Pronunciation of manufacturers' names

[rigger67]

Maybe he was just horny ?

[struth]

lol... he was a piece of work

[legb4rsk]

You should worry! I have a Roksan Ekserrecksess.

[Floyddroid]

Billy Joel???

Jole or Jo el?

[Marco]

It should be German, not the more mandatory French.

Yeah, I agree, but I'd have both, which would give kids an excellent grounding in foreign language speaking from an early age. Trouble is, it's hard enough trying to teach them English(!) as our society grows more and more towards communicating using 'textspeak', via mobile phones, and loses its skills in formal written communication.

Like you say, once you learn to speak one foreign language well, together with its grammatical discipline, it makes learning more much easier. Plus with some there are considerable similarities in many of the words used, especially between the likes of Spanish and Italian. I can understand much of spoken or written Spanish, simply because I'm fluent in Italian.

Languages just fascinate me, and if I'd had more time when I was younger (one absorbs these things better when younger), I'd have learned lots more. It's amazing how much friendlier and helpful people are towards you abroad when you can speak their mother tongue - even just a few words!

Marco.

[Marco]

For Glaswegian you'd need to be fluid rather than fluent, I would've thought.

Indeed; the vernacular can be somewhat 'challenging', certainly for anyone not brought up there.

Marco.

[eisenach]

As a German speaker, I always want to pronounce the swedish brand Primare as pree-mar-eh, but apparently it's pree-mair. Can't cope !

[Mike Reed]

That's weird ! 'Are' in Swedish pronounced as in English? I do find that hard to believe unless the company has deliberately anglicised the name. Not that I know a jot of Swedish, however. The nearest I've been to Sweden is my lovely girlfriend from Malmo in mid sixties' 'Appy 'Ampstead, and we didn't have an awful lot of time for languages, as I recall.

[Shovel_Knight]

I generally dislike languages where things are pronounced not as they’re written, that’s why speaking English gives me terrible headaches every day, and don’t even get me started on French

That said, I recently started taking Japanese lessons, and holy mother of God: in Japanese, kanji (Chinese glyphs) can have multiple readings: an approximation of their original Chinese reading (or several, if the character happens to have multiple readings in Chinese), several native (Japanese) readings, and also a special reading when used for names of persons or locations

[Barry]

When it comes to pronouncing hi-fi manufacturers, I always like to throw in the former Irish loudspeaker manufacturer O’hEocha.

Best of luck, everyone...

"O'Aich e oak ah"