>>While at college we had a killing combination - hit the local supermarket and buy a beer and 0.1 l of cognac (which I still don't know how you pronounce here, and wasn't called that way anyway, because it's a copyrighted name - our local variant was named "vinjak", and would have been spelled vignac had it been written in French).
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>Cone-yak is the simplest pronunciation.
Does that mean nobody pronounces the "gn" in "cognac" as "ny" (as in "new")?
I'm curious, because I'm building a collection of the ways foreign words are pronounced here (it's on my website, though the pronunciation collection is on the Serbian side of it), and I've noticed that the "gn" in Italian names is distinctly pronounced as "gn" (as in "ignore") though it should also be a "ny".