I am a Chinese-American who has always had a love for words and other languages. Even as a child, I adored learning new words in different languages, and the way other languages sound was just magical to me. I didn't grow up bilingual, though both my parents spoke bits of Chinese (dad for work...I think he knew more than mom did), and we lived in Hong Kong for a while, so I was hearing languages other than English long before I became Pagan.
And one thing that I saw early on was that pronunciation could be very tricky! Chinese has a lot of tones that we just don't have in English. Sometimes dad would say a word to teach me, and I thought I was repeating it back, but he'd say I had the tone wrong. I also saw how people who were native to a language often had a different flow when speaking it than someone who learned it later in life. It's kind of like accents, you can have to people saying the exact same words and depending on their accent it can sound completely different.
In the Pagan realm there are a LOT of words in other languages. Not only are there deity names, but there are also concept words and other terminology, that could be tricky to pronounce. Sometimes there isn't a lot of information on how things are pronounced (or you really have to dig for pronunciations).
There are a couple of really common ones that are pretty tricksy. Samhain is definitely one of them. I don't remember seeing the pronunciation for Samhain for years after I learned the word. I still say it 'sam-hain' in my head (and anytime I need to write it, because if I say it 'sow-en' in my head, I tend to spell it wrong lol). But technically speaking, there are several different ways of pronouncing Samhain, depending on which dialect of Gaelic you are using to pronounce it.
Another one that tended to trip people up was Athame. I have heard several different pronunciations (mostly they seem to differ on where to stress the syllables, though some people toss an L sound in there for...reasons).
Now, Athame has the interesting issue of being a modern word coined for magical use, where as many other words are historical/regional. For many people, nailing the correct pronunciation is a matter of respect, especially when it comes to deity names. After all, if you are going to be worshiping a deity, you probably want to pronounce their name right (even if you aren't working with them directly, if you are using their name, you want to be able to pronounce it).
A look at anyone who was given an ethnic name shows you just how hard this can be. I love the quote by actress Uzo Aduba's mom, "If they can learn to pronounce Tchaikovsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka." But the point is a potent one...how many ethnic names get butchered because we struggle saying words that aren't native to us? If we look back in history, people's names were literally (and legally) changed, because they were too hard for officials to say and write.
The flip side of this is that there are some sounds and sound combinations that really seem to be near impossible to master if you weren't raised with them. There is a trill in some of the Spanish words that is hard to even explain how to do. Other languages have similar effects, either sounds that are swallowed, nasal qualities, tonal differences or a dozen other things that come naturally if you grew up hearing the language, but if you didn't you might not even easily be able to detect the difference between including the sound and not including it.
The other thing that can be really hard, is that many of us are learning from literary (written) sources, or from people who learned from literary sources. So we see the word written down, we pronounce it according to our native language rules, and then when we share that word with someone else, we say it the way we have sounded it out. Words have been passed from teacher to teacher, and no one has actually heard them pronounced the way they should be.
Once you have learned a word it is much harder to unlearn it. Especially if it was a strange word, and you practiced saying it (the way you thought it was meant to be said), and now you have drilled it into your brain...only to find out that it actually should be pronounced a different way.
I view pronunciation like many things....effort trumps results. If I have a word that is hard, and I am doing my best to try to pronounce it properly, as I understand it, that to me is what is important. If someone shares new information, and I now have to unlearn a word, that may take some time, and I may make mistakes, but if I keep pushing towards it (do you know how long it too me to be able to say Samhain out loud without just feeling silly...and to even remember that I needed to think about how to say it and not just say it the way I saw it spelled), then eventually I will start to train myself in the new way.
When there are multiple versions, then I think there are two ways to approach it. Let's take the example of Gaelic words. If your path focus revolves heavily around Gaelic things, then you may want to pick one particular dialect of Gaelic and work on keeping your pronunciations consistent. But if you mainly deal with Egyptian things, and just use a few Gaelic based words in your practice, then you might find the pronunciations that you like best, the ones that sound right to you, and use those, even if they are from different dialects.
I view practicing pronunciations as an act of devotion. Names are especially important to me. I don't want to mispronounce anyone's name (person or deity), so I will work harder to learn how to say a deities name than I would, for example, to learn how to say the word for energy or life force.
I work with a lot of Norse names, and there are many that I still feel sort of weird saying out loud, especially when speaking to other people. It's strange, because I can say them in my head, and they sound perfectly fine, but I can't get that sound out of my mouth! Uruz, Raido, Algiz, these are rune names I struggle with.
I practice saying the names of things in other languages out loud. Sometimes this means literally repeating them over and over, just trying to wrap my tongue and brain around a sound.
There are deity names I also struggle with. There is a lovely lady on YouTube who gives the Icelandic pronunciation of many of the Norse deity names, and I need to watch her video probably a million more times, because I can hear that she is saying the names differently than I say them, but I can't quite figure out how to mimic what she is saying (yet!)
Whenever I think about pronunciation, I think of people who are not native English speakers, many of whom often apologize for their English, when many times it is perfectly understandable and quite good (way better than my "any language other than English" would be!) I would never get upset at someone who was trying to speak my language, and really working at it, no matter how 'bad' their pronunciation was.
At the end of the day, I think that it all comes back to honor and respect. If you are struggling with a pronunciation, do you just give up and tell yourself 'meh it's close enough, that's fine, it doesn't matter' or do you keep striving to get better? I have never felt like my stumbling over words has been received poorly by any deity I work with, but I also keep trying to get better. If I keep my heart in the right place, then I am okay with the sounds that come out of my mouth.
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