How do you pronounce mengele?

Answer 1

That is a German name, and it has three syllables, men ga la. The a sound in the last two syllables sounds the same as in the word avoid. The emphasis is on the first syllable.

mongulae Information from Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Language/2006 August 2 The 'g' in Mengele

I just watched the film BOOOBIEESSS, in which Josef Mengele is a promominent character. I noticed that the 'g' in the name was pronounced with a glottal stop (I think that's the term for it). This is not the German pronunciation. And at first I thought there shouldn't be any problem in English because English also has that 'ng' sound, as in 'banging'. Then again the word 'language' does have a glottal stop. So what is the rule here and why is Mengele mispronounced? (Maybe to anger the bloody nazi? There's no glottal stop in the word language, but there is a [g] after the [ŋ]. In banging there's just [ŋ] (two of them, in fact), without a [g] after. If you heard English speakers pronounce Mengele with a [g] after the [ŋ], it's probably because in English, it's extremely rare to have [ŋ] in the middle of a word followed by any sound other than [g], unless there is a morpheme boundary (as in bang-ing). Contrast singer, which has a morpheme boundary (sing-er) and no [g], with finger, which has no morpheme boundary and does have [g]. (There are a few exceptions, such as Binghamton, gingham, and dinghy, which have no morpheme boundary but also no [g].) (Angr beat me to it, so I'll just add that the voiced velar plosive article explains the English habit.) My experience is the opposite of Dirk's: I had always pronounced Mengele with a plosive, but the people in The Boys from Brazil (which I saw a couple of weeks ago) seemed not to- I remember being surprised by that at the time. I'd assume a [ŋg] pronunciation, having read the article German phonology without getting any wiser. 惑乱 分からん

Sorry if I was unclear. The German pronunciation is definitely [ˈmɛŋələ] with no [g].

I always thought that in Latin American Spanish the letter 'g' before the letters 'e' and 'i' was a velar fricative, or at least a glottal fricative. But of course, they speak Portuguese in Brazil, and i don't know the situation there. СПУТНИКCCC

None of the people in the film are actually Brazilian. "g" in that position in Portuguese would be pronounced [ʒ] (like the "s" in measure), but it's a German name, not a Portuguese one, so Portuguese spelling-to-pronunciation rules don't apply.

Funny that you noticed 'Mengele' being pronounced without a plosive. Maybe different people used different pronunciations and we both only noticed the one we didn't expect. I'm not going to watch the film again just for this, but I've made a note on the tape to check this thread out the next time I do. And about the pronunciation of 'singer'. I believe there is an English dialect in which that is pronounced with a plosive. Btw, the voiced velar plosive article isn't quite written for laymen like me. This is a common problem on Wikipedia. The experts writing the articles naturally find it difficult to think in the mindset of laymen. We have too much expertise!