Heh. Same thing happened with a fellow in my school surnamed Charron, which ought to have been “Sha-ronh”, but everyone pronounced “Chairin’”. And in the Maritimes, what’s Presqu’ile or “Pres-keel” on one side of the border is a twangy “Pres-ky-ull” on the other.
Not according to the AP and other style guides. The speaker always is right when it comes to pronuciation and spelling of his own name.
Consider: On the TV show, “Petrocelli” was pointedly pronounced with a “ch” sound, (petro-Chelli) yet Rico Petrocelli pronounced it with an “s” (Petro-selli). When talking about the TV show, “Petro-chelli” was correct; when talking about the ballplayer, “Petro-selli” was correct. Rico himself, when asked, said no one in his family used the TV version of his name. What right do you have to say he’s wrong?
In England, “Featherstonehaugh” is pronounced “Fanshaw.” However, around here, there is a Featherstonehaugh family that pronounces it “feather-stone-haw.” If you called them “fanshaw,” you’d be mispronouncing their name.
Or, John Chancellor – he annouced at one point in his career that his name is pronounced with an “OR” at the end, not the “ur” most people use. From that point, it was prounounced that way. Even more pronounced is that of hockey player Walt Tkachuk. In his early career, his team announced his name was pronounced “Tay-chuck.” Later, he let it be known that it had always been prounounced “Ka-CHOOK.” Sports shows immediately changed to meet his wishes.
It also works with spelling (think of Prince).
Ultimately, if someone wishes to pronounce his name in a certain way, why should someone else overrule his wishes? It’s his name, after all, and if he doesn’t want to follow the rules, that’s his business.
Another one-semester-of-Italian guy here.
What I don’t get is people’s pronunciation of the given name “Gianni.” According to standard Italian, it should be pronounced very close to “Johnny,” though with a slightly longer “n” and a slightly shorter “y.” Gianni doesn’t have to Americanize his name; it’s already a popular American name. So why does everyone pronounce it “jee-ah-nee,” making it more Italian-sounding than the original?
Huh, the Master actually touched on this subject, although with regard to spelling rather than pronunciation:
Same deal, I guess—the post-immigrant generations don’t know the original language, and the neighbors from other ethnic groups aren’t familiar with the name, so the pronunciation and/or spelling gradually gets modified to a more “anglicized” or familiar-seeming version, and soon even the bearers of the name think of the new form as “correct”.
Why do you think people names require any less consensus than place names?
If any such authority exists, it has no linguistic relevance. How would one exercise that authority? Could you seek damages from those who pronounce your name incorrectly?
There is no authoritative pronunciation of anything, in any meaningful sense. However, there are standards. Individuals have no absolute control over the standard pronunciation of their names. Their wishes may carry more weight than the opinions of others, but in the end, people are going to pronounce the name in such a way as to clearly identify the person to others who know him, whether this is the same as what the bearer of the name wants or not.
I know a bunch of Nguyens (rendered here without the accent marks). Vietnamese do not pronounce it “na-goo-yen”. Vietnamese pronounce it in a way that Americans have great difficulty reproducing. A de facto American standard pronunciation something like “win” or “wyen” evolved. Whether the American standard pronunciation is faithful to the original is not the issue - people need to be able to unambiguously identify Mr. Nguyen. Nguyens have had to learn to deal with people who can’t say their name “right”. If they had any authority over the pronunciation of their name, they chose not to exercise it. There are a thousand other examples of this.
Howyadoin,
Having an Italian surname with a silent “g” makes things interesting… If pronounced correctly, it falls off the tongue nicely, with a little trill, even. If not pronounced correctly… not so much. A lot of my family pronounces the “g”, my mother and I don’t. Having an name that is unpronounceable is great for playing “Spot the telemarketer”:
"Hello, may I speak with Mr. Puh…Pahh…Pag… " <CLICKDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO>
-Rav
Couple of random points:
Except it’s not - even using standardized english pronounciation, it should be “sheeavo”. The i comes before the a, not after, so the written dipthong is reversed whenever anybody pronounces it the way the Florida family does.
Well, you’re right about the slightly longer n, and the slightly shorty y, but the “jee-ah” is actually correct. Italian is very sensitive to the dipthong, and there is definitely a discrete “jee” and a discrete “ahh” sound in “gia”. It just happens that the “ee” is really really short. The “ah” is a better representation than “oh” (johnny) since the former is more foreward in the mouth (brighter) than the latter.
Neither of these comments has any relation to the OP, of course.
Well, forget San Pedro, then–how about Los Angeles itself? There’s hardly a phoneme in it that’s pronounced “correctly.”
