[Albion Wilde]

I wish I had a chance to tell Pat there really is at least one advantage to having an unpronounceable Polish name with a bunch of silent letters: you always know when it’s a telemarketer on the phone.

I hear you! I have been trying to find the name of an oil painter artist who, in the 50s and early 60s, lived in Beltsville, Marlyand and whose name was badly mangled in Tidewater English as "SOCK-se-vik."

Here are some of the online searches I have done of Polish last names to try to find a match or a phonetic root:

Satkowski
Sawicki
Sienkiewicz
Siok
Skoczylas
Skonieczny
Skowronek
Skrzypczak
Skrzypek
Slusarczyk
Sobczyk
Sobkowiak
Sokalski
Sokolik
Staszewski
Stocki
Stolarczyk
Stopka
Swierczek
Szczepanek
Szewczyk
Szymkowiak
Zajkowski

[dfwgator]

Once you learn the pronunciation of the letters, it’s actually easy to pronounce Polish names, because they don’t change.

[Stosh]

Hey, I grew up with several of those people!

But going back to your artist, did you try Szostkiewicz? Lots of other options if one is working off only a phonetic pronunciation, but you might try some other combinations of the pieces of that name above.