Pronouncing writers' names right

[Eric]

When translating from a language that you are familiar with on paper, but haven't heard very much, you may come across the name of an author that you don't know how to say.

For instance, there are a number of British authors whose names are tricky to pronounce:

Samuel Pepys
Evelyn Waugh
Anthony Powell
Iris Murdoch
D.H. Lawrence (no one ever calls him David Herbert Lawrence)
Charlotte Brontë (and her siblings)
John Keats
W.B. Yeats
John Galsworthy (galling, or worthy of gals?)
Walter Raleigh
William Cowper (cow or moo?)
Wyndham Lewis

and, no doubt, quite a few American authors too.

[Loki]

What is wrong with John Keats? Pepys and Cowper are tricky, but fortunately I had heard of them. Powell I didn't know.

The pronunciation of Waugh made me think of William Somerset Maugham.

As for Raleigh I knew that there were two pronunciations, but Wikipedia allows even three, although I use the first one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Raleigh#cite_note-0

As for Italian writers, only one comes to my mind (although foreigners will get most of them wrong anyway!): Machiavelli, although spelled with one c, is pronounced as if it had two "c"s, so that the sound is longer (as in the word "macchia", stain).

[Eric]

There's nothing wrong with John Keats, it's just that Keats and Yeats, which was next on my list, are not pronounced with the same vowel sound.

You are quite right, Loki, to pick up the analogy between Waugh and Maugham.

I've sometimes thought that Machiavelli was really a Scotsman or Irishman called MacIavelly...

Anthony Powell has a trick in both his first and second name. The way we say "Antony" with a "t" and not a "th" sound (this anomaly also occurs in the word "thyme" for the herb, and the name "Thomas") is well known. But Powell also pronounced his surname "pole" which rhymes with bowl, soul, coal, etc., and not the more usual /pa-wull/.

There is a surname analogous to Pepys and that is Wemys.

[Loki]

Anthony Powell has a trick in both his first and second name. The way we say "Antony" with a "t" and not a "th" sound (this anomaly also occurs in the word "thyme" for the herb, and the name "Thomas") is well known. But Powell also pronounced his surname "pole" which rhymes with bowl, soul, coal, etc., and not the more usual /pa-wull/.

So together with Thailand, thyme, Thomas, Thames (maybe another one but it skips my mind right one) we have also Anthony (but only in the UK it seems).

[Stiffelio]

As for Italian writers, only one comes to my mind (although foreigners will get most of them wrong anyway!): Machiavelli, although spelled with one c, is pronounced as if it had two "c"s, so that the sound is longer (as in the word "macchia", stain).

Non-Italian speakers rarely pay the due attention to the double consonants (il "raddoppiamento"), which is so characteristic of the language. When I studied Italian my first teacher put a special emphasis on the "raddoppiamento" and I'm very grateful to her for that.

[Stiffelio]

Trickiest of all are some Irish names and surnames:

Seamus Heaney is pronounced Shay-muss Hay-nie
Colm Tóibín is pronounced Colum Too-bin (with the accent on the "bin" syllable)

[Rumpelstilzchen]

Probably you are all aware of this webpage, which is very helpful when trying to find out how to pronounce certain author names:
http://www.forvo.com/word/

[Eric]

Yes, Loki, you're right in #4. I'd forgotten about the muddy River Thaimz and Thighland, where the girls show their limpid thighs to the lithping thex tourists... I wonder whether there are any more names in that category.

[Eric]

Appleworm (#7), you spoilsport, I couldn't really navigate my way around that Forvo website, I'm afraid, to see what they did with proper names.

Irish and Scots Gaelic names are always difficult because the spelling of these two languages tends to use the letter "i" to indicate whether the consonants surrounding a particular vowel are hard or palatalised. In the jargon the consonants there are called "broad" or "slender".

I thought that Tóibín was prononounced Tobin (first syllable stress) and that you said Shame-us Hee-ni. Which was my point about Yeats (yates) and Keats (keets).

[Stiffelio]

I thought that Tóibín was prononounced Tobin (first syllable stress) and that you said Shame-us Hee-ni. Which was my point about Yeats (yates) and Keats (keets).