BobT corrected you on San Pedro (Peedro to the locals), so I’ll correct you on San Jose. Pretty much everyone around here says something like San-a-ZAY or San-oh-ZAY, but all slurred together. Occasionally an Hispanic newscaster will pronounce it “correctly”.
As for the OP, I don’t see a difference in Italian. All non-English surnames are anglicized. even when there seems to be no reason to. Look at Japanese names, like Maruyama (the pro golfer). People call him Maury-yama. Granted, the correct Japanese pronunciation is a bit difficult, but there’s no reason we couldn’t at least say Maru-yama. Or German names that end in -ger pronounced “jer” instead of with a hard “g”.
I’ll meet you halfway. I think “SHY-ay-vo” would be just as likely a pronunciation for an American. Eventually “SHY-ay-vo” gets elided simply to “SHY-vo.” Doesn’t seem that weird or mysterious to me.
To support my “ia” pronunciation, just see “Miami.”
How does Henry Kissinger pronounce his own name?
What bugs me is that prounoucing “sch” as “sh” seems to be applying a German pronunciation to an Italian name. Or is it pronounced that way in some area of Italy?
I took a quick look through a dictionary and didn’t see any common English words that pronounced it that way unless they were directly borrowed from German or Yiddish. I know geologists (mis)pronounce “schist” as “shist”, but that’s not a common word. I was surprised to see that the first pronunciation for “schism” is " 'si-z&m" The rest of the pronuncations are " 'ski- also 'shi-; among clergy usually 'si-". And both of those words are from the same Greek root.
Okay, second thoughts.
Maybe “schist” was first used by a German geologist, and got its pronunciation that way. Do Germans pronounce “sch” as “sh” for all words regardless of origin?
The British do pronounce “schedule” as “shedule”. (And the well-known Dorothy Parker rejoinder to an actor who kept talking of his ‘schedule’ using the British pronunciation, “If you don’t mind my saying so, I think you’re full of skit.”)
The worst Italian-American surname mispronunciation standard I’ve ever encountered (and I AM Italian-American!) is <b>Tagliaferro</b>.
Pronounced <b>“Tolliver”</b>.
:smack:
Goddamn HTML…
Point made and accepted. Thanks for explaining to me why ia sounds like ay!! 
To the best of this italian’s knowledge, no. And if perchance “sch” is pronounced “sh” in some italian dialect, it’s still more likely that it’s mispronounced by Americans due to a German/Yiddish lingual bias.
Hey, want a nasty last name to pronounce? Try mine: Golaszewski. Even I’m not sure of the correct pronounciation. According to several people who actually knew how to speak Polish, they thought it was “Go-wah-chef-ski”. The reason being is the assumed the l was really a ł, which is a non-existant letter in English, but exists in Polish. According to a Google search, this tends to support this:
http://www.google.pl/search?q=gołaszewski&btnG=Szukaj&hl=pl
Wyniki 1 - 10 spośród około 11,600 dla zapytania gołaszewski.
http://www.google.pl/search?hl=pl&q=golaszewski&btnG=Szukaj&lr=lang_pl
Wyniki 1 - 10 spośród około 593 w języku Polski dla zapytanie golaszewski.
That restricts the search to Polish language pages.
Well, Rowrrbazzle, having taken two years of German in high school and three semesters in college, I’ll have to go with yes. As far as I remember ::checks her German textbook:: the SH construction isn’t really used in German, but the sound is applied to “sch” and some forms of “st,” if not to other groupings of letters. If it’s a foreign word, it’s normally English, and tends to be words like “Inelineskater,” “Actionfilm” and “Hairstylist.” It’s a different phonetic system, but English has borrowed from it in small amounts.
On to my surname pronounciation issues…
My surname is Chitow, which, oddly enough, was also a town in Poland during WWII. Obviously we don’t pronounce the name the same way that people in Poland would, but at the same time we’re still working on origin of the name and whether my paternal great-grandfather was actually from Russia, or whether he was a transient and ended up in Chitow at one point in time. No matter how it’s presented, there are rare occasions where someone guesses our pronounciation correctly. My family pronounces it as rhyming with “high toe,” while I’ve heard attempts that rhyme with “pit sow,” “stilton,” and “high sow” among others. What makes it worse is that I have friends who’ve known me for over six years who still can’t remember how to pronounce my name.
In my house, you could always tell who was a telemarketer, for my mother has a name that just doesn’t seem to appear to English speakers as if it would belong to a woman, and thus “Mr. GoodRider Chitow” is asked for often, but with a lot of stumbling through that “goodrider” part. We also had problems with telemarketers calling me and my mother “sir” due to our somewhat deep voices for women.
My mother and her twin brother pronounce their family name differently!