When you thought you knew how to pronounce something...!

That's interesting. I always wondered how the Polish L with the line across it was pronounced.

Anne Boylen. I thought it was Boy Lynn. I have since heard historians pronounce it Bowlin. Who knows?

We (general English speaking we) have traditionally anglicized names from non-English speaking countries which is what you did with Lodz. I thought it was pronounced with more of an "wooge" than "wudge" sound.

I'm not sure when it became more common to stay with the traditional pronunciation for names & places, but I distinctly remember my shock at discovering the spelling of an employee's name after I had been in discussions with him over a job transfer. I am grateful I knew him as "Vide-uh" before his file reached my desk and I learned his last name was spelled Wajda.

In Greece, I thought signs were misspelled in English until I learned the Greek alphabet has some letters that are pronounced differently than the same letters in English. "Taberna" is the first one that comes to mind, but "b" in Greek is pronounced with the English "v" sound.

I think different is a better word than odd

How do you pronounce Moto, as in motojacket?

I always say it with long O, as in motocross. Recently I heard someone say Mott-o.

Since it's short for motorcycle jacket, I would pronounce it like that.

For me it is always an issue between pronouncing things as the people do who are from that place or using the Americanized version.

Like Germany - Deutschland is what German people say. How did we get 'Germany'? Vienna is spelled Wien and pronounced Vienne in Austria because W's are pronounced like 'V's and V's like W's.  Poland is like that too like if a person's name has a W it is pronounced like a V.  In Hungarian CS is our CH sound, SZ is a S sound, ZS is SH sound. 

In Philadelphia the Schuylkill Expressway is pronounced skoo kul. Norfolk is Nawfuk or Norfuk. No folk to it at all.

I will say that Henry Louis Gates Jr does mispronounce many things - some people are not very good at pronouncing names and he is one of them. I catch him all the time on that show.

While we're at it, it's IlliNOY, not IlliNOISE!
Dez plaines, IL
De Moyn, IA
The Midwest is great for mispronounced place names named after other, older places, such as KAY-ro (Cairo), MY-lan (Milan), etc etc etc etc etc.
Terre Haute IN is much different than Terre Haute IL. We could do this for days, haha.

And the fact that I have read four or five books on her makes that even worse that my eyes made it change in my head!

My in laws travel a lot. When they went to South Africa they came home telling my kids about zeb-ras (zeb rhyming with the end of celeb). I had to put a stop to it when they referred to a black person as a colored person. I know that is how they are referred to in South Africa but that is not going to go over well here!

This reminds me of the time my son returned from study abroad in London. He visited me at school, and my students asked him to "Speak English" to them. He had them at "al-u-min-e-um. "

It's Anne Boleyn not Boylen and usually pronounced as Bo-lynn although I agree it does sound like Bow-lynn when it's said with an upper class British accent!

Our state capitol has a street named Huger which should be pronounced the French way... "eu - gee."

But bless the little pea-picking hearts of many South Carolinans. I hear it pronounced "hugger" with great regularity. When we had all the catastrophic flooding here back in October, a national newscaster even pronounced it "hue - gare."

A few books had the lower classes calling her Nan Bullen. How many ways can you say a name lol.

We call them by the English translation. No different to the Spanish calling the United States ...Estados Unidos or Inglaterra for England.