A couple of weeks ago, the RailsEnvy podcast covered RiCal.

So I got the honor of joining the long list of Rubyists who have had the pronunciation of their names butchered by either Jason or Gregg. That's OK, I love both of you jokers.

On the podcast it's pronounced something like din a tal.

Yes, I've heard that one before, less commonly than dee natalie, and many other attempts.

My last name is Italian. I sometimes joke that since my father was of Italian descent, my mother is of German descent, and I speak a bit of French, I am in effect Swiss.

Now I've always pronounced my last name dee nah TAH lee, or in ipa dinɑː'tɑːli . That's the way Grandpa said it.

I understand that, by normal rules of Italian pronunciation it should be more like day-nah-tah-lee, (deɪnɑː'ɑːli ). We always figured that either Grandpa, or Great Grandpa Biaggio, who brought Grandpa to New York in 1897], when Grandpa was named Guiseppe instead of Joseph, and was 6 years old, pronounced it as if it were di Natale, since that's the more noble form of the name.

On the other hand, my second cousin, Lou Alfano (the family genealogist) has uncovered some evidence that it might have been a spelling change, perhaps the immigrations officer at Ellis Island recorded the way he heard "di Natale" as "denatale". I do remember that the crest here, which I ripped off from Lou's page, from my youth, Grandpa had a rather large plywood shield painted with that crest in his cellar.

I love my last name, and dealing with other folks trying to pronounce it has been a source of amusement.

Mispronunciations were rare when I lived in New York and Connecticut, where Italians were more common, the most frequent mispronunciation up there in my youth was de-nat-ah-lee, as in Natalie Woods. When we told someone our name, they were likely to either write it correctly, or as diNatale if they were Italian themselves.

When I moved to North Carolina, the variations grew, and so did the spellings. I don't know how many times I made a telephone reservation at a hotel or a restaurant, and upon arrival discovered that they couldn't find the reservation until they looked it up under "Tolley." They'd misheard it as "Dina Tolley." It got to where some of my friends and their kids took to jokingly calling my wife and me "Mr. and Mrs. Tolley." Heck, we did that ourselves.