How to Say: Polish names
13:31 UK time, Thursday, 19 July 2007
An occasional guide to the words and names in the news from Catherine Sangster of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Pronunciation Unit.
One of the pronunciations we have been asked to research this week is the name of Australian rugby league player Ben Czislowski, who found an . The Australian Broadcasting Corporation also has a , and we contact one another from time to time for advice. However, the time difference means that we often have to wait until the following morning for the definitive answer from Down Under, and if we cannot find any other evidence, we must make a suggestion until then. This was the case with Ben Czislowski.
He was born in Australia, but his surname indicates Polish origins. The Polish pronunciation of the name would be chiss-LOF-ski, but the usual anglicisation would be chiz-LOW-ski (OW as in now).
What we needed to find out was whether Ben himself uses a Polish or an anglicised pronunciation. Americans of Polish origin generally prefer to use the anglicised pronunciation, such as the directors of The Matrix, the Washowski brothers - pronounced wuh-SHOW-ski (ow as in now). Polish-Australians seem to be more variable, but we knew of one senior figure named Ziggy Switkowski who also prefers the anglicised pronunciation. With this in mind, we provisionally suggested the anglicised rather than the Polish pronunciation to our broadcasters when the story appeared in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World Service, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio and News 24 on Tuesday.
Alas, on Wednesday morning, we heard back from ABC and discovered we had gone the wrong way. One of their sports reporters in Brisbane confirmed that Ben uses the Polish pronunciation after all, although apparently something quite different had been used for his father's name in the past. Also, by this time, one of ABC's senior journalists had indicated the . We changed our advice immediately, and the right pronunciation was used by the time the story came up in Wednesday's One O'Clock news.
(For a guide to our phonetic pronunciations, click here.)
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