Really? I just watched that video again and the very first two kids say, clearly to my ear, “LAY-go my AY-go.” It’s not even close.
Later in the same commercial, yes, the voiceover says it as “EGG-go” (“Light, golden Eggo waffles…”). But then the little girl says at the end, just like her siblings did, “Lay-go MY ay-go, please.”
It stands out to me because I would NEVER say “LAY-go” for “leggo” as “let go”. It sounded weirdly forced to me even as a kid, and the only reason to do it would be to rhyme it with “AY-go”, which also stood out to me (and which is why I mentally associated the product as a homonym for “Lego”, which I thought of as the normal way to say that).
You must be correcting it to “egg-go” as you hear it because it’s definitely not what they’re saying phonetically.
I am going to do a blind test of various friends and relatives now later today to see how they pronounce “Lego”. I am going to guess most of them, if not all of them, will say “LAY-go”. (It’s almost certainly how any Spanish or Italian speaker would read the word LEGO, not knowing it was a concatenation of a Danish motto legt godt, and there are just so, so many Hispanics and Italians where I grew up.)
“Lego blocks”?
I am not being paid by that company to represent and/or advertise their toys, so if I ask someone how many Legos it took to build their their life-sized replica of Galactus and the first response is, “Don’t you mean ‘Lego Brand Building blocks’?”, my first response will be, “I’m sorry. I meant to say ‘If someone pushed this thing over, how long would it take you to pick up that crapload of Lego Brand Building Blocks?’”
I could see the necessity of calling them “Lego Blocks” if there was a need to differentiate them from “Lego Tampons”, “Lego Motor Oil” or “President Lego”, but there isn’t so I don’t.
Well now I’d like to have a poll of responses from other Dopers upon viewing that video, because the clip is exactly as I remembered it from my childhood and it has always stuck in my mind as an unnatural pronunciation. Why would I imagine it? I must be hearing it. I just don’t see how you don’t hear it.
OK, now I’ve actually watched that YouTube clip, I do see what you’re getting at. There are some weird vowel sounds going on at the beginning. And I agree with you that a Spanish/Italian speaker would naturally pronounce “Lego” differently from what I’m used to. But, I’m not convinced that a) the pronunciation of “leggo” in that ad and how a Spanish speaker would pronounce “Lego” is the same, or b) that either one of those is best represented by “ay” (as usual, we should really use the IPA, but I don’t know it well enough). In other words, I don’t think the first syllable exactly rhymes with the English word “hey” (or “hay”, equivalently - to me), though it is kind of similar. I think my original objection was that “Hay goes in a horse” doesn’t really rhyme with “Legos in a horse” or “Eggos in a horse”.
OK, watching it again, and at the beginning it sounds like they are putting an extra emphasis on the word “Eggo.” I wouldn’t describe it anywhere close to “AY-go” though. The narration straight up says “Egg-oh” and when the girl speaks again at 00:26 she no longer has the same inflection from the beginning, and says “Legg-o my egg-o.”
I mean the slogan only works because it’s supposed to be “Let go [of] my Eggo.” No one would say that as “Late go.” (Well OK perhaps not no one, but it brings to mind Cletus from The Simpsons."
The LEGO corporation wants you to call them LEGO bricks because they’re worried about them losing their trademarkable brand identity they way Kleenex and Xerox did. After all they did lose their patent on the lego connection system a while ago, which is why I have a Mega Construx Castle Grayskull half-built on my table right now - made of bricks resembling and compatible with LEGO bricks.
So that’s what they want. I, on the other hand, am not concerned with protecting their trademark, so legos it is.
I do hear something approaching “AY-go” but not quite. It’s the French é or the Spanish e (which is NOT an “ay” sound. An “ay” is a diphthong. A Spanish “e” is not). So, here we go with the IPA:
“eh” as in “let” is /ɛ/
“ay” as in “lay” is /eɪ/
“e” as in Jose is /e/
What I hear in “Eggo” in the commercial is mostly the last one, and I think the second one at the end. For most English speakers/listeners, all those probably most closely approximate “ay” but it’s not quite “eh” nor “ay.” If you just pronounce the first half of “ay” then you got it.
What’s going on is something called prevelar raising, and occurs in some English dialects where an /ɛ/ before a voiced velar (fancy name for a “g”) moves up in the mouth towards an /e/. It can also happen with “a” sounds, where “bag” moves up to an /ɛ/ sound or even as far an /e/ sound. If you Google “bag-raising.”
At any rate, growing up here in Chicago, where we have our own set of vowel raising, I do raise the “e” in both “eg” and “leg” most of the time. I can’t seem to find any literature documenting this type of raising in the local accent, but I’m fairly sure it wasn’t an idiosyncratic pronunciation I had.
One possible reason is given above dealing with accents and how some English speaker “raise” the vowel before the “g.” It has nothing to do with pronouncing “Lego” as in Spanish or any other languages.
And, in Danish, Lego is pronounced what sounds something like “LAY-go” to an English speaker. (Sound sample in first few seconds:)
Because how would one know it was Danish if you see the boxes on the toy store shelf since childhood?
Besides, how do Americans (I can’t say for Brits) pronounce German product names like “Birkenstock” or “Adidas”? Hint, it’s not how they’re pronounced in German at all.
Consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel words ending in -o or -a “look” Spanish/Italian, especially if that is a fairly dominant second language, so it seems natural to me to rhyme “Lego” with, say, “Prego” (a brand of pasta sauce), especially if you’re mainly familiar with it as a product name on a shelf and have never really considered where it comes from (I was at least 12 years old before I found out Lego was from Denmark specifically, versus “Europe”).
Nobody says “preggo” for Prego, I trust? Well I do hear people say “pee-za” instead of “peet-tsa” on the TV or radio from time to time, so I’m guessing probably some people do.
Anyway, it’s not like I’d have thought “Leg-go” was a jarringly wrong pronunciation; I actually never noticed people pronounced it two ways until this thread made me realize it. But the commercial for Eggo waffles did jar me into noticing it (and mocking it) even as a child, specifically to refer to Legos (ha ha, they rhymed “eggo” with “lego”, what the heck?), which is what made me think of it!
And as for the IPA angle, those last two are fairly subtle distinctions I can hear if I listen closely (“lay” versus “Jose”), but do not make such a distinction when speaking. I wouldn’t be surprised if either vowel sound can come out of my mouth for those words, but mentally I map them to the “ay” sound - to me an E is either “eh” or “ay”, anything in between is some kind of unconscious slurring.
Haha, thanks for that. Because in my life, I have actually been to Denmark and visited the original Legoland in Billund, by train, and I’m sure I’d heard “LEGO” a gazillion times in Danish or said by Danish people (in English), and never, ever noticed they said it any differently than I did! (And it’s the sort of thing I usually do notice!)
Good explanation. It’s true a lot of products aren’t pronounced as in their original language. If there are TV or radio ads people probably copy that pronunciation, otherwise they take their best guess. And since English has so many borrowed words we do treat words differently depending what language we think they come from.
She says Egg-oh. I feel like you’re somehow conflating this with the brand Faygo.
