View Message

Maila Nurmi was Finnish, so she pronounced her name MY-lah. You can listen to it here: http://forvo.com/word/maila/

English representation of dipthongs is irregular, in that the vowels in the dipthong often don't match the sound they make alone. Sometimes they are even written with a single letter, the sound of which may not match either element of the dipthong. In normal representations you expect to see in other languages however they do match, so the |ei| of May is actually written ei (as in neighbor or weigh) or sometimes ey (this is also true of English transcriptions of words not written with the roman alphabet as transcription rules are simpler when a vowel always has the same sound). Thus Mai- rhymes with sky, not May.