Neurath (not even sure how to spell the “Neu” part so it’s not pronounced “New”, and just a T, not a TH at the end)
von Wright (I believe it’s “fon vrikt”?)
and Nathan Salmon pronounces the L, right?

“Feesh-tuh” seems like a terrible advice to me, at least if you pronounce the “sh” as in “sheep”, and if you pronounce the “ee” as in “sheep”. Check out the IPA pronunciation on Wikipedia if you want to get it right (the same probably goes for other names on the list). I would describe the “ch” has a kind of a hard “h” sound – like the sound at the beginning of “hello” in a strong Russian accent (it slides towards a kind of a “k” sound). The vowel is like “ship” rather than “sheep”. Basically, say “Ich bin ein Berliner”; take the “ich” sound from that, and say the name.

Tip: google “argument from authority”! No one seems to directly address the real ambiguities here.

My impression is that Germans pronounce “i” and “ch” differently by region. It sounds different, for example, listening to the bland German of Deutsche Welle as opposed to a modern German movie. So, is this pronunciation of Fichte regional, or standard, or just eccentric to the history of that name?

And in the British-Canadian vs. American pronunciation of “Kant,” the problem is that the short German “a” is not, to my ear, identical to the English German “a,” so pointing out that it’s a short German “a” doesn’t solve the problem. So it’s perfectly possible that the long English “a” is as close, or even closer, to the German short “a.”

Mill =/= Mills, contra every undergraduate ever.

Also, I hope it’s clear that my Kant remark was meant in jest.

You forgot to include my name.

Thanks for confirming my guess. I’ve taught Beauchamp to some very confused undergrads. I pronounced it his way, assuming the name came via England, but told my students the French pronunciation would be acceptable too, since I honestly didn’t know. (Next time I’ll have to insist.)

Re 3: This may account for the east coast variation; if I’m recalling correctly, Bob Hollander advised my, erm, Ivy undergrad humanities class that AWG-us-teen was an acceptable variant for uh-GUS-tin, as KWIX-it was for kee-HOE-tay, both of these licensed by Brit practice.

Don’t get me even started on the pronunciation of Finnish names. Since having taken part in the English speaking philosophical world for about ten years, I’m not sure I’ve heard many people get my own name right (or Antti’s or Pekka’s or Teemu’s or…). This includes most people I’ve known for years. But, to be honest, I don’t mind at all personally. If it’s close enough and that doesn’t need to be close at all, I’m happy. This makes me less worried about getting the names of the historical figures right. I don’t think they would have minded either. Since reading lots of student essays, I am starting to mind tiny bit more about misspellings of names though.

I said Beauchamp’s name, correctly, to my DGS once, and he just stared at me and said, ‘You mean Beau-sha(mp)?” in his best French pronunciation. This makes me happy that he was wrong.

One funny thing about some foreign (to the English) names is that pronouncing them correctly marks you as an outsider. (For example, if you say “Jussi” as “YUS-sy”, you’re not part of the elite.) They thus function as shibboleths in a different way.

Csikszentmihalyi – /Krzyzewski/

anonplease, I think that’s because either the linked list provided “correct” pronunciation or the “correct” pronunciation was a matter of dispute. Here’s my best stab at the ones you mention
Nietzsche: Nee-cheh (as opposed to Nee-chee or Nee-chuh). You can just think of it as emphasizing “ch” at the end: Nee-‘ch’. The second syllable doesn’t have to be long.
Zizek: Zhee-Zheck
Goethe: impossible for a non-German speaker, but Ger-teh is closest (the vowel is somewhere between “er” and the “oo” in “foot”)
Wittgenstein: Vitt-gen-shtine
Sartre: try to ‘Sar-treh’ in one syllable. Don’t bother trying to say the french ‘r’–in one short word with two ‘r’s like that it’s impossible. Either ‘sart’ or ‘sar-treh’ is acceptable as an approximation.

Scotch whiskey names are even worse as shibboleths than philosophers! The only solution is to drink Japanese, Irish, and bourbon instead.

If “fish-teh” is in fact the standard, that might be a good non-linguistic reason why! Maybe there’s less regional variation where there would otherwise be, just to avoid the similarity?

I remember a visiting French student who kept telling us she wanted to see the beach. We should have guessed what she meant, but the “ea” was somewhere in between “i” and “ee” and we were all totally stumped and could only hear “I want to see the b*tch.” Her pronunciation wasn’t wrong–she was aiming for the correct sound, but unable to duplicate it. That’s the case with most of these: everyone’s right in the sense that they’re trying to copy the right sound, but everyone’s wrong because their anglicized version is not the same sound.

