~It's pronounced MER-cuh-tor, with the primary stress on the first syllable.~
~Edit: So she's pronouncing it correctly, while you aren't :S~
Edit 2: In English it seems to be "mer-KAY-tor". I was confidently wrong. Read my follow-up comment further down on the thread for other pronounciations and where they come from.
Fair question. According to nobody authoritative, as it turns out. I looked into it properly and I was wrong.
Mercator wasn't actually his original surname. He was born Gerhard Kremer/Cremer and Latinized his name to Gerardus Mercator. "Kremer" means merchant/tradesman, and Latin mercator means essentially the same thing.
Standard English dictionaries pronounce it mer-KAY-tor, with the stress on the second syllable.
I wrote MER-cuh-tor, with the stress on the first syllable. There is a historically relevant local Neo-Latin pronunciation of his name with first-syllable stress, roughly MER-ka-tor, which may be where I got confused - but that's still not what I wrote.
And Classical Latin doesn't save me either. Since his name is literally the Latin word mercātor, that would be roughly mer-KAH-tor, with the stress on the second syllable (which is how we pronounce it in Swedish). You could reasonably argue that's the most "literal Latin" pronunciation of the name, although Mercator himself lived in the 16th century, when regional Neo-Latin pronunciation differed from reconstructed Classical Latin.
So yeah: my specific claim that it's pronounced MER-cuh-tor was wrong. I confidently corrected someone while being wrong myself. My bad.
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u/mekwall 19h ago
How do you pronounce it?