Pronouncing Philosophical Words

Posted on April 8, 2008
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If, like me, you’ve read far, far more philosophy than you’ve spoken you’re always nervous when presenting papers. Why? Because you know you might screw up some obscure German word or philosopher. (Or worse yet a Greek or French word or name) What is there to do?

Fortunately I came upon the ideal solution. Over at Enowning they had a funny link on how to pronounce Heidegger. It was to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Here’s the thing. I typed in about a dozen fairly difficult words and it had the pronunciations (with sound) for all of them.

Confused about how to say Husserl? Now you know. (Yeah, OK, everyone probably knows that one)

I was very pleased to see that all my pronunciations were correct. Very nice considering how often I completely destroy English words.

So I started thinking. If there are English dictionaries with audio pronunciations how about German and French?

Now German is a tad tricky since they have this fetish for stringing multiple words together to make real big words. But I found a dictionary that usually lists the variations for a term with audio reading of enough that you can figure out the term you’re looking for.

Here’s the variants for Gelassenheit. (That’s a term Heidegger appropriated from Meister Eckhardt that is roughly the ‘letting-be’ a mystic engages in. Heidegger uses it to mean a resolute willing of openness to being. It’s roughly human freedom.)

French was trickier, surprisingly. (After all the joke about the French is they don’t care what you say so long as you say it right) There were plenty online but few with proper nouns and pronunciation. I never did find a good one. If you know of one please let me know.

I did find some free dictionary software that does this. Unfortunately it’s Windows only. (Yeah I could run it in Parallels – but it’s annoying)

I didn’t have much luck with Greek either. Lots of add ins to Bible software if I wanted to pay for them (and buy a bunch of Bible CD-Roms). But nothing online and oriented towards philosophy.

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  6. Davidson: What Is Present to the Mind

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