There are TONS of arguments about the way these four Hebrew letters should be pronounced. There is a very long and complex grammar and history to the whole thing not worth going into here. Suffice it to say that most English-speakers tend to pronounce the Name as "Jehovah" based on the Latinized version of the letters. But even in the English, even as late as the 1611 King James Version, the pronunciation of the "J"-sound was still not fully distinguished from the "I"-sound from which the written English letter evolved, so even in English the Name was pronounced more like "Iahovah" for centuries. But it was mostly on the research of a Christian Hebrew-Greek scholar named Wilhelm Gesinius who lived 1786-1842, that a new pronunciation was offered - "Yahweh", and THAT pronuciation (called the bisyllabic pronunciation) began to become popular. Every body knew that ancient Hebrew did not pronounce the "J"-sound or the "V"-sound, so Gesinius gave his best educated guess to the pronunciation as "Yahweh". Today, even Jehovah's Witnesses will readily admit that in Hebrew it is not pronounced "Jehovah", but that THAT is a uniquely English pronunciation. They do not think it really matters for Salvation, though, HOW exactly you pronounce the letters. Any way, so the two most common ways you hear today are either "Jehovah" (as the English pronunciation), or "Yahweh" proposed by Gesinius as his best Hebrew pronunciation. But there is another view which is based on the idea that a Hebrew word of four letters such as this should be properly pronounced with three syllables. And YES, most Hebrew words do put the accent on the final syllable rather than the first or middle syllable. I have been drawn deep into this debate with people before on other forums, and I do not think it is worth getting into a debate about it again. But, more and more people ARE seeing the logic of a tri-syllabic pronunciation to The Name. Some DO say "YahuWEH", but the Hebrew root word that this part of The Name is based on is "hawah", which means "to come to be". The first part of The Name, of course, is Yahu (as attested throughout The Bible in many theophoric names). So, the compound form of YAHU and HAWAH is generally abbreviated as "YAHUWAH", which in Hebrew would mean, "Yah who causes to come to be", speaking of YAH as the Creator of all things. Some people write it out in English as YAHUWAH, just like that. But since this kind of spelling uses the "U" and the "W", which in Hebrew is the same letter, I think it is redundant to write both letters, so I generally spell it as YAHUAH, but it is pronounced exactly the same. I do not know any person who speaks fluent Hebrew who says that the pronunciation YAHUWEH means anything at all.
