Not going to describe how I would’ve tried to pronounce it…
When I read Hitchhiker’s Guide, I pronounced it b’tell-jew-EEss
There’s a thought that:
Never make fun of people for mispronouncing a word. It means they learned it by reading
Best I understand, this is a quote without a known attribution
My dad was an astronomer, and as a toddler I thought it was the funniest name for a star. Then the movie came out and I was bugged that they misspelled the name for the promotional posters (but not in the movie itself).
But only in English. In German though… it’s very strangely pronounced. Beite-zeus (but the z is soft)
Don’t say Beytelgyoose three times in the mirror…
It’s even more fun to look up the origins of the name - “hand/arm of the central one”. E.g. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Betelgeuse
colloquially it might be beetlejuice, but traditionally it’s more like betelgyse or betelgoosa
like betelgyse
Yeah I remember Patrick Moore always pronouncing it like that (with a hard g).
Although Wikipedia suggests that the name originally comes from the Arabic for Orion, al-Jauzā’, so the colloquial pronunciation is probably more correct.
