Oxon Flyer

Did BA specify the correct, 'official' pronunciation too ?

SteveF

Half of the English speaking world can't agree on the correct pronunciation of potato and tomato, so good luck getting a consensus on Avios.

corporate-wage-slave

This has overtones of when London Zoo wanted to start a development programme for a member of the mongoose species. They asked their supplier "please send a mongoose. And please send another mongoose". There are a lot of words that stay the same in both forms, for example crossroads and headquarters. However it is actually mongooses.

So Avios is to my mind (as a cunning linguist) what is known as an "unmarked plural", or sometimes a "zero plural". Strictly speaking it looks to me to be a "Pluralia Tantum", so the singular form is deemed not to exist. This is common with some units of measure so entirely consistent with the English language (so we have a gross of paper, and two gross of paper).

Another way to look at is is using the word "corps", a word that always ends with S even when singular. And corps gives us a clever way to distinguish singular and plural, since they are suppose to be pronounced differently. In "a corps of officers" the "ps" is not pronounced, "many corps of officers" the s is rendered with both a "pz" sound at the end.

ThatT1Feeling

I think Avios is already plural. So my question would be, what's the singular form??

corporate-wage-slave

It is in staff training videos, is that good enough for you?

adrianlondon

Really? You know people, apart from karaoke singers, who actually say "poh-tar-toh"?

eugegall

I seem to say it differently every single time so literally all of them work for me.

Oxon Flyer

Not going there. As it is I'm already having more than enough trouble with Merry Ott "because that's how Arne pronounces it".

BTW, isn't it delightfully ironic that the OP is spelled "Pronunciaton" ?

fripperies

A linguistic side-effect of globalisation is that corporations need to concoct product names that are useable - or at least not offensive - in a global marketplace Hits are rare, and misses such as the immortal fizzy drink Pschitt are memorable for the wrong reason. Avios falls somewhere in between. You can kind-of see why it looked like genius at the brain storming session but it hasn't taken. It feels too synthetic and the allusion to aviation is too crashingly obvious. The fact that people don't instinctively know how to pronounce it is a bad sign. The fact that a significant proportion of users on this forum still prefer alternatives proves it will never fly (ha ha).

Knodde

This, tried with an English A, fail there...at least in London.

highpeaklad

Globaliser

I'm not 100% sure how long you now have to listen to the announcements, but I suspect that this method still works.

snaxmuppet

Is that Scone as in SCONE - rhymes with phone

or scone as is SCONN - rhymes with on

armouredant

See, I figured we already knew the plural, and that the singular was a mystery. If I want to keep my points from expiring, so I just have to earn a single... Avio?

missdimeaner