Mercator.

Mercator is latinised form of de Kremer who was from Flanders (would be Belgian today). Mer-cate-or is anglicised pronunciation and I can't see any reason why it should be pronounced like that in other languages than English.

Mercator is latinised form of de Kremer

That looks a little weird and it took a little tracking down. Mercator means merchant in Latin, and apparently Krämer is a German word for a miscellaneous goods seller, so he has increased the class a little in the translation.

Actually some of my own ancestors did the same. They devised a family motto of Aula boum constans, for which an academic cousin colloquially translated as "you can rely on a Viehoff". Vieh-hof literally means cattle-manor, hence aula boum = hall of the oxen.

Broadcasters no longer seem to be served with information on how to pronounce things, and often seem to make it up on the spot from a position of ignorance. Radio 4, would you guess, broadcast an adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov in several episodes a couple of years ago, in which it was pronounced kara-mats-off throughout.

Edited by: iviehoff

There's also an exoticization factor. mercaTOR sounds more foreign than merCAtor, so must be right for a foreigner. Same with the Z in Radio 4's Karamazov. It's a foreign name, and those foreigners pronounce things differently.

You hear people saying imPRIMatoor for imprimatur these days, I guess to make it sound properly foreign (albeit wrong).

And this is real pedantry but: I once saw a production of Bussy d'Ambois directed by Jonathan Miller at the Old Vic. They pronounced the last name in the French manner, including stress, which ruined the scansion in every line in which it appeared. You'd think there would have been at least one non-cloth-eared person around to say "Shouldn't that be DAMboyz?"