Plato

Plato
 

how do I pronounce Plato in English? The Greek Philosopher. Platou, plitou, platou, plato?
And Aristotle ?

/'pleɪtəʊ/
/ˌærɪ'stɒtl/ but some /'ærəstɑːtl/ NB Both are missing a dot subscript under the l because I can't work out how to type it.

"Plato" would be written "Play' - toh" for someone who doesn't know the phonetic alphabet like pjt33 does. The "ay" sound in the first syllable would be like the Spanish word "he" (first person singular present indicative of haber), and the second syllable with what we call a "long O sound" - like a Spanish "o", but with an English dipthong. Also, in this context, the "t" is a bit soft....

read Spanish:

pléi-to

pléiro (if pronounced quickly/fast)

Be thankful Plato changed his name from Aristokles.

Aristotle is pronounced with the stress on the A, and a short o. The adjective Aristotelian is stressed as aristotélico

Ok, so Perikles goes for the other pronunciation.

I should mention that I got those from the Oxford dictionary, so they're en-gb pronunciations. There are probably other options available in en-us.

Sorry, I didn't see your Aristotle above. But the usual pronunciation in BrE academia is as I described, although I have heard one or two academics immersed in Greek automatically say αριστοτέλης in the nominative and αριστότελες in the vocative.

Should I ask when these academics use the vocative?

(FWIW the Pythons stress *tot*, although that may be because they're rhyming it with bottle. If I knew where to find the material it would be interesting to see whether that influenced hoi polloi).

Best not, but I have actually heard it! Most of them live on a different planet and in a different era.

Yes, that stuck in my mind because of the unusual stress to enable the rhyme. If only we could arrange a poll to see whether this has influenced people.

BTW, the pronunciation of Greek names in English is as far as I know is seldom a subject with rigid rules because the words are distorted and the original accent lost. Some adopt a pronunciation directly from Greek, others from the name adopted in Latin, with considerable inconsistency in both spelling and pronunciation.