How do you pronounce Joseph?

[fairybeagle]

Joe-sef or Joes-ef?

Joze-if

Jo-zeph

I agree with Barbara.
It is also influenced by knowing/hearing lots of foreign pronounciation of names.
I'm probably influenced by this so I mix the 'English way' with the German way for example.
Also it is a fact that back in the day lots of spellings were decided by printers who were responsible for printing the spoken word.
They were not experts are quite frankly spelt things how they thought.
That is the actual fact.
Academics now come along and try and fit a theory into the English spelling of words which quite frankly is bollocks.
Sorry to disappoint you but that is the real reason as to why English is so hard to fathom and really doesn't make sense.
People will try and come out with all manner of phonetic nonsense.
When I taught students I told them the best way to learn to read was by reading. Just as the best way to learn to swim is to swim, not sit philososysing about it.

Emily the experiment was fascinating - native speakers of English split words pretty arbitrarily, native speakers of French always split words the same way. The researcher running this experiment (she explained afterwards) was interested in people brought up bilingual from birth (I was one of her monolingual controls).

Turns out one language dominates. So if French is your dominant language, even if you speak English as a native due to being bilingual, you will consistently split words the same way every time while a monolingual English speaker will vary, arbitrarily.

Joez-ev

I have no idea hiw people learn to spell english as a second language . It's hard enough as a first!!

Ha ha, Actually the English grammar is relatively easy! There are no gender differences (everything is 'the') and there are no cases like in German for example.

Interesting about the linguistic experiment. I'm bilingual but still instinctively pronounce words according to my 'first language rules'.

Joze-if

Joe-siff

Our next door neighbour is Joseph. My DC1 called him Joeswef for years

Incidentally, my Irish grandmother called her son Jospeh so he was more of a Jawsff.

Joseph obvs.

Joe-zif

Joes-if

Joe-suff (S.wales, here)

Thank you all for all your replies. I don't think the difference in pronunciation would bother me massively as they are still fairly similar.
I was just wondering how people pronounced it as when I started to say it, as PP have said, I thought I pronounced it maybe both ways.
But think I'm mainly in the Joe-seph court.

Joe-sif

Jo-siff. I don’t like the z pronunciation at all!

Swamp it's basically asking if you use an S or a Z sound.

I use a Z sound, don't like it nearly as much the other way!

Joe-siff. My ILs pronounce it joez-eph. It bothers me not.

I’ve read this thread now it’s like when you read a word so many times you think maybe it’s spelt wrong even though it’s not you’ve just looked at it too much
So now I can’t say my child’s name 🤣🤣

My DDs (12 and 13) always at the way I say Jo-seff. They are convinced it should be Jo-zeff.

I have a brother called Joseph, just to let you know, so obviously he and I have been saying it wrong all our lives.

Joe zef

Joe-ziff.

Joeziff