specific pronunciations were practiced in class. Also, there were regional differences. (e.g., the Bavarian ‘ish’ instead of ‘i(ch)’.)
Don’t certain German dialects pronounce the sound of the umlauted o more like “ay”? I think I recall hearing this about, maybe, southern German dialects. As to Wayne Newton’s danke shoen, seems to me his pronunciation might reflect the way the Yiddish would be pronounced, no? Same goes for “Bei mir bist du shoen.”
In German the spellings ‘oe’ and ‘ö’ are different ways of rendering the O-Umlaut sound, which is approximately what you get when you hold your lips round as if to pronounce a long O-sound, but otherwise shape and position your tongue to pronounce ‘A’ as in ‘gate’ or ‘take’. The spellings are not interchangeable, and the ‘ö’ spelling is a lot more common in German today. Different families with these names might spell them either way, with the usual expectation that other people will spell the name their way when referring to them. For instance, you wouldn’t spell Wolfgang Goethe’s as ‘Göthe’.
The “PAY-ler”,“KAY-nig”, etc. pronunciations just reflect the Anglicization of the pronunciation, since we don’t have the /ö/ sound in English.
In some personal names, oe cannot be rendered as ö.
However, ö can *always *be written as oe, so long as it is done consistently throughout the text.
The same one-directional relationship is true of ä/ae and ü/ue.
Similarly, ß can always be written as ss, but not the other way around.
Sure it works for ü, as I’ll illustrate below.
The ‘rounding’ of the vowel is analogous to what happens with ö. I was taught to say “ee” while holding the lips round as if to say “ooh”.
We should get it over with and decree that from now on he shall be known as Boner. If nothing else, it’ll give us something to snicker about over the next couple of years.
I also decree that Carl Paladino switch out the “d” in his name for an “m”.
It does me too. Can you imagine what I go through, with the commonness of German names in America, the pronunciation of 99% of which is radically different from proper German? On the other hand it’s unreasonable to expect these people not to have anglicized their names to some extent, and my own mangled Dutch name is another example. Besides, you can’t tell people how to pronounce their own names. Someone here even posted a Pit rant about it once.
Interestingly, I used to have a very old English/German phrasebook, intended for speakers of either language wanting to learn the other. For Germans, the sound rendered by “er” or “ur” was explained as being close to /ö/. It does indeed seem to be a fairly apt comparison, depending on which English accent you’re thinking of. It wouldn’t work with most American accents.
I have relatives named Schoenherr and live near a road of the same name. It’s that stupid “long A” sound for the lot of them.
I’ve seen a pronunciation guide say that the name of the mathematician who had a famous incompleteness theorem is pronounced like “girdle” - it likely assumed that all speakers had a non-rhotic accent, and if they didn’t, it was the best alternative since English never uses that vowel outside of the “er” cluster. In fact, pronouncing that vowel gives me the impression of a young child who hasn’t learned to pronounce ‘r’ correctly yet (and I was one of them - I had to go to a speech therapist to learn when I was in grade school) - that vowel sound implies that cluster so strongly that I hear the “mistake” clearly.
It’s not entirely clear to me what you’re saying here. But I was responding to the comment that implied that all the umlauted vowels were based on “eh,” which I’m assuming is meant to be [ɛ]. If you assume that there is a total of six umlauted vowels, only two of them (short ä and short ö) and perhaps a third (long ä) can be said to be related to [ɛ] in any way. The other ones – long ö, short ü, and long ü – have nothing to do with an “eh” sound.
I’m starting to cotton on to the idea that this pronunciation might have been influenced by Yiddish pronunciation, as Sal Ammoniac mentioned.
It’s difficult to convey sounds on a message board. When I was in school nobody’d ever heard of IPA. I never heard of it until I saw it on Wiki. I thought of including ‘ee’ as well as ‘eh’ in my post, but I didn’t feel like it. My post was not meant to be a definitive answer, but only an example of how we were taught in German I. As I said later, the correct pronunciations were practiced in class.
Pedantry is often at odds with real life. (Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with pedantry – I use it myself on some subjects.) On a message board where actual sounds cannot be used, mouth shape and ‘eh’ or ‘eh’ (or ‘ay’ or whatever) is close enough to demonstrate a difference between ‘BAY-nor’ and ‘Böhner’. Especially when you consider that different people who follow the guideline will come out with different sounds when they try to play at home.
Actually, when it comes to pronunciation, I think the general trend of messages on this board tends to prove that lack of what you call pedantry leads to discussions that go nowhere.
Part of the confusion of this is variations in how we speak English. I suspect that if I were a New Yorker, or Bostonian, I would say Burner very close to the way a German would say Boehner. Having been raised in Denver, though, Burner is far from the mark. I guy from Boston I used to work with had not too thick of an accent until he was telling me about his vacation in Mahthus Vinyuhds. If you do that to the R, then “Burner” is very close to the German.
He’ll always be a Boner to me.