Talk:Georg Henrik von Wright

Moved note
I removed the following note from the article page. I think it's more appropriate here. It directly preceded the list of works. PRiis 06:33, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * note: for the time being, only individual words in the following titles have been linked. This is intended as an inspiration for those who write wikipedia entries on philosophy.

Claim of Scottish descent
Saying that von Wright was of Scottish descent is very far-fetched. He himself pointed out that his earliest known ancestor lived in Narva in Estonia around 1650 and that this man may have had Scottish descent. So not only is there no proof of any Scottish descent, but even if true, we are talking of one single ancestor many generations and more than 250 years removed. If we would talk about descent using similar reasoning in other articles, almost anyone would be of multiple descent. JdeJ (talk) 11:34, 1 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Ten years later, next question: "Von Wright was of both Finnish and 17th-century Scottish ancestry." And where does the very German-sounding nobility predicate von comes from? :-) --Delabarquera (talk) 17:20, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

pronunciation
Which language is the pronunciation in? Swedish? kwami (talk) 16:37, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
 * The best pronunciation would be the Swedish spoken in Finland, by the Swedish-ethnic minority. Swedish should suffice. Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 16:51, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
 * I think that the phonetic spelling is accurate, and I speak Swedish and studied phonetics from Ian/John Catford! What is the problem? Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 16:57, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Language is not identified (I can do that); tone is not provided (I can't do that!). kwami (talk) 17:56, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Swedish has 2 tones, which I cannot distinguish! Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 18:01, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Von Wright's obituary in The Times [20 June 2003] notes that although his 'surname is pronounced, in most countries, to rhyme with “tricked”; in Britain and the US it is commonly pronounced to rhyme with “bright."' And claims that von Wright "used to tell British friends that the anglophone pronunciation was correct, since the name derived from a Scotsman." (The obituarist is wrong about the family history re said Scotsman - Georg(e) Wright emigrated to Swedish Estonia not Germany and he was not enobled there, his grandsons were enobled in Swedish Finland) as von Wright recounts in "Georg Henrik von Wright: Intellectual Autobiography" (in: Schilpp, 1989)  Jy Houston (talk) 01:40, 1 March 2022 (UTC)