No, no, lads... Moscow! I mean ffs, in Russian it's spelled Moskva, but Muscovites make it sound like Moorskva, so... OK, back in the day, when the Hanseatic League was the UN of its day, and the majority of English was spoken in an accent somewhere between Yorkshire and Geordie by people so cosmopolitan that a trip to the outside privvy was worthy of note, let alone a conversation with t' furiners from t'other end o't'village*, we can easily imagine that Slavic suffixes were beyond the ken of those who came up with "Mosko" as a pronunciation and fair dos, people had to write that down in a way which distinguished the final 'o' from the more usual pronunciation of the 'o' long vowel 'or'... but to then look at the result and see "cow" as in "moo" takes a special kind of insular pigheadedness...
*I shit ye not. There was a case somewhere in the North East during one of our wars with France where a sailor came ashore with a Barbary Ape and the townspeople set on it and hanged it as a Frenchman!
I think we should start a campaign of pronouncing "Way-shine-gtone".
