@3nt3@chaos.social @action_jay@thecanadian.social As a native speaker... it does not look like it has an english pronunciation. It does not look like an english word.
Words that do end in AI tend to be loan words and are typically names of a thing. "Bonsai" and "Samurai" look odd, but that's because they actually are. They come from Japanese, which is very notably not english.
An odd but relevant detail about this is loan words can adopt vocalization quirks of their origin language. Reading Croquet, Crochet, or balet also can be odd because these comes from French, where they make the "ay" sound instead of the "et" in "bet".
To bring it back to "Zuzai", this is not a loan word - at least not one that's well established, and it's not common to end a word with AI. Starting with "Zuz" is not common either.
Trying to turn the spelling into a pronunciation takes real work. Sure we have some ai terms (Bait), but being seperated from another vowel by a single letter means that the sound of both vowels gets modified. Where we do see this pattern is in foreign location names, words with the "para" prefix like "parainfluenza", or after a protetive double consanent like "Certain". Oh, and when the suffex -air is involves like in Millionairs.
The thing about all of those words is that either the pronunciation of the "ai" is protected from modification, or we are never trying to apply english pronunciation rules in the first place.
Then there is finding the sylables. The Zu * Zai? Zuz *ai? It's not terribly clear how you break up the word.
So how would I pronounce it? "??? How would you even pronounce this" is a pretty accurate description of my first attempt. Then I kept using a soft z cause I was having trouble figuring out how the "ai" behaved.
