The blog “454 W 23rd St New York, NY 10011-2157” provides a “list of shibboleth names”—mispronounced names of cultural VIPs “by which the privileged judge their inferiors.”
It reminded me of a conversation I had a long time ago with a rather distinguished professor of philosophy, in her office, that went something like this:
Me: So I was wondering if you could provide me with some advice about which courses I should take.
Prof: Alright.
Me: Do you think I should take this class on Fraysh, Russell, and Wittgenstein?
Prof: Do you mean Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein?
Me: Uh. Um. Yes?
Prof: …
Me: That was kind of embarrassing.
Prof: Yes. Yes it was.
Anyway, while Frege’s name is not on the list (it should be!) other philosophers make an appearance, along with the correct pronunciation of their names, including:~
Augustine of Hippo (aw-gus-tin)
Walter Benjamin (ben-yameen)
W.E.B. DuBois (duh-boyz)
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (feesh-tuh)
Saul Kripke (krip-key) [really, people are getting this one wrong? I know, who am I to talk?]
Charles Sanders Peirce (purse)
Plotinus (ploh-tine-us)
Ayn Rand (well-fare recipient)
Simone Weil (vay)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (vitt-genn-shtein)
Feel free to suggest others.
Bagehot (badge’-it)
Not a philosopher (psychologist), but someone that a number of philosophers know about:
Robert Zajonc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB9uXnGjBfo
I was always under the impression that the pronunciation of Augustine’s name was more of a cultural/regional difference. I gather that those from the east coast tend to say AW-gus-teen while people from other parts of the U.S. (including the midwest, where I’m from) tend to say uh-GUS-tin.
Can people confirm that this is just a regional thing? (It’s possible I am just out of the loop.)
Sartre?
Luce Irigaray, which, no matter how many times I try, I will never be able to pronounce correctly.
Immanuel Kant = Kahnt (get with the program, Brits and Canadians)
Berkeley was on their list too, and I feel like that’s just about the best example for Philosophy.
Also the way people say “Kant” isn’t really a shibboleth, but I feel like it tells you where someone did their PhD in a way that accent might not.
Deleuze is also a funny one because I find that even among people who literally publish scholarship about him (English-speakers at least) there’s division over whether they say de-LUHZ or de-LOOZ.
I also doubt that there’s a solid convention in the “Augustine” case, even among specialists. I’d be a little bemused if someone insisted to me on one pronunciation over the other.
Duh, Friedrich Nietzshe. I still get it wrong half the time (and first name too). And the spelling too.
Are we all assuming the inferiors aren’t reading this so we don’t even have to offer the right pronunciation? Well, just in case, this website can help: http://inogolo.com/pronunciation/d360/Friedrich_Nietzsche
Not a pronunciation problem, but I wrote an entire paper for an undergraduate class years ago referring to Hilary Putnam as a ‘she’.
I’ve corrected and been corrected, but usually in friendly way. It’s a service to the student, as long as not done condescendingly. We should take it with a grain of salt, though, since in some cases it’s nearly impossible for a non-native or near-fluent speaker to pronounce the name correctly. For example “Sartre” is between “Sart” and “sar-truh”, with the second ‘r’ very subtle and hard to get right. Saying “Kant” with an emphatically long or short ‘a’ (“cannt” or “kawwnt”) is equally unsatisfying.
Some I’m unsure of. For example, in different regional accents, Germans often pronounce “ch” closer to either “sh” or to “ck”. So would “Fick-tuh” be egregiously wrong? (And for that matter, wouldn’t “fish-tuh” be almost as close as “feesh-tuh”?)
Some items on the list seem just mistaken:
Foucault is foo-coe not foh-coe
Goethe’s impossible, but goo-tuh is a pretty poor alternate?
As an American grad student at a Canadian university, I once hat a heated debate about this with a fellow student. We appealed to the higher court of our native German language instructor, who declared us both wrong.
That philosopher in your story, Justin, is a horrible human being for doing that.
Tom Regan’s name looks like “REE-gun” but is pronounced like “RAY-gun”.
A lot of students assume that the “Marquis” in Don Marquis is pronounced like the Marquis in “Marquis de Sade” but it’s pronounced like “MARK-wiss”
It could be worse. Most of these folks, being dead, can’t correct you themselves. The first time I met Tom Beauchamp, I said it was a pleasure to meet you, Dr. “BO-shomp” to which he replied simply “BEECH-um.” Great way to start grad school.
The “kawwnt” pronunciation, which is preferred by American Kawwntians, has always annoyed me. In German the a in Kant’s name is a short a, the same as in “Max,” “Hamburg,” and “Mannheim.” It should therefore be pronounced in English the same way we pronounce those other short German a’s. You wouldn’t say “Mawwx Weber took a train from Hawwmburg to Mawwnheim,” nor would you eat a hawwmburger. Elsewhere a short German a becomes a short English one; it should do the same in Kant’s name and does, I believe, in the British pronunciation.
