How to Pronounce Your Favorite Director's Name

[therewillbeblus]

Jarmusch. Is it JAR-məsh or jar-MOOSH? Or something else?

Do you have reason to believe it's the second? The only videos I've found of people who've worked with him pronounce it "Jar-mush"

[beamish14]

Jarmusch. Is it JAR-məsh or jar-MOOSH? Or something else?

Do you have reason to believe it's the second? The only videos I've found of people who've worked with him pronounce it "Jar-mush"

Wayne Wang pronounces it “moosh” in his commentary for Smoke

[Matt]

Jarmusch. Is it JAR-məsh or jar-MOOSH? Or something else?

Do you have reason to believe it's the second? The only videos I've found of people who've worked with him pronounce it "Jar-mush"

Someone, I don’t remember who, corrected me to jar-MOOSH once several years ago when I said JAR-məsh, so I started saying it the “correct” way. Then I heard Ben Mankiewicz on TCM tonight say JAR-məsh and I thought I’d ask. I should have just gone straight to YouTube.

[therewillbeblus]

That’s what I found when I typed “Jarmusch pronunciation” into Google. I trust Adam Driver

[Rayon Vert]

By the sound of it, I'd say more it's JAR-mish than JAR-mash.

[Michael Kerpan]

I always thought of the name as rhyming with "push".... (rather than "rush").

[Mr Sausage]

By the sound of it, I'd say more it's JAR-mish than JAR-mash.

Technically it's your usual schwa (ə) sound that happens when a vowel is unstressed, like when a convict becomes to convict, or why Alice and alive have two different -a sounds tho' they're nearly identical in spelling.

[Lemmy Caution]

I found Japanese fairly easy to pick up and retain. Mandarin is much more difficult. Albanian, now there's a tricky European language both in terms of pronunciation and spelling. Found it hard to get anywhere in the 5 or so days we spent in Albania and Kosovo. Even something as basic as a cash machine in Tirana was perplexing.

[hearthesilence]

I think this happens a lot with non-English words in America. A friend of mine from Texas was traveling through Kentucky and when she was looking for Versailles, she pronounced it the "correct" way. It caused some confusion with a local until they told her, "oh, you mean Ver-SALES."

[senseabove]

Also seen in the not uncommon Middle Eastern names of small towns throughout the south, e.g. "PAL-ə-steen" Texas and "LEB-ə-nən" Tennessee.

[Mr Sausage]

This is even more the case in Japanese, where they have a whole syllabary called katakana to accommodate foreign words (Japanese has a much smaller range of sounds). For one reason or another, most Japanese people don't seem to realize that katakana is not, strictly speaking, English, so I would forever get students violating the most basic rules of English pronunciation (rules they knew good and well) in order to pronounce words the katakana way. One of the banes of my existence was trying to get them to stop pronouncing salad as "salada" (which they'd pronounce suh-luh-duh with no stress). Trying to correct that would just get them to say either 'suh-lud' with no stress, or 'sowd' with no...lots of things. But "SAH - lud" very rarely.

That said, the way English mangles Japanese words like karaoke and karate and hibachi doesn't leave me with too much room to complain. And I did sometimes feel a twinge of embarrassment trying to teach Japanese people to butcher their own language by showing them the English way of saying those words.

[hearthesilence]

I was actually going to update my previous post with the same thing as well. It happens with Mandarin and other Asian languages, but I think it stands out with names. I never thought the English version of common Chinese names were very accurate, but it's probably a lost cause to change things. Even if you tried, I doubt everyone will be able to nail the correct pronunciation that precisely.

[MichaelB]

When I recorded my commentary for Arrow’s Blind Chance, I breezed through things like Bydgoszcz, Szczęsny Dobrowolski, Grzegorz Królikiewicz, Stanisława Przybyszewska and the Powszechny and Współczesny Theatres (Polish spelling is pretty much totally phonetic; the words may be tongue-twisters, but I always know how they should be pronounced), but a reference to Pall Mall cigarettes was a real head-scratcher.

I felt instinctively (and, it seems, correctly) that I shouldn’t pronounce it like London’s Pall Mall (i.e. both words rhyming with “Hal”), but it turns out that there are two different and equally valid ways of pronouncing the brand in the US as well. I forget what I opted for in the end - probably both words rhyming with “wall”.

[Matt]

Alice Rohrwacher. According to Isabella Rossellini in her “Adventures in Moviegoing” interview on the Criterion Channel: al-EE-chuh ror-VAH-ker

[diamonds]

If you watch Rohrwacher's delightful bonbon Le Pupille, you can hear her name introduced at the beginning by the chorus of children who star in it!

