BYD — the look and the sound
Yesterday, Charlie Munger, the 99-year-old billionaire Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, declared that the Chinese company, BYD, was beating Tesla in the electric vehicle (EV) market. I had never heard of BYD, so I asked my students from mainland China what "BYD" meant.
They all seemed to consider the apparent initialism as though it were an English word, pronouncing it Beeyah'di, making the second syllable long and stressed. I pursued by asking, "But what does it mean? What does it stand for?"
They said, "It doesn't mean anything and it doesn't stand for anything. It's just the name of a car company: Beeyah'di."
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