I recommend siz-nazh, where the zh is that soft thing like the z in crozier, or the s sound in leisure. I always notice that one because of my last name quora.com/How-is-Nagy-pronounced

See Wiktionary for various pronunciations of Nagy including /ˈnæɡi/ (for English speakers who read what they see) and [ˈnɒɟ] in Hungarian with a voiced palatal plosive (so a single syllable with neither a hard g nor a soft g).

@WillJagy did you hear people in analysis pronounce the first half of his last name in such an abbreviated style? Your link is not addressing what the main question seems to be, which is dealing with the Szőkefalvi part.

I asked a related question on why it's abbreviated in 2010 at a different site: ask.metafilter.com/146952/… - he signed his papers that way. The conclusion was that Nagy Bela would be too generic, so he needed something to disambiguate, but the full "Szőkefalvi" is too long.

It was Szah-Nahj when I was in grad school.

As a student I remember being baffled by the collapsing of the first half of his last name to "Sz.-" on the cover of the Dover edition of his book with F. Riesz on functional analysis. The Russian translation of that book doesn't abbreviate the name on the cover page or in the foreword (except in one place where both first and last names are collapsed to single letters): lib.ysu.am/open_books/83299.pdf

And indeed English wikipedia has 6 Bela Nagys (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_Nagy)whilewhile) Hungarian wikipedia has 30+ (hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/…)

@KCd I don't remember. Note that a rural reader does report a pronunciation from grad school,

@KCd I was baffled by the same book!

I think I have it. Sha Na Na youtube.com/watch?v=9Gfqy-awdYA

Yeah, that Dover edition is also where I first saw it. I've had it for years, and it's been bugging me this whole time. But now I'm actually going to be citing his work, so I thought I should finally sort this out. Of course, I guess if I'm wearing skin-tight gold lamé no one will much care about the pronunciation! :)

Who is Sz. Nagy and why does anyone care?

@Adam Rubinson The question inquires about this gentleman: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9la_Sz%C5%91kefalvi-Nagy : "Szőkefalvi-Nagy collaborated with Alfréd Haar and Frigyes Riesz, founders of the Szegedian school of mathematics. He contributed to the theory of Fourier series and approximation theory. His most important achievements were made in functional analysis, especially, in the theory of Hilbert space operators."

A mathematician. We generally try to name the people who contributed to the field out of respect for their work. More specifically, I thought this question might be appropriate for this site because the tags "soft-question", "mathematician", and "pronunciation" — all of which apply to this question — seem to suggest that those topics are of interest to at least someone on this site.

You can hear the name in this clip: "The front side has a portrait of Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy" youtube.com/watch?v=IT7yMa2EVTY&t=60s

I recall from long ago ... the textbook Functional Analysis by Frigyes Riesz and Bela Sz.-Nagy, which the instructor called something like "Reese and Nazh"

@md2perpe Thanks! That's an excellent example, and I suppose it's as official as any existing source. I believe the person speaking was Ferenc Fodor, who appears to be Hungarian (but probably not the Hungarian soccer player), so I'll happily believe his pronunciation as canonical.

@Mike The pronunciation in the video is indeed the correct Hungarian way of saying the name.

Istenem! (basically, "oh my G-d!" in Hungarian) I had always thought Sz. Nagy was Szent Nagy ('szent' being Hungarian for 'saint'). Ah well. Live and learn... A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. So thank you for this question. BTW Nagy = Big. Fekete = Black, and Fehér= white - I would think Fejér is some old variant on the spelling of the word. Sós is salty and Erdős is woody. That covers all the Hungarian mathematicians with names that I know to mean something, but maybe a genuine Hungarian would care to add something...

@WillJagy - or Jagy Vilmos? I had assumed that your name was of Hungarian extract. Not the case? (I have some Hungarian, but not much more than the above - although I certainly can pronounce Szőkefalvi-Nagy...)

@peterag As far as I can tell, it goes back to a Swiss version (Jaggi) of the German name Jaeger. My father thought it was from the Alsace-Lorraine region... Mostly indirect evidence at this point.