Masham in Yorkshire was one name I got wrong. Beaulieu is Bewlay.  Welsh villages are a nightmare but that is an entirely distinct language. Many place names in the Home of the Brave have perplexed me, too. Poughkeepsie, Kennebunkport, Des Moines, Sauk Centre (note surviving Brit spelling), Terrebonne, Baton Rouge, Terre Haute, etc. If they are clearly French I would go for the French pronunciation probably with disastrous results as in Brit Beaulieu.
Why is Arkansas pronounced Arkansaw but not Kansas? Obviously people who live in the country in question will know how to say them if the places are ever in the news or they have been there.

We USns tend to Americanize the pronunciation of foreign place names when we use them as our own.  I don’t suppose that it’s much different elsewhere.  The streets in Chicago, where I grew up, are good examples up:

Goethe = gay thee (unvoice th)
Devon = de VOHN
Des Plaines = dess planes
La Grange = le graynj
Berlin = bur ln (schwa between l and n)
Dan Ryan Expressway is pronounced most often as “Damned Ryan Expressway”.

And then the city of Arkansas City, Kansas is pronounce like the state it’s in, not the state next door.  And the river that runs through both states is most often pronounced ar KAN zuz in Kansas and AR ken saw in Arkansas.  Some of our Tribal names for our indigenous peoples are French pronunciations of indigenous names and some of those retain something close to the French pronunciation.  Illinois is not close, but retains the silent “s”.

The French pronunciation of Arkansas was mandated by law in the 19th century to resolve the different pronunciations. See Wiki.

edit: softened the, perhaps, judgmental language in the first paragraph.

It’s fascinating how the pronunciation of such names is is assimilated in both the Land of the Free and Perfidious Albion. When I first came across the name Goethe I said it “goeth” and Nietzsche night-she! (Eddie Murphy says Night-she when ostensibly showing his intellectual chops in the dreadful movie The Golden Child - it is odd no one involved in that movie knew the correct pronunciation). Also Porsche is often Porsh not Portia on both sides of the pond I’ve noticed. My excuse is that I have never studied German.
I have also noticed interesting variations in the pronunciation of first names cross-pondwise: Brit Cecil (SESS’l), American SEEsil; BERnud vs Ber-NARD; Colin vs Coe-lin; there must be others. My grendma was a Reenee (with acute accent on 3rd e) but it was pronounced reany unlike Zellweger’s more correct French first name.
And I heard an American DJ pronounce Ray Davies as Day-veez not Day-viss.

When I first came across the name Goethe I said it “goeth” and Nietzsche night-she! ... Also Porsche is often Porsh not Portia on both sides of the pond I’ve noticed. My excuse is that I have never studied German.

These things aren’t cut and dried; there are often various anglicized forms, of varying degrees of acceptability.  “Goeth” will get you laughed at, but not many English-speakers can manage /götǝ/, and it’s always interesting to me to see where people land when they say the name.  Nietzsche is tough too—who says /ˈniːtsʃə/ (NEETS-shuh)?  I guess /ˈniːtʃi/ (NEE-chee) is more popular than /ˈniːtʃə/ (NEE-chuh), but at least there are two clear choices.  Monosyllabic Porsche (/porʃ/) is pretty standard in America, I think; I remember being surprised the first time I heard Janis Joplin sing “POR-sheez.”

I have also noticed interesting variations in the pronunciation of first names cross-pondwise: Brit Cecil (SESS’l), American SEEsil; BERnud vs Ber-NARD; Colin vs Coe-lin; there must be others.

Rafe/Ralph is a common one.

And I heard an American DJ pronounce Ray Davies as Day-veez not Day-viss.

“An”?  I’ve never heard an American say it any other way than Day-veez (except me, and I say “Davis” just to show how superknowledgeable I am).

In Jack London’s “The Sea-wolf”, the sea captain, a solitary reader who has read a lot of Goethe’s work without ever having heard the writer’s name spoken, talks to the young man whom he pulls out of the sea about “Go-eeth”, and after being corrected, laughingly speaks of “Go-eeth-Gerter”. In one of Richmal Crompton’s “William” books, William refers to Socrates as ”So-Crates”.  Those are European names, written in Latin (or Greek) characters., and relatively easy. I remember how difficult it was for English people to pronounce even approximately, the name of the then Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh (the papers had 15 ways of writing it). I believe the Chinese don’t have an easy time saying, or writing, names like “Khruschev” or “Ferrer”. You should hear what a mess Israel newscasters make of foreign names (sportscasters, for some reason, are really brutish).

lionello - 20 March 2008 11:56 AM

I believe the Chinese don’t have an easy time saying, or writing, names like “Khruschev” or “Ferrer”.

