How to Pronounce Your Favorite Director's Name

[Mr Sausage]

Yeah. Whenever you hear a Japanese person say Akira Kurosawa, it always sounds like Ku-ROH-suh-wuh AH-ki-ra.

[george613]

The most wrong thing when foreigners pronounce Japanese names is the huge stress-accents they always seem to use. NakaMUUUUra, SuZUUUUki, KuroSAAAAAwa, HiroSHIIIIma, etc.

In these four-syllable words, it sounds much better if you stress the second syllable.

If you want to pronounce them more like Japanese people, then just try to not stress any syllable.

In Oshima, the surname of the filmmaker, the o is twice as long as a normal o: it is like orshima, but with no North-American "r" sound, just the long vowel.

[jouvet]

Please excuse the banality of this one: Jean Epstein.

Is it Ep-Stine or Ep-steen?

Thanks!

[Trip]

I believe it's Na-roo-sa (suh).

[felipe]

Is it King Veedor (as in "see") or Vidor (as in "my")?

[Mathew2468]

I've always heard VEE-dor.

How 'bout Żuławski? I looked up the Polish alphabet and it seems like it would be: Zhoo-WAHV-skee. Is that right? 'Zh' as in beige.

[TMDaines]

Pretty much it.

[MichaelB]

I'd say that's spot on. The handy thing about Polish is that it's completely phonetic, so the first stage of pronunciation ("what should it sound like?") is easy enough to reach.

It's the second ("can I possibly get my tongue around this?") that's more of a challenge - and I speak as someone who had to introduce Żuławski's son Xawery and his wife Maria Strzelecka to a three-figure audience heavily made up of actual Poles. I practiced for ages, got the first bang on, momentarily relaxed my guard and...

...well, she was very polite about it afterwards. I daresay she's used to it.

[HerrSchreck]

Lemme guess--

Zah-ver-ee, and Shzteh-leh-kah?

Anywhere near close?

[MichaelB]

Lemme guess--

Zah-ver-ee, and Shzteh-leh-kah?

Anywhere near close?

The first is pretty accurate, but the second is closer to 'StrzheLETska' - but with the 'r' and 'zh' fused together as in the middle consonant of 'Dvořák'. Which isn't normally a sound I have a problem with on its own, but once you throw in an initial 'St' it becomes a real tongue-twister.

[markhax]

I have just started to the commentaries on that set and it looks like David Kalat has done another outstanding job. Except that he really should take some coaching on how to pronounce French names in his future endeavours.

Not only French. He consistently mispronounces MURnau as murNAU.

[JanPB]

I'd say that's spot on. The handy thing about Polish is that it's completely phonetic, so the first stage of pronunciation ("what should it sound like?") is easy enough to reach.

In general, if you are completely puzzled by a Polish name, you'll get closer to the correct pronunciation by pretending it's a German word. German also has a very consistent pronunciation and key letters are pronounced similarly (J, W, E, I, etc.) except for certain characteristic consonant clusters. These look hopeless but they are actually quite easy: there are only few of them and they are 99% consistent. Once you learn those few you can read any Polish name with 90% accuracy.

The remaining 10% is diacritical marks which can change the pronunciation completely, so they are very important, for example "o" is "o" but "ó" ("o acute") is an "oo", as in "moon". "l" is "l" but "ł" ("l with a slash") is an English "w", as in "what".

[Hail_Cesar]

What about Zbigniew?

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

"Zbigniew" is perfectly phonetic (phonemic, to be strictly accurate) when broken down like this:

Z
b (yes, a zb consonant cluster)
i (like ee in meet, but shorter)
g
ni (like the Spanish ñ, or the ny in canyon if you can't manage that)
e (as in bed)
w (normally a v sound, but becomes f at the end of a word)

So: "Zbeegnyef." As Michael said, it's not hard to figure out how you're supposed to say it, but doing it is another problem.

[Lemmy Caution]

A month ago there was a head-on train crash in Poland near the town of Szczechociny, and I had no idea how to tackle that. My mother asked a Polish family friend, and relayed what seemed a pretty simple sounding name, which I can't recall. But that place name is some eye workout.

Now, I see that a more common/alternate spelling is Szczekociny, which makes it easier to work through. Though that initial consonant cluster is still rough.

