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nonenglish speaking countries seem to have a preference for 'knee-con'.
The US and UK seems to prefer 'nycon'.
my Japanese bus accociates tell me it is 'nikon'
MattKing
Moderator
Colonel. As in Sanders.
They're idiots. Probably the same people who pronounce ''nuclear" nucular. Maroons. Huh, my spell check didn't pick nucular as being a misspelling. It's an idiot also. Sorry, I don't have any patience with this sort of thing.
<linguist hat>
Now, that's a topic worthy of a 20-page, double spaced paper. I checked in with Wikipedia on the matter, and realized this is the type of subject that Historical Linguists like to sink their teeth into. Historical was more or less my concentration when I was an Lx student. In my opinion, further research is needed -- based on the Wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany
It's clear that 'Germany' came from the Romans. It appears that Julius Ceasar was the first one to write about them, and used the term Germani. But he got it from somewhere, and it appears likely to be of Celtic origin. Back in JC's time the Celts were all over northern Europe, causing Rome a fair amount of grief with all their raids. So, it seems plausible that he would associate the Deutch tribes with the Celts. But he was actually referring to those people east of the Rhine. Deutchland comes from Old High German diutisc and can be traced back to Proto-Germanic *Þeudiskaz, which can eventually be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root *teuta, which means 'people'. Obviously, the PIE root is where Teutonic came from.
</linguist hat>
Thanks Michael!
Did you ever hear the dumb blonde joke about the Porsche?
This dumb blonde who was looking for some odd jobs knocked on a door of a house. A fellow answered and told her that he would pay her to paint his porch in the back of the house. An hour later the dumb blonde knocked again and told the homeowner she was finished with the job. The fellow went out back to examine her work and found his prized 911 sitting in his driveway covered with house paint.
I just asked a Photographer friend who lived in Japan for several years and she says "Nye-kon"....though with some sort of inflection on the "k" and "n" that I cannot notate.
BUT...she says there is another way...."Ni-Konn"
Apparently the former is more common.
Interesting!
BUT...she says there is another way...."Ni-Konn"
Apparently the former is more common.
Interesting!
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Unless there is a Youtube video out there of the original founders of Nippon Kōgaku Tōkyō K.K. telling us all how they intended for it to be pronounced, the bottom line is that there is no single, definitive answer - not even from today's Nikon Corporation themselves.
In the U.S., Nikon has been marketing the pronunciation as "Nye-kon" at least since the EPOI days, if not before.
In the Commonwealth countries [save Canada where the U.S. pronunciation seems to have been adopted], the official corporate pronunciation seems to be "Nick-on" whereas in Asia it seems to be "Knee-con".
It strains credulity to believe that Nikon would allow their various business units to intentionally mispronounce the name in its marketing, thus it seems clear that Nikon accepts and promotes the various regional pronunciations.
In the U.S., Nikon has been marketing the pronunciation as "Nye-kon" at least since the EPOI days, if not before.
In the Commonwealth countries [save Canada where the U.S. pronunciation seems to have been adopted], the official corporate pronunciation seems to be "Nick-on" whereas in Asia it seems to be "Knee-con".
It strains credulity to believe that Nikon would allow their various business units to intentionally mispronounce the name in its marketing, thus it seems clear that Nikon accepts and promotes the various regional pronunciations.
Andrew O'Neill
Moderator
nee-kore
My passion for languages and linguistics far exceeds that for photography - and I speak, read, and write four languages besides English (my first job was as a Russian translator - despite my degree in engineering) .
Noam Chomsky is an outstanding, brilliant linguist who would never have concocted the stupid ghoti thing. It doesn't work for the many reasons I gave in my prior posting.
Look it up in Wikipedia to see its bastard origins over 100 years ago by fools trying to be a smartass.
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That's why I bought a Contax. I knew how to pronounce it.
The coolest sounding camera name, by far. If I could have one brand back from the past, it would be Contax.
http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/22270
English spelling still has general rules even though you can find oddities. As they say, it may be spelled "Mr. Luxury Yacht", but it's pronounced 'throatwobbler mangrove'.
That's the origin of the car's name, but it doesn't explain the sound.
Here's the reason.
What they don't realize is that a final -e in German has what is called a "schwa" sound (typically represented in text with an upside-down 'e' symbol). A schwa sound is the same sound as -a in "sofa".
https://www.logicofenglish.com/blog...lping-students-read-and-spell-the-schwa-sound
The general rule about pronunciation of the schwa /ə/ is that it is the pronunciation of any unstressed syllable. And the 'e' at the end of Porsche is very much an unstressed syllable, so it follows this rule. This works in German and English and other Indo-European languages, but not all languages.
