Why is 'Nike' pronounced as 'naiki', instead of 'naik'?

Looking at the spelling, one might guess that Nike rhymes with words like "bike", "like", or "mike", but this is not the case. It is pronounced in two syllables, rhyming instead with words like "crikey" or with a bit more full second vowel, almost like "my key". read more

The work nike has greek origin, and english only has 26 alphabets, which makes it very difficult to capture the nuances of pronunciation, for example, "to and go" look similar, but are pronounced differently. So, to capture the greek word corresponding to the sound "naiki", Nike was chosen. read more

Alternative pronunciations exist for some words from Latin and Greek, but not for Nike as far as I know. The "traditional English pronunciation of Latin" (and Greek) is also why the i in "Nike" is pronounced as an English "long i" (IPA /aɪ/). The i's in via and viva are sometimes pronounced the same way. read more

Yes exactly. Even though they say Finnish is hard language (it might be) but atleast the pronunciation is very simple. That is the main reason for so called "rally-English" because Finns pronounce the words as it is written. read more