toYOta
toy-O-ta
The one I’ve always heard (including in an Top Gear [magazine] interview with Shoichiro Toyoda) is that the number of brush strokes used to write Toyota in Japanese calligraphy is luckier than the number used to write Toyoda.
Wikipedia agrees, too.
Toy-ohta with no real stress anywhere.
Me too.
Bingo. the syllables used to construct the word in the Japanese language are to, yo, and ta (or da, if the story about changing the name is correct). So if a Japanese person is telling another Japanese speaker how to spell Toyota, he’ll say it exactly as you’ve described.
Interesting to note that Mazda deliberately anglicized their name before they even began selling their cars here in America. The Japanese name is Matsuda, although the pronunciation is very similar to Mazda, since the ‘tsu’ is a very unstressed syllable.
I grew up in the 80s, and I learned to pronounce it from the ads. Here’s a trip back in time:
In my head, I always hear it as one of the old ads jingles, which went something like, “I love what you do for me / TOY-o(t/d)a,” where the (t/d) is either a soft, d-ish t or a hard, t-ish d.
**I **say toy-oda and a lot of other people say that or toy-ota (we’re a little loose with our d and t sounds up here), but some of the people in local car commericals say tie-oh-da. Just them, though. It’s weird.
Toy Oh Ta
I say the “t” in “ta” at the end.
I want to clarify. I figured out why I elide the y into both syllables. It’s just part of the accent. For example, around here, we say “I yam” instead of “I am.”
Still, I’m pretty sure the guy in the official American commercials pronounces it my way. And I assume that person would get in trouble if he didn’t pronounce it the right way.
I can only say Toe YO tah if I switch to a Japanese accent. And I generally find people who change accents in the middle of sentences quite annoying.