Well, I stand corrected. My recollections of where I first heard the attribution are now hazy, it having been some twenty-five years ago or so. For all I know, my instructor may have given this attribution to Chomsky in error -- since I seem to have always associated it with him for some reason.
There's no questioning Chomsky's brilliance, but I disagree absolutely with Chomskyan Syntax. If it doesn't fit, well then add another corrolary to the top heavy theory. Where's the elegance? Reminds me of Ptolemy's rings within rings within rings.
By the way, I doff my hat to you and your language expertise. I can barely get by with one -- make it three, possibly four, if I have lots of dictionaries and grammar resources handy.
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I never heard that term "schwa-sound".
Not in the UK, in four decades of photography I've never heard a British native pronounce the camera as anything other than Nick-on. Overseas businesses never used to expect UK English speakers to pronounce a foreign name authentically (one relative used to pronounce the French car manufacturer Pew-Jot), but this has changed in the last twenty years. The Swiss chocolate firm Nestle was pronounced throughout my childhood as Nessels, even in their long running Milky Bar TV advertisements. At some point it reacquired its accent and Nestlé (Nes-lay) became standard pronunciation, and the old ads were re-dubbed. WW1 in particular offered Anglicisation of French and Belgium place names into a barely recognisable English phonetic.
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Nice analogy.
As for languages, well, Hungarian and Syrian Arabic were acquired simply by being exposed to my crazy family.
The schwa sound is the same sound we make in English when we say "uh." If you listen to a word with an unstressed syllable, you'll hear it. Take the word "photography," which has the accent over the second syllable. In common speech, that is, where you're not paying attention to the sounds you make -- cuz if you do that can distort things -- the word "photography" contains two schwas. They appear in the first syllable and the third syllable. In rapid common speech, we don't say PHO-'to-GRAPH-y, we say "fə-'to-grə-fi". Take the word "the". We might say 'thee' if we're thinking too hard about it but in common rapid speech we always pronounce it "thə".
But women love cunning linguist!
Ha! If only!
Porsche . .
Porsh
or Porsha?
silly linguist nazis . .
Yeah? Would it annoy you at all if somebody repeatedly pronounced your last name as 'gailt' with the /a/ sound found in "mail" instead of the /a/ sound found in "fault" ?
Actually, linguists aren't interested in telling people how to speak, they're interested in observing how they speak. Big difference. When I comment about the mis-pronunciation of "Porsche" that's me as a regular person, not a linguist, expressing my disapproval. When I've got my linguist hat on, however, I'm more interested in observing how and if a person makes other pronunciation errors in their speech, where and how they occur, and if there are any phonotactic rules in their speech patterns that may account for these differences.
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Japanese is an open syllabic language. All syllables end in a vowel. One exception is "N".
Ni Ko N represents 3 Japanese kana characters but IDK how many Kanji characters. Japanese is filled with words that sound alike. Ni can equal 2 and Ko can equal small but without the KANJI, the actual Chinese characters we cannot say what they stand for. The Japanese would have to be the final arbiters of this one.
PE
Ni Ko N represents 3 Japanese kana characters but IDK how many Kanji characters. Japanese is filled with words that sound alike. Ni can equal 2 and Ko can equal small but without the KANJI, the actual Chinese characters we cannot say what they stand for. The Japanese would have to be the final arbiters of this one.
PE
I still don't know the accepted (Japanese) pronunciation of Hiroshima and Fukushima. I've heard that the 'u' in Japanese is often very short and almost nonexistent - which is why they tend to insert that vowel as a pronunciation aid in foreign loan-words with consonant clusters that are unfamiliar to them.
Decades ago, SNL had a great skit based on news correspondents trying to out-Neekaraawgwah each other.
Decades ago, SNL had a great skit based on news correspondents trying to out-Neekaraawgwah each other.
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Was not directed at you cooltouch but the whole thread in particular. People get all wrapped around the axle about things that don't matter.
Like when I was a player in the Giant Scale R/C Aerobatics world . . . there were two big sponsors . . JR (Japan Radio) and Futaba . . . gringos pronounce the latter as Foo-tah-ba, purists (God bless their black little hearts) made real PIAs of themselves insisting it was pronounced FUH-to-bah . . .
cry me a river :/ get a grip
etc
Take cool pictures.
That is all.
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