Sorry, you're right about Heaney: it's pronounced as Keats and not as Yeats.

[accidie]

Interesting to learn how Anthony Powell is pronounced as to me that seems a distinctly Irish way of pronouncing it.

The 'ea' in names like Heaney, Reagan, etc. is often pronounced differently in different parts of the country, but the poet is indeed always Hee-ni.

I'm trying to think of a way to pronounce Iris Murdoch other than Eye-ris Murdock. Murdoch, w. 'ch' as in 'chair'? Ee-ris? Myur-doak?

[Eric]

In the Celtic languages, "ch" often suggests a "kh" sound as in the Scottish "loch". But given the frequency of the names Rupert and James Murdoch in the media, there is probably not much of a problem, as you, Accidie, suggest. In many if not most parts of Europe, the name Iris is pronounced /ee-ris/. The English-speakers are the odd ones out.

Entony Pole was actually of Welsh extraction, so maybe you have a point Accidie, Celtic or Gaelic input.

English spelling is chaotic by tradition. The input of French, Scandinavian, and Gaelic no doubt caused this.

How is Tóibín actually pronounced? I merely hazarded a guess.

How would you pronounce Bagehot, another of those weird English names? And to mention another economist, Keynes seems to get pronounced /kaynz/ and /keenz/. I never know which is right.

Why do we say /elliöt/ when there is only one "l" which would suggest /eeliöt/ (George and T S)?

My theory of "nearest reasonable pronunciation" of the names of famous people applies to the painter Vincent van Gogh. The Dutch would say /finsent fan khokh/, but that pronunciation sounds overdone in English. So /fan Gock/ would be a reasonable compromise, rather than /van go/ as if you are encouraging a vehicle to move.

Another name is Kierkegaard. Is it too pedantic to say /keerkö-gore/? The "d" isn't pronounced in Danish, but it is there in the spelling.

And what about Bore Haze? I heard a woman giving a lecture about translation, and consistently pronouncing the Argentinian writer's name as if he were tedious mist.

And then there are all those structuralists and semioticists who happen to have Russian and Czech names.

[Stiffelio]

And how about the American Congress speaker John Boehner, pronounced "Bayner". How on earth did they come up with that one?

[Eric]

He may be a bane to America.

[accidie]

Toe-BEAN, Eric. 'Colm' becomes 'Colum' because Irish language has no 'lm' endings, so English words as well often acquire that extra syllable between l & m.

I've noticed other names of German origin with 'oe' sound being pronounced with 'ay' sound by Americans; Schroeder=Schrayder, e.g. Always wondered whether that was an American quirk or whether it derives from some region in Germany where umlautted 'o' is actually said as 'ay'. . .

That's a good question: When does attempt to pronounce a foreign word properly become pedantic? Certainly any attempt by someone to whom it doesn't come naturally at pronouncing Kierkegaard or Copenhagen in the Danish way would seem wildly over-the-top to me.

[Eric]

So it's toe-BEAN with the stress on the latter syllable. I couldn't find anything much about Irish stress on the internet, except that it tends to be first syllable stress, but that an accented second syllable (like í) would even it out. But I've got to repeat: guessing the pronunciation of Irish Gaelic from descriptions in books is quite a job. I'm sure a visit to the Gaelic-speaking area would be a much more effective way of learning.

The Schrayder pronunciation in America could well be the influence of Yiddish, given the fact that Schroeder / Schröder is probably a Jewish name. Yiddish doen't have an "ö" sound, whereas German does. There have been a great number of Yiddish-speakers emigrating to America from Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Belarus, etc, since the 19th century pogroms and right through WWII and afterwards. So a name that looks German needn't necessary be pure German.

I agree that pronouncing capital cities as in the language of the country smacks of pretentiousness. But as Kierkegaard doesn't come up in the average conversation, maybe leaving the "d" off is not such a big deal. But you won't catch me saying Kerbenhown, for Copenhagen... In the same way I tend not to say Biler Ah Er Clear, or however that city is really pronounced.

