KEEE-appa or CHEEE-appa ??

In Italian, Kee-appa. In America, whatever Bubba says on Youtube. It's just like Franchi - Fron-kee or Fran-chee ....

In the end, what difference does it really make?
 
Also Voere isn’t pronounced vore. At least not in German. There is no equivalent sound in English for the short “o” in German. With your mouth make the shape as though you were going to say “oh” but then try to make the short e sound. It’s sort of like the “eu” sound in French for any of us here that speak that language. No English equivalent. The closest I can think of would be veure, but that’s not quite right either.

So, kee-appa, fraankie, and veure.

This is a fun thread.
 
Mauser = Mowser. I wasn't aware there was any other way folks pronounced it. If they are saying it some other way, they're saying it wrong. Just like (in German), braun = brown, not brawn. But, if there's an umlaut (the 2 little dots) on the a in au, it gets said like the German "eu," which in English is the "oi" sound. This is why you'll hear people pronounce bauer as boyer, Neumann as Noyman, and so on. In North America, these surnames almost always lost the punctuation and the pronunciations got "Americanized." Many of us who are descendants of German ancestors, just gave up on correcting people, and accepted these new names.

Who knew a CGN rifle forum would turn into a lesson in European phonics?
 
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We don't pronounce most foreign words the same way that the foreigner would. So why insist on "socko" for Sako? Normally in English we would pronounce the "a" as a long a ("ay") in a word like that (with a single consonant after the a), so that anglicizing it to SAY-ko is just fine as far as I'm concerned (and it's the way I pronounce it)--just as we pronounce NATO as NAY-toh, and similarly Plato, Cato, halo, etc. Do we pronounce Paris as "pahr-EE" the way a Frenchman would? No, we anglicize it to "PAHR'-is." Do we pronounce Munich as a German would—as MOON-shen. No, we anglicize if to MUNE-ic. An English-speaking person trying to pronounce foreign words as the foreigner does often comes across as a little pretentious and risks being misunderstood by English speakers.

The German car is correctly pronounced FOLKS-vaagen in German, but an English-speaker pronouncing it that way to other English-speakers would sound a little silly. Instead, we anglicize it to VOLKS-wagon. As for Lapua, the Finnish pronunciation is something like LAHP-uwa or LAHP-wa, but when I hear La-POO-A I immediately understand and am not bothered in the least.;)
 
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