A Brief History
On February 1, 1946, Norway’s Trygve Lie was selected as the first ever Secretary General of the United Nations, beginning a long line of names to head the UN that are tricky to pronounce in English.
Digging Deeper
Succeeding Mr. Lie, a questionable name for a diplomat, was the even harder to pronounce Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden. Next up to the plate was a diplomat with a succinct first name consisting of only a single letter, U Thant of Burma, now Myanmar.
After U came the more pedestrian sounding Kurt Waldheim, although this man has been rumored to have been a war criminal during World War II. From 1992 to 1996, the UN was headed by an Egyptian named Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Kofi Anan and Ban Ki-moon sound almost plain by comparison.
As the UN represents all nations, we would expect a rich variety of names from all over the world and take pleasure in that variety.
(Note: Prior to an actual Secretary General, Gladwyn Jebb of the UK was the nominal head of the UN, and his first name qualifies as pretty nifty!)
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Fasulo, Linda. An Insider’s Guide to the UN. Yale University Press, 2021.
Hanhimäki, Jussi. The United Nations: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2015.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by atelier Benkow of Lie in 1938, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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