23 Sep
It’s N-oh-l-t-ee!
I was reading a blog post that was only written for the purpose of explaining how to pronounce the author’s name. One of the comments had a great link to a website that gives excellent help on pronouncing names. The site is plainly called Pronounce Names.
I looked up my last name, Nolte, and sure enough it was phonetically spelled very well. It even has an audio widget so that one can listen to it.
The other name that gets butchered a lot is my wife’s: Rachelle. They got it right once again, but no audio recording yet. You can record and submit your own version right through the site if you’d like. I’ll see if I can convince her to do that tonight! 
December 1st, 2009 at 12:42 am
Hello Steve
I found you blog on google which led me to the pronouncenames.com site. Very interesting. I left additional info there. Nolte is a German name and as such is pronounced “Nol-tah” there by the native speakers. But for some reason we have adopted the “Nol-tee” sound here. I for one might prefer to go back to the original way to say it. Go back to that website, I left a new entry there with a WAV file. By the way, my ancestors came from the Hannover, Germany area, and the name is till pretty common there. Many businesses in the area with the name and a street in Hannover with the name of Noltestrasse.
Take care
Bruce Nolte
Los Angeles