He's b-a-a-a-c-k! The Pronunciation Grump. Didn't we promise he would be (or did you take that as more of a threat?)
Everybody knows English (even the more refined version known as American English) is difficult to spell, and that also makes it difficult to pronounce. But one of my peeves is people who make it even more difficult by giving their kids oddly spelled names that they may be stuck with for life. (Ever heard of the "Boy Named Sue?")
Speaking of Sue, that's what got me thinking about this whole matter. On television last week, a woman whose name has appeared on book covers: Suze Orman. It turns out that she wants to pronounce that first name like "Susie." When I see it, I want to pronounce it "sooze" (rhymes with "ooze"). Was it Mom who confused the issue? In English we can go with Soozie, Suzie, Susey, Souzee, and maybe other spellings that would give her the pronunciation she seemed to want. But "Suze" is "Sooze."
I think back to a skier named "Picabo," and pronounced (by her Mom at least) as "peek-a-boo." Same deal: Maybe, if you stretch, the first syllable could be "peek" but that last syllable can't be anything but "bo" in English. It doesn't help that the name comes from a little town; towns aren't people. If you happened to meet this woman and she told you her name, you might not worry about how it's spelled; but as most folks won't ever meet her, she was doomed from birth to have a lot of people mispronounce her.
The same problem sometimes extends to last names, too. Let's take the writer Michael Crichton. Clearly, "kritch-ton," yet people tell me he liked to pronounce it "cry-ton." Wow. English has a lot of weird spellings, and even consonant clusters that can be pronounced more than one way (tough/through). But I really can't think of anyplace in English where "ch" is just silent. Can we just spell things any old way? If I said my name was spelled "Harjklixor" but pronounced "Jones" how would you react?
The problem becomes even worse, of course, when names derive from those devilish foreign languages we don't know. I am not constantly plugged into television or other audio media, so when I encounter a name like "Sinise" (sinus? synice? sineezey?) or Proulx (I think that one is Basque so I'm going with "proo"), I just have to take a wild guess. It would be a great help if book jackets could tell us how the author's name is pronounced (rather than giving us another of those idiotic blurbs); it would be heaven if television shows and movies had voiceovers to r-e-a-d aloud the names of the cast as they roll across the screen.