Anon at 11: certainly not feesh-tut. The German ‘ch’ is hard for English speakers. Fikte would be better, though still not right.
I’ve no idea at all how people pronounce (or should pronounce) Erigena (sometime spelled Eriugena). I once asked a classics professor and he didn’t know either. I’d be grateful for guidance from anyone who does know how it’s done.
Also, a propos of Justin’s lead in story, I heard a story about Patrick Gardiner, from years and years ago. A student in a tutorial was reading out his paper in which he talked about the “bor-ghee-oy-zee.” He meant “bourgeoisie.” Gardiner didn’t want to embarrass him and himself adopted the “bor-ghee-oy-zee” pronunciation for the rest of the meeting.
This pronunciation manual is rather helpful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYzRP_WLwEQ
That’s Nietzsche. Dammit.
I almost didn’t click on that Wittgenstein video, but so glad I did. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to hear his name again without giggling.
Simon, you can get Peter Adamson’s pronunciation of Eriugena here: http://www.historyofphilosophy.net/eriugena-predestination
If ‘St. AugusTEEN’ is good enough for Bob Dylan, it’s good enough for me.
Mike, excellent. Thanks.
I suppose Ayn Rand would be something of a reverse-shibboleth: the elite might look askance at someone who made too much of a point of correcting others’ pronunciation, or who spoke the name with too much obvious reverence.
(So, at risk of being the target of some askance-looking, I read once that “Ayn” is pronounced – appropriately enough – to rhyme with “mine.”)
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?
Ah, yes. Leib as in the first syllable of ‘Liberia’; Niz as in ‘knits.’ The German language is like music; don’t screw around with it.
“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 “fichte pronounciation”!
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.”
Correction: “the short German ‘a’ is not, to my ear, identical to the short English ‘a’.”
Mill =/= Mills, contra every undergraduate ever.
Also, I hope it’s clear that my Kant remark was meant in jest.
Oh, that one kills me! I find myself bending over backwards never to use the possessive form, in hopes that will prevent them from calling him “Mills”: “Mill’s view, er, I mean, according to MILL…”
You forgot to include my name.
Jonathan Kvanvig.
I’ve never met him but once mentioned his work to a former colleague, who told me it’s /’kwɒn.vɪg/
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.)
Roger Ariew /’arɪɛv/
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.
& I’d add that I find both as obnoxiously provincial (along with Don Joo-an & Jay-kwiz) as the Chicago pronunciation of Goethe St. as Go-EETH-ee.
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 gotta understand this. Why do all these undergraduates think Mill’s name is “Mills”? They have this book, see, and it says on the cover
“John Stuart Mill”
And then they have all these handouts, see, and they say
“John Stuart Mill”
And then some even have PowerPoint slides (God help them) that say
“John Stuart Mill”
And yet these undergraduates write “Mills”.
p.s., Why, oh, why do college professors continue to use Powerpoint slides?
PowerPoint + Pure Lecture = Pedagogical catastrophes
Justin – how about a Daily Nous post about PowerPoint slides? Maybe link to this: https://quote.ucsd.edu/childhood/files/2013/05/tufte-cognitivestyle.pdf
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.
I just want to remark very quickly on how hilariously unhelpful half of these comments are; *please* if you’re going to mention someone’s name as frequently mispronounced, provide the correct pronunciation.
Examples of unanswered complaints, simply to be concrete: Nietzsche, Zizek, Goethe, Wittgenstein, Sartre…
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.
I always wondered whether the mispronunciation of Kant’s name was meant to bring to mind an association with the word ‘cant.’ After all, you don’t see people saying Leebnizz. So there has to be some element of intention there.
Csikszentmihalyi – /Krzyzewski/
My grad professors said AW-gus-teen, so that’s what I’ve always said. I once read a classicist who said they use AW-gus-teen for the once-Bishop of Hippo and reserve aw-GUS-tin for the period corresponding to the reign of Augustus. But I read another classicist who said he preferred to say the opposite of whatever the other scholar said, so as to wrong-foot the opponent from the start.
Laphroaig = le-FROYG
Islay = EYE-lu
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.
Not that I’m an authority, but speaking a little German, I can tell you that “Fick-teh” would be a mistake in a class with anyone who actually speaks the language. That would make of his surname the simple past-tense of the colloquial expletive for sexual intercourse (ficken) we know so well in English.
A good guide for getting the consonant right, was once explained to me by a friend that serves as an excellent guide: take the long, hissing [h] sound you make in pronouncing “We humans” to get the hissing sound of the german “ch” (as in “Ich bin ein Berliner”) correct. (sounds a little like the y in “hyu” if you do it right).
Scotch whiskey names are even worse as shibboleths than philosophers! The only solution is to drink Japanese, Irish, and bourbon instead.
Did you mean “whisky”? 😉