In the U.K. a Swiss company sold and sells, a lot of chocolate products.
The company is called Nestles.
For decades Brits pronounced it Ness ulls.
But a little while back the company had a big advertising campaign to get people to pronounce it the Swiss French way, as in Nez Lay.
It was successful though I wondered why they bothered.
There has been a recent campaign by a company that makes cleaning products that they sell in many countries named as I recall Jif., they want us to say Zif, as thats how apparently it sounds everywhere else.
Unfortunately the correct pronunciation has connotations of S.T.D.s.
And lastly NAAFIs (British version of P.Xs) in Europe used to have a bread brand named Bums, which was just as good as other brands and actually a little cheaper.
But squaddies wives were too embarassed to say the name so sales were poor.
Until they were told that the correct way to say it was Boooms, and then sales took off.
I agree. In a rational world we’d pronounce it the German way.
I was just pointing it out as an example to the OP of a company so not being bothered by differences in pronunciation that they didn’t even worry about it in internal conversations (let alone trying to change customer behavior).
That’s the way we say it in the UK as well. The possibility of there being another pronunciation was only introduced to me once I started seeing someone that spent a good few years of her teens in France. We had really exciting conversations.
That’s the way I remember it pronounced. Hearing that this is not correct surprises me, since I always thought the point of transliteration is to render the word such that speakers of the second language will at least attempt to pronounce it the way it is spoken in the original language.
It’s much the same in the UK. I watched some early series Top Gear episodes recently and Richard Hammond was saying “porsh” then. At some point he converts to “porsh-uh”.
Every British person I’ve heard saying the word (me included) says “SIT-ruhn”. I know how it’s meant to be pronounced, but that seems a bit affected in English. (Of course, if you ignore the diaeresis in French, the pronunciation comes rather close to “citron”, meaning lemon…) I’ve never heard it pronounced to rhyme with bone, though.
Likewise with Peugeot, I’ve always heard “PER-zho” in British English, and Wikipedia agrees with that, more or less:
[nitpick]Actually it’s Wanda (the woman not the fish) who says this to Archibald as an example of how stupid Otto is. As she at the time desperately needs to make Otto seem a fool I don’t think she is a reliable reporter.
The goal of transliteration really depends on who is doing the transliterating. Most transliteration systems actually created by non-Europeans tend to be challenging for Europeans to pronounce correctly. As an example the Japanese mountain that is written “Fuji” in the romanization system developed by an American missionary is written “Huzi” in the romanization system developed and officially adopted by the Japanese government. And most non-native Chinese learners find Pinyin challenging.
Of course, even transliterations created by non-natives can be difficult if the pronunciations used by the creator’s language differ from that of the reader.
As reflected by their original spelling, Datson. I’m not sure why they changed the spelling later… seems to just invite some confusion.
Which is why on my recent trip to France whenever my wife asked me what kind of car we were in (taxi) I always said “Renault”. I got some looks from drivers (mostly Citroen guys) but then distracted her by pointing out the numerous Audi and Mercedes taxis that we could be in.
Of the Renaults, Peugeots, and Citroëns, the only ones any Americans I knew were driving in my lifetime were Renaults. And for what it’s worth, everyone pronounced it “reh-NO”
I love Top Gear, and have for years. But I still find the way those guys pronounce a lot of brand names very jarring. No matter how many times I hear it, “NISS-n” will never sound right.
The only French cars I’ve every seen in the US are Peugeots. I can’t recall seeing the other two. That’s not counting fancy-pants cars like Bugattis, which I might’ve seen as a display.