+1 I'm used to getting looked at funny anyway. Then there's "Porsche" and my favorite....guacamole.
The correct pronunciation is 'wok ammolay' but the hispanics here say 'Gwok ammolay', cracks me up.
^ If you mean the French made vehicle, that would be Peugeot, not Puegot, and there's no "r" in it...
When I lived in Holland, it was pronounced as per the link; in Canada I've learned to say N-ee-kon, but only with great difficulty and holding back supper KIDDING!
who me wrote:
Yea, we westerners do butcher the word a little. I wonder at what point did the pronounciation change?
When Americans got a hold of the word
Was option 1 for a bit, then I learned to say it properly since kind of surrounded by the langauge. Sometimes slip and do American pronunciation, Funny thing is now I have a tendency to say some English words like a Japanese person would sometimes.
DaveEP wrote:
Since it's a Japanese company, theirs is the correct pronunciation.
I dunno Dave,
Not knowing how the Japanese pronounce it I went to the ultimate authority on the English language, The OED. ( For those who speak only in "Microsoft English" OED is short for Oxford English Dictionary. 13 volumes)
They say Nik on. = emphasis on each syllable
In Aussie english, which is correctly known as "strine", we speak without the use of the tongue or lips, so it is nik n and Canon is can n.
While we refer to the language we speak as English I guess we have to defer to the OED
Names often are pronounced and even spelled differently in different languages. A couple of examples:
John (English)
Jean (French)
Ivan (Russian)
Andre (French & Russion)
Andrew (English)
Andres (Spanish)
The interesting thing is, when English people say Andre, they say it ON-dray, which is how I say it as well when speaking English. In French, it is sain en-DREH where the first e is a cross between a short-e and a short-a (no real English equivalent) and the DREH has a hard rolling R and the final e last longer than a short-e in English.
So, in Japanees they say NEE-kon, in English, we say NEYE-kon. unless you are Down-Under, where they say nik-on.
I always said Neyekon (long i) until a few years ago when someone (on here, I think) said it was supposed to be Neekon, which I first thought was absurd until I heard Nikon execs pronouncing it that way. So now I say Neekon and now other people here (in the U.S., not this Board) think I'm nuts.
Aaah... what's in a name... never mind pronunciation... A petpeeve of mine is the wrong spelling of that most noble of dog breeds - the Dobermann, which for some unexplicable reason becomes a Doberman (less one "n") in North America.