[accidie]

Aha, the Yiddish explanation sounds good to me. Don't suppose there are any Yiddish speakers here who could comment. . . ?

A couple of small points--After posting above, it occurred to me that the 'u' inserted here between l & m has an exception: Film = fillum and elm = elum, all right, but words ending '-alm' lack that insertion. Instead, palm, calm, balm, are all rhymed with 'Sam'. And both Scots & Irish can be rather insistent that the Scottish language is called Gaelic and the Irish called Irish. Don't worry--on a scale of the offensive, calling Irish 'Gaelic' isn't remotely near calling Britain the 'mainland'.

This thread has reminded me of a conversation stopped dead in its tracks because I was too polite to ask 'How could a Cambridge graduate not know that one of the brothers Karamazov was named Ivan?' and he was too polite to ask 'How could someone who claims to have read the Brothers K several times think that there's a character named Yvonne in it?'

[Eric]

The number of Yiddish-speakers was greatly reduced by the actions of someone you may have heard of called Adolf Hitler. Those that were left chose to flee to the USA, Argentina, Israel, Australia, etc., where they tended to assimilate with the local population. So those that genuinely have Yiddish as their mother tongue and first language must be in their 80s or 90s by now. Except for small pockets of very Orthodox Jews who evidently speak it among themselves in places such as Manchester and Antwerp. Plus the odd enthusiast who has artificially learnt Yiddish to listen to klezmer songs and search out their roots in Vilnius, Lithuania, once called the Jerusalem of the North.

The U-sound between L and M is also common in Dutch, where they also say "fillum" for film.

The problem with calling the Celtic language "Irish" is that you soon begin to talk at cross purposes if you try to call literature written in that language "Irish Literature", as opposed to that written in English. I presume that "Celtic" is a safe uncontroversial way of denoting the family of those languages, so why not "Irish Celtic"?

That was a good little joke, the Ivan / Yvonne one. Ever heard of Yvonne the Terrible? But the joke does hinge on a certain pronunciation of the two names, as we in Britland at least, say /i-VONN/ and /AAY-vön/.

No one commented on Bagehot, which is not /bay-gher-hoe/ but /badgett/. I heard this for the first time when I was teaching English at a newspaper in Stockholm, and an attractive young lady who was the Financial Times correspondent in that city mentioned a few things about financial English and economic English, which I was, and still am, weak on.

[Eric]

A few more writers' names:

Two Belgian writers are often pronounced wrong. Maeterlinck (playwright, Nobel, 1911) and Verhaeren (poet). Although both of these wrote in French, then the language of education and culture, their home language was the Flemish version of Dutch. So their names should really be pronounced /ver-HAAR-en/ and /MAA-ter-link/. The "ae" is a long "a" sound, not a "ä" as when you write Goering instead of Göring, where the oe and ae serve to be the telegraph equivalent of ö and ä. Dutch is not German.

Polish writers' names often cause problems, firstly because all those zeds (zees, to Americans) and secondly because the names should all be stressed on the penult, i.e. next to last syllable. A few, whose works have appeared in English (note: the "i" is and in, pin, thin, etc., and "ee" as in free, me, tree):

Gombrowicz /gom-BROH-veetsh/
Witkiewicz /veet-KYEH-veetsh/
Konwicki /kon-VEET-skee/
Przybyszewski /pshi-bi-SHEFF-skee/
Iwaszkiewicz /ee-vash-KYEH-veetsh/
Mickiewicz /meets-KYEH-veetsh/
Kolakowski /ko-wah-KOFF-skee/
Borowski /bor-OFF- skee/
Chwin /khveen/

You will notice that the "y" in Polish is pronounced "i" as "i" (pin, thin) not "ay" or "ey", and the "i" as "ee".

[Loki]

I've just found out that I've been pronouncing the name of Thomas Macaulay in the wrong way. I'd always imagined it to be pronounced "'makjulei", probably because I left out the second "a" in the spelling. But it appears that the right pronunciation is /mə'kɔːli/, which I wouldn't have guessed anyway, even if I had remembered the correct spelling.