Helen, his name - Isaac, we pronounce it [Ee-sah-ah-k]is obviously jewish, but his familia looks russian, with typical -ov ending, which is pronounced as -of by the virtue of consonantalization schemes of russian speech. It just seems easier and more natural for us. Such family names were spelled -off in the past to reflect it. E.g. Romanoff (tsar Romanov). However the letter 'z' ('s' was incorrectly spelled) in his family name is pronounced [z],as in Zoo! To verify it, you can look at his homepage, and reed his own opinion on sounding of his family name: http://www.asimovonline.com/asimov_FAQ.html#starters
And yes, it's in English!
Little excerpt from there:
How do you pronounce "Isaac Asimov"?
"EYE'zik AA'zi-mov". "AA'zi-mof" is also OK. The name is spelled with an "s" and not a "z" because Asimov's father didn't understand the English alphabet clearly when the family moved to the U.S. in 1923. (In Russian, the spelling was the Cyrillic equivalent of Azimov, and in Yiddish, the Hebrew letters were aleph-zayin-yod-mem-aleph-vav-vav.) One way to remember this pronunciation is the pun from The Flying Sorcerers by Larry Niven and David Gerrold: "As a color, shade of purple-grey", or "As a mauve". Asimov wrote a poem ("The Prime of Life") in which he rhymes his surname with "stars above"; someone else suggested amending the poem to rhyme it with "mazel tov", which he thought an improvement.
Asimov's own suggestion, however, as to how to remember his name was to say "Has Him Off" and leave out the H's.
P.s. I still think that [z] in Zinger sounds as in Zoo zone! But only Germans among us can clarify... Please!
Viktor V. Trukov