You can also slap directors' names into Google Translate and then click the speaker icon to hear it pronounced. I'm not sure how good it will always be, but it seem to do a nice job with a good accent for Żuławski and even Szczekociny. Just be sure you change the language you are translating from to the one you want to hear pronounced, because Zbigniew pronounced the Polish way is of course different than an Anglicized pronunciation, if you have the language set to English.

Actually it's kind of amusing to hear Naruse pronounced as an English, Polish, Spanish and then Japanese name -- if anyone needs to hone their advanced time wasting skills.

[jbutler]

It's interesting that this thread originated over five years ago, but it's still going strong!

To answer pronunciation questions such as these, the Telecommunication and Film Department at the University of Alabama created ScreenLex.org. ScreenLex contains MP3 sound files illustrating how to pronounce many of the names in this thread. It is free, open to the public and contains no ads.

For example, Krzysztof Kieślowski may be found here:

http://screenlex.org/kieslowski-krzysztof/

We try to get native speakers to record these names/terms or else we use professors of film and TV.

And we're open to suggestions/requests and to corrections of pronunciations if we get one wrong.

We hope you find ScreenLex useful!

[Tommaso]

Can anyone help me with the correct pronunciation of the family name of Danish silent film director Stellan Rye? I suppose it's NOT as in "The catcher in the rye"?

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

According to how Danish sounds to me you start with a gutteral trilled 'R' and then throw up in your mouth and swallow abruptly.

[martin]

Google translate gives a perfect pronunciation of Stellan Rye. This is not always the case (Marguerite Duras being an example) but in this case it's spot on. A very famous Danish TV host is Søren Ryge, and his surname has the same pronunciation.

[denti alligator]

It's interesting that this thread originated over five years ago, but it's still going strong!

I think I started it.

I actually find people who pronounce foreign names too perfectly when speaking English a little annoying. If I'm speaking to someone who knows the language in question then I don't hesitate to be punctilious, but if I'm speaking to someone who does not know that language, I aim to pronounce the name properly, but in a slightly American accent or intonation so that the other person understands what I'm saying and doesn't just hear "[some German name]." This even applies to names that also exist in English, such as Robert. I want whomever I'm speaking to to hear "Robert." In some cases, such as "Thomas" or "Jakob" (in German, in particular), I still use the "proper" pronunciation, though I think this is because most English speakers can still hear the name.

[Tommaso]

The problem is, if for example you're speaking at an international meeting of scholars, that you simply don't know if someone speaks the language in question. But if so, I personally would want to avoid making a fool of myself by, for instance, pronouncing Goethe as "Go-thii". I heard that myself, and I couldn't help it: it gave me the chuckles.

Thanks for the help with Rye, guys!

[denti alligator]

Oh, man, I've heard

Go-eeth-ee !

and I'm so embarrassed that I can't correct them. Yes, I guess you're right, if you don't know for sure, go with the native-style pronunciation. I'm just thinking of the usual situation where I'm telling someone about a writer or filmmaker and it's clear this person would only be confused if I gave the native pronunciation. This happens quite a bit with "Robert Walser," for example. Not an unusual name. But I've learned to soften it some, especially the first name and the final "er," which I usually Americanize, as much as I cringe while doing it.

[Tommaso]

Well, thanks to this thread, I learned that it's not Kuro-SAA-wa or Mizo-GU-chi, but that these names should rather get the stress on the third-to-last syllable, or no stress at all (which is really difficult for anyone who has a Germanic language as his native language). But it's quite cool, because you can really impress your film-loving friends with this 'much more Japanese-sounding' intonation

[Mr Sausage]

I hear Goh-ay-tay all the time, and it just kills me. I also get Gowth a lot. It really depends on the context whether or not I correct the person. I heard it once at a German club meeting, and obviously I felt no qualms there. I find the most tactful way to do it is pretend like you haven't understood them for a second, then reply "ohh, Goethe" and then launch right into some comment about the person so it looks like the mispronunciation isn't important. I'm usually too lazy to do this, tho'.

The one that really got me was a group presentation on Roethke in which everyone pronounced his name "Row-EET-Kee". It was really painful because I had to keep hearing it over the course of 45 minutes, but I couldn't bring myself to interrupt a presentation to correct them since it was, you know, totally unimportant.

[matrixschmatrix]

Germanic pronuciations always nail me for names that have actually been Americanized- like Schoen pronounced 'Shane', which comes up a lot. I always want to pronounce Kristin Wiig's name as though it starts with a V, too.