To help you follow the pronunciation, the names have been written in the normal alphabet, but with some special capital letters. We call this Respelling.

Note that Respelling can only give you an idea of the pronunciation; it will help you see the important points you need to imitate. The way you speak your own language will affect to some extent how you say these 'foreign' names!In Respelling

• Most single letters stand for single sounds; certain combinations of letters also stand for single sounds.
• Respelling is put inside ( ) brackets.

Example: The French name 'Joseph' is re-spelled (zhoh-zef).

• The 'zh' represents a single sound; so does the 'oh'.
• But the remaining letters 'z', 'e', and 'f' are three separate sounds.
• See below for a full explanation of how to interpret each letter in Respelling.

Example: The French name 'Michel' is re-spelled (mee-shel).

• The 'm' is the normal 'm' sound as in the word 'men'.
• The 'ee' is like the 'ee' sound in the word 'see'.
• The '-' means a syllable-boundary (that is, you can have a short break here when saying the word slowly).
• The 'sh' is like the 'sh' of 'shed'.
• The 'e' is like the 'e' of 'red'.
• The 'l' is like the 'l' of 'let'.

Words are separated from each other by a __ mark. Example: (lwee_oh-baiR) =Louis Aubert.

Two more examples:

• The French name 'Benoît' is actually quite easy to pronounce once you see it re-spelled as (be-nwa).
• The composer Cécile Chaminade's name is (say-seel__sha-mee-nad).

Capital letters, like R, N and OO, are to draw your attention to some sounds which normally won't occur in your pronunciation of English.

Example: 'R' in the French name 'Ernest' (aiR-nest) means that, to make it sound French, you can't use your normal 'r' sound. Instead you have to make the sound at the back of the mouth; very much as you would if you were using the back (uvular) flutter.

Example: Capital 'N', as in (aN) or (eN), means that the preceding vowel sound has to be made with air going through the nose. Many American pronunciations of the word 'can't' have this 'nasal' quality in the vowel.

Example: Capital OO means that the sound is similar, but different, from the 'oo' of 'fool'. You have to make it further forward in the mouth (see below for more details). 

You need to have FLASH enabled on your system.

We also have AIFF files available offline for most of the names. AIFF files are high quality sound files, but they are very large. If you would like to request a pronunciation in AIFF format, please send email to Robin. You will receive the file as an attachment to email.

Regretfully, we are not able to provide pronunciations on demand for non-flute-related names.

Most of the recordings were made at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

French speakers: Karin Monnery, a student of English and linguistics at the University of Strasbourg, France, and Aurélie Lievre, a student of English at the University of Poitiers, France.

German speaker: Dr Wolf-Gerrit Früh, a native speaker of German from Hannover, and a member of the Dept of Mechanical & Chemical Engineering, Heriot-Watt University, Scotland.

Hungarian speaker: Dr Balázs Gellér, a member of the Faculty of Law and Political Science, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.

Italian speaker: Angela Fiore, a student of languages and literatures at the Universitŕ degli Studi "Gabriele d'Annunzio", Chieti e Pescara, Italy.

Japanese speaker: Dr Mariko Kondo, a native speaker of Japanese, at the Institute for Applied Language Studies, University of Edinburgh.

Greek speaker: Dr Katerina Nicolaidis of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

Prof. Mike MacMahon, University of Glasgow, Scotland

Robin Mason Horne, Ft. Walton Beach, FL USA

All comments, suggestions, and ....corrections are welcomed! Please send email to Robin.

Regretfully, we are not able to provide pronunciations on demand for non-flute-related names.

© 1997, R M Horne & M K C MacMahon