Is this pronounced dough-veh<BR>or<BR>dough-vay?

in what language? In English it's pronounced Duhv.

Are you talking about a &quot;duvet&quot;, a sort of bed covering, like a comforter?<BR>If so it is pronounced &quot;doo-vay&quot; with accent on the second syllable.

Simple question with a slightly complicated answer.<BR><BR>First, dough is a good equivalent to the first syllable. The pronounciation of the &quot;veh&quot; part is about halfway between veh and vay, if that makes sense. It's an abbreviated vay without actually using the y sound.<BR><BR>If you are simply asking &quot;where is he/she/it?&quot; the accent is on the second syllable, and it is actually a contraction (of dove &egrave; or dov'&egrave.<BR><BR>Otherwise, the accent is on the first syllable. In neither case is the accented syllable stressed as much as we tend to stress syllables in English.

If you're speaking English it sounds like &quot;DUV&quot; as in the soap or the bird.

A website I found spells it phonetically as doav-ay.<BR><BR>If you ask an Italian &quot;Dove bar?&quot; and pronounce it correctly, they will direct you to a place where you can have a delicious cappucino. However, if you pronounce it incorrectly, they will say &quot;No grazie, I prefer gelato.&quot;

daw-ve

And how do the Italians pronounce &quot;Dove&quot; soap? I've seen it on the store shelves there : )

they pronounce it dav (like duck or sort of, but with a v at the end)

Maybe I'm particularly stupid today, but I have just read this entire thread and have no idea what you are all talking about. What is &quot;dove&quot;?

&quot;Dove&quot; is Italian for &quot;where&quot;. So a helpful thing to be able to pronounce. The two options given by the original poster will both work, and (as StCirg points out) the real question is which syllable to stress. As one is typically using the word in a sentence, and the sentence will like use the word for &quot;is&quot; as well, one would say &quot;dough-VAY&quot; the whatever.

Soaps, etc.<BR><BR>http://www.dove.com

Thanks for your replies.<BR>My confusion lies in the second syllable of this Italian word. Do you pronounce it with a long a....like vay? or short e....like veh?

Thanks, Therese. I guess it would be a good word to know. Maybe that's why I wander around lost so often in Italy, fun as that it is. I'll have to add dove to my 15 word Italian vocabulary.

<BR>The linguistic next door neighbor of dove is, of course, the Spanish donde.

doh-veh

Or like you would pronounce daw-veh?

I know how to pronounce it, but I don´t know how to write it phonetically in English. Dough is certainly the wrong sound. Do is pronounced like daw in dawson.

Know It All: It is most definitely not pronounced like daw in dawson. Italian is a remarkably easy language as far as pronounciation goes. An &quot;o&quot; is always pronounced just like the letter &quot;o&quot; in English.<BR><BR>To repeat: dough (or doh or doe, or however you want to transliterate it)is the first syllable.<BR>something between veh and vay is the second syllable. That is, start to pronounce vay, but stop short of actually pronouncing the y.

X:<BR><BR>We Italians have a knack for mispronouncing foreign words. The soap &quot;Dove&quot; is pronounced exactly like the Italian word &quot;dove&quot; (where). The same is true for many other english-languace brands, such as &quot;Carefree&quot; and many more. One interesting thing is that English language brands are used mainly on beauty or similar products: to the Italian buyers they sound good (even if mispronounced), while food stuff may have eiher an itlaian r a french name, only cheeses can have german names, but no food with an English name will have much success. Except for junk food. We tend to think that Americans and English eat nothing but junk food, so if ever a quality food would come from the other side of the Atlantic ocean (or from the Uk) its name would be fast changed in order to make it more acceptable to the Italians.