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John you wrote:
"I can't keep track of how many people tell me the "proper" way to pronounce 
Betegeuse.    It always starts out with a question of whether I know the 
proper way to pronounce it....now this last bit is great!"

Yeah, because of the movie "Beetlejuice" and also the radio/tv/film versions 
of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", the pronunciation of Betelgeuse 
was relatively stable, sounding like "beetle juice", for a couple of decades. 
But some people consider that pronunciation embarassing so they insist on 
finding a more scholarly pronunciation. Others hope for a more international 
pronunciation. And still others try to get something that's closer to the 
original Arabic. None of these make much sense. I always advise people to 
pronounce star names in the fashion least likely to confuse their target 
audience. There is no "right" pronunciation.

If you want more on star name etymologies, I recommend "A Dictionary of Modern 
Star Names" by Paul Kunitzsch and Tim Smart (2nd rev. ed., Sky Publishing, 
2006). Kunitzsch seems to have made the only modern attempt to develop proper 
etymologies for the classical star names. Many people still treat an old book 
by R.H. Allen (originally published in 1899, and available online via Google 
Books, and re-published several times after) as the primary resource for star 
names and his version of the Betelgeuse etymology is frequently quoted, for 
example in the Wikipedia page, which is a bit of a mess. By that probably 
mistaken etymology, the name originally meant "The Giant's Armpit" but by the 
etymology offered by Kunitsch et al., it's "The Hand of the Central One". Of 
the modern star names derived from Arabic, most are simply descriptive 
phrases of the star's location within the constellation more or less directly 
translated from Ptolemy's catalogue, where the descriptive locations were 
given in Greek. For example, the delightful star name Zubenelgenubi for alpha 
Librae means nothing more than the "the Southern Claw" (the stars of Libra 
were previously seen as the claws of the scorpion). Because of this most 
Arabic star names are easy to "reverse engineer" and understand. Some Arabic 
star names, however, are derived from indigenous bedouin traditions and these 
are much harder to work out. That group includes Betelgeuse and Aldebaran and 
others.

-FER




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