I see from EurActiv that the Bulgarians are runing into some linguistic trouble over the single currency:
The country has expressed concern over the differences between Bulgaria’s Cyrillic and the EU’s Latin alphabets, in response to renewed European Central Bank (ECB) demands that ‘euro’ be spelled and pronounced with a ‘u’ and not a ‘v’ as Bulgarians wish (‘evro’).
(Strictly speaking of course the argument is whether or not the Bulgarians should be allowed to continue calling it the “евро”, not the “evro”, as nobody plans to use the Latin alphabet for the word.)
Nobody seems to have noticed that in Greek the word ευρώ is also pronounced “evro”. Those who are more familiar with ancient rather than modern Greek (which is probably the majority of those outside Greece who have bothered to think about this issue) will have assumed that the word is pronounced with only one consonant rather than two.
Anyway, it’s not as if other languages are uniform. If that Latvians can say “eiro” and the Maltese “ewro”, the Bulgarians should be allowed their spelling, and not be made to go down the road of the Slovenes, who are forced to use “euro” officially but continue to use “evro” unofficially.
Wikipedia has a page about this. (Of course.)
I wrote an article on this subject recently.
Here it is:
http://www.eunews.bg/index.en.php?cmd=singlenews&id=273
I call it “Evro” in Swedish. I think the pronouncian youu-ro, which is more similar to English, is more wide-spread though. But it sounds silly!
The Greeks do indeed call it the “evro”, because the word for Europe (which is itself of course a Greek word) is pronounced “evropi”.
Say “euro” to a Greek, on the other hand, and he may look at you a little oddly, because it is almost exactly the same as the word for urine – perhaps appropriately enough.
Pretty much every country has its own peculiar pronunciation: the French say ‘euh-ro’ and the Germans ‘oi-ro’ for example. Perhaps instead we could settle on the following rule, which I think is largely adhered to anyway: spell and pronounce ‘euro’ the same as you pronounce ‘Europe’ in your language, truncating just before the ‘p’, ‘pi’ or whatever. I don’t know if that works in all European languages, but it ought to work in most of them.
In Serbia both Evro and Euro is acceptible.
However, the bulgarians wont be the only ones who will be demanding more usage of the cyrilic script..