Arnold Zwicky's Blog

On NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, an announcement that Michael Gazzaniga (the psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist) would be the guest on this morning’s Forum show on KQED. The man’s name was pronounced

/ gàzǝnígǝ /

which is what you’d get if you took the pronunciation of the name in Italian and nativized it to English phonology. But in fact the man’s name is pronounced (in English)

/ gǝzǽnɪgǝ /

which is what you get from the spelling.

(I’m listening to the interview right now.)

The perils of trying to get things right.

This entry was posted on March 19, 2015 at 9:37 am and is filed under Names, Pronunciation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.