I say it ‘ra-men’. Not ‘ray’, to rhyme with ‘say’, as might be suggested by the spelling; not ‘rah’ with the same a-sound as ‘father’; but ‘ra’ with the a-sound that ‘cat’ has in my dialect, which I think is sometimes indicated as ‘æ’.
So the various pronunciations offered so far include –
['ra mɪ̈n] (rahmen)
['reɪ mɪ̈n] (raymen)
['roʊ mən] (Roman)
[roʊ 'meɪn] (romaine)
[ra 'me:]
['ræ mɪ̈n] (rammen)
Jragon, how would you transcribe the Japanese pronunciation that you use?
Lo mein.
Well, it’s different than varelse.
So-baa.
I know it’s “RAH-men,” but when I see it, my mind goes to “RAY-men” first. Just like, when I see “awry” in print, my mind initially says “AW-ree.”
About the same as the first one except with an alveolar tap/flap instead of an alveolar approximant.
Egyptian sun god+multiple male humans.
Falcon-head dudes
I don’t recall ever hearing it called RAY-men. Sounds too much like Raymond noodles.
I’m going throught that right now. I’ve eaten a whole heap of them in my lifetime, but only ever discussed or heard about them in textual media.
I picked rah-men, but normally what I say is closer to “rammin’ noodles”, which looks really wrong when I write it out like that!
I haven’t eaten that stuff since elementary school, when the fashion was to crunch up the dry noodles and sprinkle on the seasoning packet and eat it like that as a crunchy snack.
I was picturing something like “You eating those highfalutin raymon noodles, Meathead? Why can’t you eat spaghetti like a real American?”
Incidentally, I just learned that highfalutin is a real word, not just a hickism.
I had a boyfriend who grew up in Alaska and ate a LOT of it as a child (his parents were very poor hippie homesteaders)… he called it, very breathilly, “rahhhhhhhhhhhh-mens” 