So in Korea it's pronounced hyun-dae. But they spelt it 'hyundai' (said hy-un-dai) for western markets to sound more Japanese so their brand was associated with the quality of Toyota and Honda.

Hmm, I don't think anyone with a passing knowledge of Japanese would look at that "hyun" and think it sounds Japanese ...

It's spelled that way because it was born before Korea's industrialization, when regular transliteration of Korean was pretty far down the list of concerns. Everybody just grabbed whatever sequence of alphabets that vaguely resembled the original sound, a tradition still continuing with names of people and companies.

I wonder if that's how we got the pronunciation for Chevrolet as well (: . In Korean it's 현대. Theㅕmakes a yuh sound with a short y, and projecting one writing system onto another can get tricky.

The radio ads here in the UK say “hy-un-dai” too so that proves that that’s the pronunciation Hyundai want perpetuates

Didn’t they have an ad some time ago where they say “Hyundai like Sunday”?

It isn't just "dumb American's" fault. They promote different pronunciations by region. Compare Australian commercials to Usonian. Westerners don't pronounce Honda, Toyota, Mitsubishi, or Nissan correctly either and nobody bats an eye.

A regional pronunciation that's ingrained in the culture is no more or less correct, particularly for a foreign word. And the Japanese pronunciation of western brand names is similarly incorrect (mostly due to the limitations of their language but the point stands).

The Western world encompasses many more languages than English. My mother language is Spanish and we pronounce most Japanese names correctly. It helps that both languages have the same 5 vowels and a similar set of consonants.

Japanese is not hard for English speakers. I bought two lots of minidiscs from Japan and was listening to them before recording over them and my wife was somewhat surprised at how singing Japanese does not sound all that foreign to her. Chinese, in the other hand, really does sound different, and personally I find the sounds of French much more difficult.

The problem are the vowels. Germanic languages are notorious for having a large number of vowels that may not even be consistent across dialects. Add the funky English spelling, and it is no wonder that English speakers will mangle Japanese names beyond recognition.

But yes, Japanese has pretty simple sounds and prosody and it is easy to pick up. I studied French for 5 years, and I could never get the pronunciation right. I know how words should sound, but my mouth just refuses to do it. I also studied one year of Chinese, and while I enjoyed it a lot, good god is the phonology difficult with all the weird consonant and the tones.

Going in the other direction, the official spelling of Pfizer in Korea is 화이자, which sounds a bit like why-jah. A game of telephone going through Japanese, which somehow stuck.

At least they pronounce Kia correctly, although I wouldn't have named my car brand with the same letters as the abbreviation to "killed in action". Btw, their Kia brand means "rising from (ki) Asia (a)".

This is a lost cause. Similar to Seoul (it blew my mind when I heard it pronounced by locals: soh-wool, because the letters are s-eo-ou-l).

For decades in the UK they've marketed themselves as "high-un-die". Now for some reason they want us to pronounce it slightly differently. I can't help but feel this is merely a cost saving measure so they can use the same ads here as they do elsewhere. Why does it matter how a different country pronounces a foreign word?

I doubted you, for that I offer my apologies.

https://youtu.be/n5j1UdLM2Pg

I live in Korea and hear it pronounce the Korea way all the time. Frankly, had I known this was their marketing abroad, I'd never have complained. Thanks for sharing! :)

I can only assume that originally they didn't think we could pronounce it the Korean way. Similar to how Nestlé was originally pronounced nestle (neh-sel) in the UK.

> I really wanna make a youtube video on how to pronounce Hyundai, drives me nuts

Why? Once enough people pronounce a word in some unique that becomes the new pronunciation.

It doesn't matter how one pronounces. Thanks to the great vowel shift, even English words are pronounced differently than they were in 14th century.

A recent Party Down episode made reference to the pronunciation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr-nZJNg0-A :)