Road Bike Racing - Ivan Gotti, Ivan Basso, Iban Mayo

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Coppi51
07-30-02, 08:00 AM
remembering back to the 1995 Tour de France when Ivan Gotti (then of the Gewis/Ballan team) grabbed the yellow jersey he was always referred to by Phil and Paul as "eeeeeeevan"...with a long "E"...

now that Ivan Basso was in the young rider's jersey, he too was pronounced with a long "EEEEE", Iban Mayo of the Euskatel Euskadi team was the same way...

is this the way Italian and Spanish riders pronounce that? or is it just the british lingo by the commentators that use the long "EEEE". All guys I ever knew pronounced their name "IIIvan"...but then again the brits throw in an extra sound or two on words like "aluminum" and others :) hehe


just curious

Richard D
07-30-02, 08:12 AM
EE is the normal Spanish pronunciation for I as far as I'm aware.

Richard
velocipedio
07-30-02, 10:38 AM
In most languages other than English [French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, German... whatever], the letter "i" is pronounced as a sharp "ee." The letter "e" is invariably pronounced as "ay" or "eh" and the sound you would normally associate with "i" is produced by the dipthongs "ai" and "ae." So Rainmondas is pronounced as Rye-mondas.

Although Ukrainian and Russian use as different alphabet [the Cyrillic] this hold true for words and names transliterated into the Latin alphabet.

Coppi51
07-30-02, 04:08 PM
cool...thanks for the clarification :)