So, how do you say Leinster?

We see authors’ names in print and, sometimes, struggle to figure out how to pronounce them.

A couple of years back, there was a discussion in one of Yahoo’s pulp groups over the pronunciation of Murray Leinster‘s last name.

Some had always pronounced it LINE-ster. But those who knew the SF fictioneer (whose real name was William Fitzgerald Jenkins) said he pronounced it LEN-ster.

This isn’t something new only to those of us who come across a name in an old pulp magazine. It weighed on the minds of those who were buying the pulps new off the stands.

While reading through “Brass Tacks,” the letters column in Astounding Science Fiction, I came across this question in the October 1945 number:

I have also a project to suggest. That, to facilitate scholarly discussion of the ideas presented in your periodical, you publish some sort of phonetic list of authors.

Some of my friends, for instance, rhyme “van Vogt” with “Van Gogh,” while others make it “van Vaught.” Ordinarily a simple knowledge of languages would suffice for such a problem, but with Americans, Anglicizations has set in so arbitrarily and so irregularly that one can never be sure, and moreover, so many of your names are pseudonyms with purely personal pronunciations that the matter makes reference difficult.

Does “de Camp” rhyme with English verb “decamp”? For that matter, when we consider the personality of the author as we read it, there is some doubt as to whether he rhymes “Sprague” with “lake,” “Hague,” or even “ague.” “Ley,” of course, presents no difficulty (though there are those who make it “Lee”), but where is the accent on his nom de plume? “Line-ster” or “Lin-ster”? “See-mak” or “Sai-mak”? And where is your accent on “Asimov”?

Indeed, I even know people who have never heard the whole story of the team “Eando.”

— John M. Campbell Jr.

His answer arrived in the May 1946 number:

Dear John:
For the other John Campbell’s benefit, ASF, XXXVI, ii, 142, “Sprague” rhymes with “plague” and “de Camp” is pronounced the same as “decamp.”

“Willy Ley” is “willy lay,” not “veely lie.” His surname was pronounced “lie” in German, but he switched to “lay” in this country because of the unfortunate homophony of the original. And “willy” is close enough to Willy’s German, wherein “w” spells a bilabial voiced fricative, like the intervocal “b” in Spanish, between English “w” and “v.”

(Isaac) Asimov is AZ-im-off; (Robert) Heinlein HINE-line; (Lester) del Rey del-RAY, and his real given name is Ramon followed by about a dozen more Spanish names.

I could do this much better if (Street & Smith) would invest in a set of International Phonetic type.

—L. Sprague de Camp

Mr. de Camp must have left the last part of the question — the story behind Eando Binder — for another time.