New York City just finished replacing the Kosciuszko Bridge, a critical segment of the BQE (I278). Most people in New York say "the koss-key-oss-ko bridge", though my understanding is that the pronunciation is more like "Ko-shuz-kuh"?
Neither :). It’s a pretty hard word for people outside Poland. I would say it’s pronounced more like “Kosh-choosh-kuh”. It still won’t be perfect, but close enough.
These kind of shenanigans are exactly why Mr. Karadžić [1] pushed for an orthographic alphabet in Serbia, and why it quickly got adopted by neighbors as well.
Indeed, it's one of the peculiarities of the Polish language that it has Slavic phonetics but a Latin alphabet. Hence why typically Slavic phonemes, which in Cyrillic are represented by single letters (such as sh = ш), in Polish get represented with two (sz), and why you need a double-letter context to know how to pronounce a given sequence of characters.
Unfortunately, back in the 10th century, the choice of an alphabet was essentially a pure consequence of whom the first ruler of Poland would adopt Christianity from: the Western part of the Church (this was before the official Schism) or the Rus (Ruthenia). The Rus had a liturgy in Old Church Slavonic, and for the liturgical books they adopted an alphabet, the Glagolitic (a predecessor to the Cyrillic), which was more suitable for the phonetics of the language (and, indeed, of Slavic languages in general). Poland adopted the Latin liturgy and the alphabet was part of the “package”.
Unfortunatelly, neither. Main problem with his surname is the ‘ś’ (proper spelling is ‘Kościuszko’), which doesn’t appear in English at all. The closest equivalent I can think of is Japanese sound at the beginning of words such as ‘shinobi’, which I guess English-speaking people still pronounce like ‘sh’ in ‘fish’…
And then there’s ‘ci’, which is pronounced similar to ‘s’…
The closest I can get is ‘Koshch-oosh-kuh’, but that’s still not it (that would be spelled ‘Koszczuszko’).
Similar to the tallest mountain in Australia, named after the same person and in general people pronounce it Ko-zee-os-ko. My father was particularly proud to correct people's pronunciation of it and to try and get them to say it the proper Polish way.
There is a small town in Mississippi named Kosciusko, and they pronounce it kosi-'uhskoh, or, in IPA, /ˌkɒsiˈʌskoʊ/. It's not far from my mother's home town and it is the home town of James Meredith and Oprah Winfrey.
If you listen to NYC traffic reports on AM radio(1010 WINS)where this bridge is mentioned almost daily its pronounced "Koz Cuse Ko." I have never heard anybody use the pronunciation you are referring to.
Growing up near Middle Village, I only heard “koz-e-oos-ko” or “koz-e-us-ko”. Have lived in Brooklyn & Manhattan ever since, and the same there. Definitely don’t listen to the radio. Can you find any clips where they say it this way on NY1... literally have never heard it that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosciuszko_Bridge