I recently ran across a reference to “Кошут” (Koshut) in a Russian text and realized it was very unlikely to refer to Lajos Kossuth, the usual referent; googling it took me to this disambiguation page, from which I learned that it can also refer to the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, which seems an unfair ambiguity because the latter’s name is pronounced (per Wikipedia) “/kəˈsuːt, -ˈsuːθ/” — i.e., kə-SOOT or kə-SOOTH, so that it should be Косут in Russian (either way, since Russian represents /θ/ as /t/). So consider this a public service message. But I’m also curious about the pronunciations of both names. In the first place, surely Joseph Kosuth says his name one way or the other — does anybody know? And in the second, Kossuth is [ˈkoʃut] in Hungarian but of course is routinely anglicized in English; my Webster’s New Biographical Dictionary gives \ˈkä-ˌsüth, kä-ˈ\ — i.e., KAH-sooth, kah-SOOTH, but I suspect that doesn’t exhaust the possibilities. How do you say it, and/or what version have you heard, if you and/or those around you have discussed the once-famous “nobleman, lawyer, journalist, politician, statesman and governor-president of the Kingdom of Hungary?”
Lajos’s surname is pronounced by Americans, in two videos I found, as COE-shoot and COE-shooth. WP says that Kossuth county in Iowa, named for him, is pronounced /kəˈsuːθ/ (same as the artist).
None of which correspond to either of Webster’s offerings! Thanks very much.
Here’s a video clip from about 5 years ago put together by a realtor who was trying to sell the house at 2205 Kossuth Street, Lafayette, Indiana. Her pronunciation is also /kəˈsuːθ/. (Charming bungalow cottage with excellent central location, minutes to downtown and the Purdue campus etc.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohgq_nhdn5I
…and yes, the ss is as ornamental as the th, the /ʃ/ is short: etymology here.
Interesting, but “Ko- is a prefix that provides emphasis”: is it?
“Ko- is a prefix that provides emphasis”: is it?
About the etymology, here is Edward Stankiewic (1986) The Slavic Languages: Unity in Diversity, pp. 448f on the family of Slovak košút:
(Greek ξυρόν is usually translated ‘razor’.)
Vasmer on this family of words under кошута.
Vasmer’s reference to Berneker is to here, p. 586, which eventually leads via Petar Skok here to Miklosich (1886) Etymologisches Wörterbuch der slavischen Sprachen on the pronominal ko- here:
The semantic force of the pronominal ko- would be like that of ku- in Sanskrit. As explained by Monier-Williams:
See also §506 in Whitney here. And see the many examples of words beginning with this ku- in Monier-Williams on p. 286 here.
According to Wikipedia Joseph Kosuth is a relative of Lajos, and they are part of the same Hungarian aristocratic family. So I suppose I can see why you might transcribe it into Russian using the same spelling if you hadn’t bothered to ask the actual artist how he says it. There are a number of interviews with Joseph online but he doesn’t say his own name. For what it’s worth, people in the Anglo art world seem to pronounce his name coe-SOOTH. For example – https://youtu.be/IspGesmq6xY?si=W4VpmeLGbqKNXwfL
I also found a German art historian who says coe-ZOOT, but I think we can ignore that.
Xerîb: Thanks very much for all that; I had been unaware of ku- as a prefix, and now I am aware!
Vanya: My thanks to you too; it’s too bad we can’t hear him say his own name, but I’ll adopt /kəˈsuːθ/ as my own pronunciation should I ever have occasion to refer to him.
My Hungarian-born father pronounced the name in Hungarian. He also gave all his kids Hungarian names and misspelled them grotesquely according to what he believed they would look like in English, and our mother let him do it. [Rolls eyes.]
Just a note… In that text I cut and pasted from Stankiewicz, you don’t have to believe any of what he says about the ulterior Indo-European etymology of кошута or шут, or whether these two belong together in the first place. I just wanted to show that segmenting off the ko- was the usual approach, rather than it being the ko- of koza ‘goat’ or something like that. I think Stankiewicz is channelling Jakobson—see Trubachyov’s note under шут in his translation of Vasmer. And note also Vasmer’s own cross-reference to шустрый there.