The Vanda Miss Joaquim is Singapore’s national flower, appropriately for a city that’s a hodgepodge of ethnicities, since it’s a natural hybrid (of Vanda hookeriana and Vanda teres). But here’s the part I never did figure out: how do you pronounce “Joaquim”? Apparently Agnes Joaquim was a member of Singapore’s small Armenian community, but that gives me no sense as to whether I should pronounce the name “JOE-kim” as I’ve always heard around here, or “wah-KIM”, as in Spanish names (as in Joaquim Phoenix, even though I think he isn’t Latino).
Of course, the right answer is “you pronounce any surname the way the person wants it to be pronounced” - if your last name is “Smith” and you want it to be pronounced “Tan”, more power to you. But unfortunately I don’t know anyone with the last name Joaquim in Singapore, so there’s no way of using that avenue to clear up the question.
So I sent out an e-mail to Bert Vaux, linguistics professor and editor of the Annual of Armenian Linguistics. His response:
That’s definitely not an Armenian name, so I would do it in the Spanish or Portuguese way (the two are different, I believe) depending on where the person is from.
Interesting, I hadn’t considered that the Portuguese pronunciation might be different. A little bit more poking around the Inta-Net points to the fact that Joaquim is likely to be a Portuguese surname (not surprising, given the strong Portuguese presence in this region - many Eurasians in Singapore have a Portuguese last name), so I guess it’s probably pronounced something like zhwa-KIM (following the pronunciation of Joaquim in Brazilian names) assuming, of course, that no anglicisation of the pronunciation occurred. Hmm.