Pronouncing writers' names right

[Eric]

If you take the letter "ö" as meaning something like "er" as in hesitation in British English (those of you that know German etc., know the ö-sound from other languages), then I always say "i-REVV-ö-kö-bl" with the capitalised letters showing the stress. That, at least, is an acceptable British way of pronouncing it. Quite a lot of longer words with Latin or French roots, are pronounced and stressed differently in Britain and North America. Even within one country the pronunciation and stress can vary (e.g. ARR-is-tö-kratt and ö-RISS-tö-kratt in the UK).

I repeat my idea of "nearest reasonable pronunciation" of writers' names. In other words, as near as you can get in English without sounding as if you are showing off. I think the Russian author is pronounced correctly by native-speakers as dass-ta-YAYFF-skee, but most of us make do in English with doss-toy-EFF-skee.

But the pronunciation should be reasonably near the original. So the Moomin author should preferably be TOO-vö YAAN-son rather that TOAV JANN-sön.

The problem with all of this is that writing a simple phonetic description, without using the weird squiggles of the International Phonetic Alphabet, means that what Brits understand leads an American astray and vice-versa, as our two versions of English are pronounced differently right from the start.

[Eric]

Here are a few more writers' names that may cause difficulties when saying them:

- Oleg Zaionchkovsky

- Günter de Bruyn

- Jan Celliers

- Harry Mulisch

- Anthony Powell

- Anatoli Rybakov

- Johan Daisne

- Uku Masing

The difficulty here is that the name exists on the cusp between two cultures, or there could be two ways of pronouncing the name, so there might even be alternatives.