Never mind the Chinese, the British had a hard enough time with those names. Khruschev was, variously, Kroo-schef, Kroo-schof, Kruh-schef, Kruh-schof, Kroosh-chef, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. Pronunciation for the actors Mel and Jose Ferrer swung between Ferrer and Ferray.

Oecolampadius - 19 March 2008 12:11 PM

We USns tend to Americanize the pronunciation of foreign place names when we use them as our own. 

Just so with we British. And not just with place names. Those pronunciations, once adopted, are usually set in stone, but the 20th century saw a movement away from the Anglicisation of other foreign names in both the UK and US. (It would be interesting to know if there was a similar process in other nations. I rather doubt it somehow). It would be a brave man today who would speak of Don John (or Don Joo-uhn, as in Byron’s poem), King Lewis, etc, unless in historical context. Don Quicksot is in full retreat, although they’ll wrench the pronunciation from my cold dead lips. (Can one picture the French bidding farewell to Don Quichotte for Don Kee-yotay? They’re far too sensible.)

Sorry to expand thus, it’s a bugbear of mine.

Ferray?  Really?  I guess the pull of French is strong.  Which reminds me, Lawrence Olivier said his name was properly pronounced oh-LIV-ee-er (as if it were a comparative adjective), but he’d given up trying to convince people of that, since everybody was determined to make it French.  (I remember how surprised I was, decades ago, to learn that the great science fiction editor/writer Anthony Boucher pronounced it BOWCH-er; I wanted it to be boo-SHAY.)

I have to put my hands up to Booshay. I recall discovering some years ago that Italian-American surnames, which I’d long given an Italian pronunciation, were as often as not Anglicised. Thus the singer Teddy Randazzo (recently dead alas) was -azzo not -atso, and so on..

Colin vs Coe-lin

The only Coe-lin I know in the States is Colin Powell. All the other Colins I’ve every met or heard of pronounce their names as the British do. Powell’s may be a family (he is of West Indian ancestry) or African-American pronunciation.

The So-crates pronunciation joke was also used in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (the sequel was a lot better).
The BBC has a pronunciation unit but during the Sapporo World Soccer Cup they got the stress completely wrong. It should be SA-puh-ro but they all said Sa-POOR-oh. I might have mentioned this before and the following joke refuting the thick Irishman stereotype:
An Irishman goes for a job interview at a building site and is asked if he knows the difference between girder and joist. Sure, he says, Girder wrote Faust and Joist wrote Ulysses.
I remember Anthony Burgess writing in his Language Made Plain primer that the middle bit of Kruschev is like in “smashed china”, with a glottal stop.
I didn’t know the Rafe/Ralph one at all except through the British actor Ralph Fiennes (fines) who gets very stroppy if people get it wrong.
I didn’t know how to say Joe Louis until I heard it.
How about David Bowie’s The Beaulieu Brothers?

Never mind about Coe-lin, Powell itself is a shibboleth - the British politician Charles Powell pronounces it pole (as, I believe, did the novelist Anthony), his brother Jonathan says pow-ell.

Rafe for Ralph would be regarded as unusual even in Rightpondia, despite Mr Fiennes and the composer Ralph “Rafe” Vaughan Williams.

My own two-syllable surname has an emphasis on the second syllable which is clearly counter-intuitive for most people, since cold-callers regularly mispronounce it. I know I shouldn’t let it annoy me, but it does (probably more because they’re cold-callers than because they’re name-manglers per se).

Rafe for Ralph would be regarded as unusual even in Rightpondia, despite Mr Fiennes and the composer Ralph “Rafe” Vaughan Williams.

Are you quite sure of that? It’s the first pronunciation given in the Everyman English Pronouncing Dictionary.

In 50 years I’ve never met a Rafe, although I’ve known several Ralfs. Even British newspapers have to point out to readers that Mr Fiennes’s first name is pronounced Rafe. I have no evidence at all on how common one pronunciation is versus the other in Rightpondia, but Rafe would definitely be regarded as upper-class, rare and affected. When this change to make the spelling pronunciation the “normal” one happened I don’t know, but normal it now is ...

Oecolampadius - 19 March 2008 12:11 PM

We USns tend to Americanize the pronunciation of foreign place names when we use them as our own.  I don’t suppose that it’s much different elsewhere.  The streets in Chicago, where I grew up, are good examples up:

Des Plaines = dess planes

The nearby city is pronounced the same way, but the not too distant city in Iowa, Des Moines, is pronounced d’ moyn.

Edit: typo