In any case, I don’t think copying John Kennedy’s pronunciation of “ich” is our best bet. And “sh” doesn’t sound any closer to the “y” in “hyu” than “ck” does.

The key feature of Shibboleth names is that the majority are in languages we don’t speak at all and, therefore, we need functional very anglocized equivalents. So trying to teach everyone the truly correct pronunciation is a waste of time. We’ve got things to do besides host Jeopardy.

Soren Kierkegaard, according to that website, sounds like “Sern Keer-ke-gawl” or “Keer-ke-gompf” depending on whether you listen to the female or male speaker.

Thanks, Justin.

Your follow-up on the original story is fascinating, and reminds me that tone is everything in interactions, and tone is lost in writing. When I read the anecdote, I thought the prof’s reply, “yes, yes it was,” was the most *humane* part of her behavior, since I read it as saying, “yes, what you and I just did there was embarrassing to both of us, and I’m glad we can acknowledge that shared awkwardness.” Whereas apparently in context, her tone was more like, “yes, you ought to be embarrassed about what you did.”

Sometimes I’ll also comment on the ridiculousness of the pronunciation. “oh, yeah–oddly enough, he was called “Barkley,” like Charles or Gnarls. Because British people can’t spell.” Hoping that this too will make the pill of correction easier to swallow. Because being corrected always sucks, especially at a time in life when the message of “you’re wrong!” feels ubiquitous, i.e. grad school.

A graduate of UC Berkeley once told me that Berkeley would have pronounced his name Burkley, and that it’s only a later corruption of its pronunciation by the English that led to its being pronounced as Barkley now, the same process that led them to pronounce ‘clerk’ and ‘Derby’ with short a’s. So, I tell my students the story, and tell them that I’m going to say Barkley, but that I’m not going to correct their pronunciations.

How do the Irish today pronounce his name?

I haven’t witnessed a problem with mispronunciation, but when students are asked to write an essay about “causal impotence” nearly half of them discuss “casual” impotence instead, with often amusing results. Beware of overreliance on spellcheck and autocorrect!

Richard Galvin: you didn’t read all the comments before you posted, did you? 🙂 Its not just their spellcheckers!

George was “Irish” only in the sense that he was born in Ireland. Berkeley is an old-school English surname not Irish. His actual lineage, just like his surname, is very much old-school English (pre-Norman conquest Saxon).

Eric,
I agree–it’s mixed bag. But as I said, often unintentionally humorous.

If you want to be accurate to the original Scots, ‘Hume’ should actually be pronounced “hummy”, to rhyme with “yummy” or “tummy”.

William, “Hume” is a Scottish surname but one originating not in Scots-Gaelic but Old English. Though spelled several different ways (e.g., “Home”), I’m pretty sure it’s always been pronounced (hewm).

Sigrid, I don’t think it’s surprising that English speakers hear an “r” sound. It’s not really there, but there’s a similarity. Listen to some of the examples on Forvo, especially the fourth one: http://www.forvo.com/search/goethe/

I suspect the main reason the “ger-tuh” pronunciation dominates isn’t about the ‘r’ at all. It’s just an easy way to get English speakers to pronounce ‘ə’ (schwa), since in English any vowel can be pronounced that way (penc əl, tak ən, s əpply, el əquent, mount ən), so there’s no easy way to spell it to show that pronunciation. The only way to get people to say “g ə-tuh” instead of “goo-tuh” or “goe-tuh” is to throw the ‘r’ in: “g ər-tuh.”

The issue here is the same old one: in most of these cases, non-speaker simply cannot make the equivalent sound, so it’s *always* a case of choosing between anglicized equivalents that are *both wrong*. But thanks to the wonders of the narcissism of minor differences, we will insist one is “correct” and the other is “incorrect”–that “Kant” really is pronounced either with a short English ‘a’ or a long English ‘a’, for example.

I apologise, William, for my poor sense of Humer!

A student of mine recently was using the audio function on a tablet (or something like this – I don’t recall the exact details) to listen to some background readings for my seminar and reported that the experience was excellent – he now understood much more about Fridge’s logicism (he fortunately knows the proper pronunciation, but was nevertheless understandably amused by the technology’s rendering).