In West London (UK), we pronounced it Chi-och. There were no Italians amongst us. I remember someone from another club had a sweet looking one, brown with yellow decals. However, this was around 1980 and foreign bikes wasn't a big thing where I was because back then there were lots of frame builders around who could make you a custom frame. I had a racing frame made for me. £140 for the 531db frame plus £40 to have the front forks gold plated. That would be about £700 in today's money. Custom frames seem to start from about £2,700 these days. I recently repainted the bike another colour myself and refurbished it. It gets lots of compliments, even from people who have no interest in bikes. The original was quite snazzy as well. It was a mixture of Super Record and any gold anodised accessory I could find. This included rims, chainrings, headset, brakes, bottle cage and toeclips. Alas, all the cheap gold bits failed over the years and had to be replaced.
The old school brands are the best !!! And I am not even talking about the most popular ones which are still in the world tour today !!! I mean look at GIOS CIOCC BASSO TOMMASSINI VITUS BATTAGLIN to name but a few
THAT's a northern (Bergamo, Brescia?) accent if I ever heard one! I was up there in the suburbs of Bergamo years ago talking to someone who claimed to have made a few bikes with that decal on them. He was making frames at the time using the brand-name GION (as in John, just like the vintage bike garage, maybe you need one of these in your collection?) and also claimed to have made more than a few with the brand-name COPPI on them. He tried to teach me to pronounce CIOCC pretty much the same way but I never could get my tongue wrapped around it so for me it's just CHOH-TCH. The Bergamo dialect owes a lot to French, another language I have a tough time wrapping my tongue around. Counting (as in one, two, three) in Bergamasco sounds more like French than italian for example! Think of someone from the deep south of the USA trying to talk to someone from the upper midwest - same language but almost two different dialects when it comes to pronunciation.
Interesting perspective. I just did the video because everyone tells me a different way of pronouncing it and they insist that they are correct. So I figured they could hear it from the horses mouth. LOL
Can we expect a video that explains how you got the clip of Mr. Pelizzoli pronouncing it?? The remainder of the video looks like a hint that a RAGBRAI video is on the way! Hope you had fun, met some cool folks, and enjoyed some pork chops and corn. 🙂
I always thought it was pronounced Ch-oh-owe-oh-ch and not See-ock. But it doesn't matter because it's like claiming you want to know how to pronounce the name of the latest pinup girl or the title of some painting. Art is just art.
