Buttigieg

We’re all going to have to get used to this, apparently, odd name in the coming months as Pete Buttigieg tries to become the next president of the US.
I think it’s an interesting case, not because the name itself is odd – if you come from Malta, where the name originates, it is distinctly NOT odd, but because despite Americans’ well-known difficulty with languages other than English (some might say even with English!), Mayor Buttigieg has managed to retain an approximately Maltese pronunciation for himself.
How many English speakers with no knowledge of Maltese would arrive at the pronunciation -jejj for the final syllable? And I suspect that most would also use the STRUT vowel in the first syllable rather than the FOOT vowel which seems to be Pete’s preference.
There are very few words in English – and those abbreviations – in which a final -g is pronounced as if it were a ‘j’: veg (as in “meat and two veg”), Reg (short for Reginald, or with lower case r-, for “register” and words of the same group); marg (short for “margarine”, which some older pedants insist should be pronounced with /g/ in any case). There may be others, but not many. So to get the general public to pronounce -gieg as ‘jejj’ is quite an achievement. Of course, what is missing is the ‘correct’ Maltese spelling, which has a dot placed above the ‘g’ in both places (Buttiġieġ). I suspect that Mayor Buttigieg, or his father’s family, abandoned that as a sophistication too far.
Paul Auster, in his novel 4 3 2 1, tells the story of a Jewish immigrant family. The patriarch of the family, on the way over from Europe, is advised by a fellow traveller to choose a name with prestige when he gets to Ellis Island – something like Vanderbilt, or Rockerfeller. However, when confronted by the imimigration official, and asked his name, the man can’t remember what he was told, and says, in Yiddish, ‘Ikh hob fargessen’, at which the official writes down “Ichabod Ferguson”. The first American Mr Buttigieg obviously had better luck!