Pietro

We named our son Pietro, who is 6 years old now. We love the name and the fact that he's the only one we know with it. But the one problem is that people unfamiliar with it will invariably Americanize its pronunciation if they don't know how it is supposed to be pronounced.

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In English, we typically change the "t-r" to a "c-h-r", as in "tree". But in other languages, including Italian where the name Pietro comes from, the "t-r" is handled with a slight tongue roll. We realize some people have a very difficult time doing a tongue roll, so this part is forgivable.

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But the glaring problem we hear is the inexplicable change of the "e" to an "a" in the middle of the name. It should be a soft "EH" sound rather than a hard "AY" sound.

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CORRECT: pee-EH-tro
ACCEPTABLE: pee-EH-chro
INCORRECT: pee-AY-chro.

An alternate pronunciation of this name is Pee-AY-troe, and is the one I prefer.

The character Quicksilver aka Pietro Maximoff from the Marvel comics pronounced his name PEE-eh-tro. I like this pronunciation much better.