And why does George Bush pronounce Nuclear as Nucular? He never can get it right.
It was a username here for a while. Hmm, now I am second-guessing how to pronounce geobabe.
I knew a southerner who pronounced it bool-YAY, which is also not the French pronunciation.
But BEE-cham for “Beauchamp” is not just southern. It’s the English English pronunciation. Goes along with names like MAUD-lin for “Magdalene” and CHUM-ley for “Cholmondeley” and FAN-shaw for “Featherstonehaugh.”
Is his family from Louisiana? You’d think they’d be a little closer to the original French pronunciation if so.
It’s “Farve” for the same reason people say “oar durves”. The little “vruh” sound doesn’t really exist in English, so people tended to switch the “v” and the “r” around, and those pronunciations became standard.
And the Hampshire village of Beaulieu is pronounced BYOO-lee.
I thought Ben Stiller covered this in 1998.
Actually, ‘Colbert’ is an Irish name, I’m told. So it’d be pronounced ‘COL-bert’, sort of like ‘Dogbert’. He pronounces it ‘col-BEAR’ because he feels like it, though, and so therefore, he’s ‘col-BEAR’.
If you were listening to me watch the game last night, you’d have thought the official pronunciation was “Motherfucker!”…
The better question is why Jimmy Carter (who was a nuke tech in the Navy) also pronounces it that way.
It might still originally be French though. Some Irish names are descended from the Normans.
The most annoying butchery of a name I have ever seen, though, is in Microsoft Flight Simulator X. The air-traffic control system in that game allows you to “talk” to the air tower for many airports around the world, and they went to the trouble of recording actual voices for all of them, and for the pilot (the player, in other words) talking to them. The pilot voice and the air traffic controller voice both pronounced Sault Tower, in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, as “Salt Tower.” Everyone knows it’s actually pronounced “SOO” though. I’d forgive them for a more obscure city, but Sault Ste. Marie is way too notable for them to have fucked that up.
Thing is, most people don’t make the slightest effort to pronounce foreign words like they were originally intended to and just adapt them in their own language to the way they’re spelled. In the United States, this situation is accentuated by the fact that many people are never exposed to any other language than English.
This said, the most absurd butchering of a French name I’ve ever heard was that of former Houston Astros pitcher Jim Deshaies, which became “de-shayz” instead of “dey-hè” (with the “è” sounding like the “e” in “Ken”).
more interesting is that the vice pres. last name is mispronounced constantly. he says “cheeney” nearly everyone else says “chayney”. the only person on tv (so far) that says it like the vp is chris mathews.
i go with cheeney. it’s the way he says it and it rhymes with more things…
Okay, now explain Dwyane Wade.
Shouldn’t it be “Dwayne”?
I had a chemistry professor in high school who went through pains to teach us all the correct pronounciation, which he said was “New-Clear”.
Yaknow, the way the word is spelled. :rolleyes:
That said, when I brought this up in a discussion amongst my friends years later in college, it seems that online dictionaries do not back me up on this. sigh
You should hear what the Chinese language does to Western names. In China, “Texas” is pronounced “Duh-Jhoh” (more confusingly, they spell it “Dezhou” when using romanized spelling, and when using Chinese characters, there is only one character’s difference between “Texas” and “Germany” 
)
Apropos… The town in which Favre grew up and in which our school was located is Kiln, Mississippi – pronounced “Kill” (or sometimes “the Kill”.) If you pronounce the “n” on the end of “Kiln”, people will wonder what you’re talking about.
Ah. Okay, didn’t know that.
Hell, even a lifelong Florida boy like myself knows to say ‘SOO’ (even though my two years of high school French compell me to say ‘SEW’). Then again, I associate Sault Ste. Marie with sea, and not air, traffic.
Ha, when I was choosing my own name in Chinese class, the obvious thing to do — straight phonetic transcription — yielded a six-character monstrosity. So I simply decided to translate my name, yielding the far more manageable ‘Wei Shengmian’. ‘Shengmian’ is my half-assed attempt to translate ‘victory crown’, since the Greek form of my name, Stephanos, means “that olive-branch thingy that Olympic victors wore on their heads”, IIRC.
Chinese transliterations are funny. My own state is called ‘Fozhou’ — ‘Buddhist state’.
Well, they were both at one point governed by fascist dictators.
Ba-dum-bum!
(I kid, I kid…I’m pretty apolitical. If this was inappropriate for GQ, I apologize.)
You get to pick your own names? Lucky.
Our instructors picked our names based on what our old names were, whether our names looked like boys names or girls names, and most importantly, a requirement that the name be three characters or less. One girl in our class was accidentally given a guy’s name, and they hastily made her a new one, using the name of a famous Chinese author.
Well, half-true from what I understand of admittedly biased Texas history. I don’t think Santa Anna was a fascist, but I’m pretty sure he was considered a dictator.