Or the final y may not be pronounced at all; for example, "Malagasy" is pronounced the same as "malgache".

Thanks, I hadn't realized how much elision of vowels there was -- this page says "Unstressed vowels are often elided, e.g., word Malagasy with accent on the syllable -ga- is pronounced as [malgas]." You learn something every day.

At first I thought this was some sort of silly spelling of Ogygia ;)

Another is a type of lemur, the sifaka, which can be pronounced shifakh, or the fossa, a predator, sometimes pronounced foosh. This was a major pain for me when writing a story that took place in Madagascar.

D

As I recall, Douglas Adams made a lovely little observation (which I have always wondered about) on that very subject, in Last Chance to See, which, sadly, I just loaned out to someone the other day. His basic point was that "Antananarivo" (the capital) is pronounced more like "Tananarive", which so upset the French that they forced the Malagasy to spell it "Tananarive". Adams said this would be like the French invading Britain, and forcing the natives to spell "Leicester" as "Lester" - as he said, "we'd do it, but we wouldn't have to like it." (All my quotes are approximate; if someone has the book, they can feel free correct me.)

Anyway, that's how I learned to pronounce "Leicester" as an eight-year-old Adams junkie.