[Matt]

I just watched it again and there it’s pronounced more al-EE-chay, which is what I would have thought with my limited knowledge of Italian. Though who would dare correct Isabella Rossellini and her wonderful, singular accent? She’s welcome to pronounce my name any way she pleases.

[DeprongMori]

but a reference to Pall Mall cigarettes was a real head-scratcher.

I felt instinctively (and, it seems, correctly) that I shouldn’t pronounce it like London’s Pall Mall (i.e. both words rhyming with “Hal”), but it turns out that there are two different and equally valid ways of pronouncing the brand in the US as well. I forget what I opted for in the end - probably both words rhyming with “wall”.

This old TV ad for Pall Mall cigarettes should resolve your question. (At least for the official US pronunciation. Not sure if they were ever marketed outside the US and whether marketed with a different pronunciation elsewhere.) Curious as to what was your source for the alternate valid pronunciation of the cigarette brand in the US. This is the only pronunciation I’d ever heard growing up.

[MichaelB]

This old TV ad for Pall Mall cigarettes should resolve your question.

Nope, because during my research I dug up two old TV ads, both from the US, made a dozen years apart, with different pronunciations. (Sadly, the YouTube account from which I sourced them is no more, although I think you linked to the earlier one.)

And an American friend who's older than me backed this up by claiming that the official pronunciation shifted over time.

Although discovering that was something of a relief, because it meant that I didn't have to be 100% purist.

I had to name the brand twice in the commentary, as it's a signifier of a character in Communist Poland having privileged access to American brands that were otherwise unavailable:

How did he get hold of such a thing? Well, this next shot offers at least a suggestion – note the bottle of expensive French Three Barrels brandy on the left, and the box of American Pall Mall cigarettes on the right, which would normally be impossible for someone of Werner’s seemingly limited means to obtain unless he was given them in exchange for services rendered – such as retiring and keeping his mouth shut.

and then...

Oh, there’s a nice little touch here – the last cigarette brand we saw in this film was Werner’s box of expensive American Pall Mall cigarettes, whereas Daniel is favouring the considerably cheaper Polish brand Sport, but when he says it was the first thing he bought when he returned to Poland, he appears to be alluding to the powerful nostalgia that ostensibly ordinary sensations can trigger if you’ve been separated from them for long enough.

[Michael Kerpan]

My recollection is that the standard pronunciation MANY decades ago was Poll (as in Polly) Moll (as in Molly). Very similar to the way the dish soap (Palmolive) was pronounced at the same time.

[martin]

I'm curious about Diane Kurys?
I saw (heard) a Danish film critic on tv saying Du'rah when speaking of Marguerite Duras which is definetely wrong as the s is not silent in that case. But the final s is always so confusing in French (to me).

[domino harvey]

I believe it's "Cur-eese" (as in "geese")

[MichaelB]

And "Deeann", not the standard Anglophone pronunciation.

[MichaelB]

Recording my first Swedish-film commentary last year, I decided to be as accurate as I could reasonably manage, which meant rethinking quite a few preconceptions - for instance, Harriet Andersson and Bibi Andersson's surnames are more like "Andershoan", Sven Nykvist is "Nuikvist", Lena Olin is "Oleen", and so on. The G was the trickiest, not because a Swedish "G" is that hard to pronounce (it has no direct equivalent in English, but it's an easy enough sound to master - to my ears it sounds like an abruptly cut short "Y") but because pronouncing "Bergman" correctly is closer to "Beryman", with the "y" barely enunciated. But in that particular case I decided that that would be taking purism too far, and opted for the more familiar international pronunciation.

Also, to my shame, I discovered only recently that I've been mispronouncing Jerzy Kawalerowicz's name for a good couple of decades - it should be KavalerOHvitch, not KavaLERovitch. Daniel Bird's commentary for Ga, Ga - Glory to the Heroes put me right - or rather, he pronounced it differently from the way I normally did, so I did a bit of independent digging and found that he was absolutely correct.

[swo17]

The correct pronunciation of Widerberg (something like "V Dubai") was so far off from what I was expecting that I initially didn't realize who was being talked about on the extras of a recent release (can't remember if it was Radiance or Criterion)

[Blip Martindale]

Names don't always follow the expected rules of whichever language's pronunciation (do they?) so I think for clarity's sake (if not posterity or accountability) the speaker should simply pronounce them in a way that provides the listener the clearest understanding, and the easiest means of researching the subject and their work. If I was taking a film class at UCLA and a professor said "Beryman" instead of "Bergman" I would assume he's the most pretentious ass in the world, once I figured out who he was referring to.

On the other hand, if someone at a press conference at Cannes said "Beryman" to an audience of Europeans, OK, that's on me to comprehend.