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).
colloquially it might be beetlejuice, but traditionally it’s more like betelgyse,
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
Fascinating!
But only in English. In German though… it’s very strangely pronounced. Beite-zeus (but the z is soft)
