First I’ve ever heard of this. Did Flanders and Swann do a song about the Zebra, so we can check?
Later: yes, they did! It’s in “The Warthog,” and refers to “Gorillas, and zebras, and all.”
Long e! “Zeebras”, not “zeh-bras.” I challenge the veracity of your claim!
Yeah, the first one. I don’t really recall it ever coming up, and I didn’t have a television when I lived in the UK. Sorry if I was unclear.
The English pronunciation of zebra can be heard in the first 15 seconds of the clip below.
[quote=“Baron_Skinley_Von_Clipper, post:243, topic:657399”]
The English pronunciation of zebra can be heard in the first 15 seconds of the clip below.
[/QUOTE]Blimey, Lud, and Lum! You can’t argue with the BBC! But this is the first time I’ve ever heard this (and the post, just above, was the first I’d ever heard of this!)
Say… How do you pronounce “Recce” as in “Reconnaissance.”) “Ree-See” or “Recky?”
Recky.
How would you pronounce ‘Debra’?
Shufti. … What? 
From his grammar it appears that sweat209’s first language is not English, which may be contributing to all the confusion.
It can be shown with many other examples that how you pronounce a letter may have little or nothing to do with how you pronounce a word containing that letter. I am pretty sure “G” is pronounced in all English accents as “Gee” with a soft G. “Goat” is pronounced with a hard G and a long O following it. “Gem” has a soft G, “Gear” has a hard G. And so on for many other letters.
For a really extreme example of the difference between pronouncing a letter and pronouncing words containing that letter, consider W.
So the fact that I say Zed and the folks south of the border say Zee has no relevance to the fact that we both (I think) say Zero with a long e. I had an east indian TA once that pronounced Zero as Gero with a soft g, which was damn confusing until I realized what he was trying to say!
So, you can discuss who in the world says Zed for the last letter of the alphabet and who says Zee, but words have nothing to do with it.
Heh. I remember Isaac Asimov jumping up and down in outrage at someone (British or Canadian) pronouncing “School Schedule” as “Skool Shed-yule.” Asimov insisted it should be one or the other, but not both!
Besides, Flanders and Swann easily trump some random Beeb boob!
ETA: But thank you for Recky!
Only after the U.S. short-e “lever” vs. everyone else’s long-e “leever” is ground into the dust.
By the by, I recorded a Canadian TV Murdoch Mysteries episode the other day. It’s a turn-of-the 19th-20th centuries Toronto cop show. It happened to be on the Accessible Channel, where a narrator describes the action for the sight impaired/blind.
The described-video narrator kept calling a Toronto character, referred to as “negro” in the period show, as “African-American.”
But that wasn’t enough. Another character, who for purposes of the plot had travelled from Sudan to Toronto, was also an African-American.
A U.S. company must do the described video.
I’d write the CBC and bitch, but each week the show’s own dialogue is replete with anachronistic clangors that are just as stupid as a Canadian and Sudanese African-Americans — “ongoing” is their favourite — so perhaps the described video is out of Toronto, after all.
Anyway, it’s zed.
So there.
It’s not, you know. It really is one of the pronunciations of that animal’s name (also the one I use, FWIW).
I take it you haven’t been to London, Manchester or Birmingham (the one in England) recently. Really, your argument reveals considerable ignorance not just of the diversity of accents but of the international peoples in the UK.
If I remember correctly, sweat209 mostly learned English through watching American television combined with self-help. And, on American TV, the UK really isn’t that diverse.
Personally, I don’t see any inherent value in diversity itself. Diverse ideas? Sure. But just diversity? Nah.
Z = “zed”…
Zebra rhymes with Debra…
What next!? Soon you’ll be trying to convince me that you measure your currency in pounds or some other such nonsense. 
No, no, they weigh it in piles. That’s why it’s called “pounds.” It’s only not called “kilos” because they’ve not gone metric yet.
Haven’t read the posts so I may be duplicating one or more-
It’s also “zed” in French (eeks, ygrek, zed (x,y,z))
Sort of in German too, where Z is pronounced “tset.”
[quote=“Martini_Enfield, post:1, topic:657399”]
Something which came up in this threadhere - apparently significant numbers of Americans are unaware the letter “Z” is pronounced “Zed” in the UK (and Australia, and New Zealand).
You’re vastly underrating the innate ability of many Americans. Quite a few would not be able to locate said countries on a globe and several would say "ain’t never heard 'a no place called ‘New-Whatland’ ? They can find the local Piggly-Wiggly and their customary bar stool at the Idle Hour, so they’re good to go.
The above, of course, does not apply to any of ‘us’.
We’re actually pretty inconsistent with zebra pronunciation, even Sir David Attenborough himself pronouces it in two different ways:
Short ‘e’
Long ‘ee’.
[quote=“Philliam, post:257, topic:657399”]
And of course, people in NZ would be able to point to Montana?
Look, there’s nothing special at all about American ignorance. Folks is dumb everywhere.
The above was meant for a jocular comment on the tendency for Americans to have a lower level of curiosity about ‘non-American’ culture, not about their overall intelligence. Compared to ‘working class’ folks I have met while working abroad in SE Asia, S America and India, we’re pretty self-satisfied here in the U.S.
Hey, we’re all ignorant - just on different subjects.