How to pronounce Goudey and Bowman?

[jerseygary]

I know this has been discussed a few times in the past...

Has anyone found definitive proof of how you pronounce Goudey and Bowman?

I seem to recall at least one of them was solved because it was in print or someone knew the owner or family of one of those companies - but I went through past threads and can't find it.

So... was one or both ever solved?

[RCMcKenzie]

I'm going to try and refresh my recollection and defer to the experts if I misstep. I started a thread about Goudey a few years ago. It was shown on another website that a descendant of the card company founders pronounced it "Gowdy", the Americanized way that I have pronounced it since the 70's. However, the correct French pronunciation is probably "Goo-deh". I always called Larry Lajoie..."La-joy" like the NASCAR driver, and was told that I should say La-shoo-wey. I thought Bowman was settled at Bowman, but I'm here to learn.

[Casey2296]

I read somewhere that Lajoie is pronounced Laj-wa.

[G1911]

I've always said:

Gow-dee

Bowman, like bowman as in an archer.

[Al C.risafulli]

Per a member of the Goudey family: GOW-dee.

-Al

[Huysmans]

Originally Posted by Casey2296

I read somewhere that Lajoie is pronounced Laj-wa.

Correct.

Lajoie's father was French-Canadian and I believe possibly his mother.
I live in Montreal now and when asked, as the name is still found in the province, several people told me it is pronounced "Laj-wa" in French, and never as three syllables.

[Snapolit1]

Thought it was pronounced Laj-a-way.

[Snapolit1]

How someone pronounced their name is obviously a different question than how others would pronounce it. If you ask people who speak Italian how my family name is pronounced I suspect few of them would accurately say how my name is commonly pronounced in the US among non Italian speakers. And I'm sure this was even more true 100 years ago when foreign names were probably not considered particularly desirable in many parts.

[Neal]

I always thought it was la zhwa, and then a guy with quality cards told me it was lah joo way



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[Butch7999]

Our grandad, as a boy, was a big fan of Lajoie. He always pronounced it "la-JOY," but then again,
he learnt it before baseball was on the radio, and our whole family always mispronounced
their own actual German surname, deferring to some Amurricanized version. And yes, "la-ZHWAH"
would be correct, but his family, too, is free to mispronounce it which ever way they prefer.

We pronounced Goudey "GOO-dey" for decades until this discussion started. Once, in Europe,
a group of us bumped into NHL player Doug Houda and had lunch with him at the Louvre. We had
poutine, and a salad with gouda and croutons. Of course, each of those things is a noumenon,
so make what sense of them you can. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daw6UhG0tSk

We're on the Canadian border, so anytime we don't hear a Canadian pronounce "about" as
something between "a-BOOT" and "a-BOAT" it's confusing. Similarly, "house" is somewhere
between "hoose" and "hoce." And a significant proportion of the many Canadians we know
personally punctuate most sentences with "eh," eh?

Of course, a name doesn't have to be French or Italian or Chinese to be tricky to pronounce.
Featherstonehaugh, ferinstance, is "FAN-shaw." Here's the final word on the subject: