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A weekly guide to names and words in the news, from Martha Figueroa-Clark of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Pronunciation Unit.

"This week's pronunciation is for Nato secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. His full name is Jakob Gijsbert (Jaap) de Hoop Scheffer, but he is generally known as Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and he himself uses this name to introduce himself in a video clip on Nato's website.

Our recommendation is YAAP duh HOHP SKHEFF-uhr (-aa as in father; -uh as in the; -oh as in no; -kh as in Sc. loch), based on his own pronunciation in the video clip.

There are several features in this name which might cause a monolingual native speaker of English difficulty: the 'j' in Jaap which is sometimes pronounced zh as the 's' in measure or the 'j' in French 'Jean' ; the name Hoop looks like the English word 'hoop' but is pronounced more like the word 'hope' ; finally, the pronunciation of Scheffer in Dutch is SKHEFF-uhr. That is, the s is followed by the fricative sound kh (as in Scottish loch). Since Scheffer is also a German name, the German pronunciation SHEFF-uhr is sometimes heard but this is inappropriate in this case, since the language concerned is Dutch."

(For a guide to our phonetic pronunciations, click here)

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