They don’t teach about Kant in school and soon they won’t even be teaching real American history in school.

“Heheh, teacher said Kant.”

The way I heard it, it is the other way around – German students get English translations because they are easier to follow than the original.

Not that I know of. English has the very common word “can’t”, and Kant is at least as far from being snicker-worthy. I suppose a viral video could change that, but AFAIK that hasn’t happened.

Also, as janbb mentioned, I’d be surprised if any US public schools (except maybe in someplace like Cambridge MA where they actually fund them to be good) actually had a lecture on Kant.

On the other hand, I have heard of some US teachers having peculiar ideas of how to pronounce some name, and students who know better, laughing at them a lot for it, so I expect it may have happened somewhere, perhaps in a private prep school somewhere that actually does mention Kant.

They teach Kant in the Kahn Academy.

I’m not sure if this is a question about pronunciation or something else.

I’ve heard Kant’s name spoken in school plenty of times (including in college philosophy classes, but not only those), and I’ve never heard it spoken as the American rendition of “can’t.” It’s one of the German names that are really easy to pronounce correctly.

I have also heard a philosophy instructor (in California) mangle Nietzsche and Beauvoir and even Cambridge. I forgave the sneeze that was Nietzsche and the shock that was ba-VORE, but I had to go up to him after the lecture and tell him that if he said CAMM-bridge one more time, it was going to make me cry in class.

@Jeruba
It is about pronunciation.
Kant is pronounced as “cunt”.

@ragingloli – Everything is pronounced “cunt” when you let your mind wander… ;p

@ragingloli Except it is not. Kant is “kahnt”, can’t is “kant”, cunt is “cuhnt”. So they’re not even very close, and separated by the common and not funny “can’t”.

Immanuel Kant, but Sammy Cahn!

I learned about Immanuel Kant in a philosophy course in college.

@ragingloli, are there regional differences in that vowel sound among speakers of German? I understood the a to be the same as in Vater (and father.) I never once heard it confused with a vulgar expression, or sound like one, and I never even heard the boys in the back of the room giggle when the philosopher’s name was spoken. To me those two words sound distinctly different, and in any case the context makes an unmistakable distinction.

If the name as pronounced in German does authentically sound more like the English vulgarity, then perhaps English-speaking professors and teachers have skewed it a little to avoid the homophone. Would that be the contortion you asked about? A slight reshaping doesn’t seem like a contortion to me.