>>>>I have always heard it as pop-poe or maybe pah-poe. Am I off?
>>>
>>>Only a little. Try puh-poe with the accent on the 'poe'. When I was a kid in school, I used to sign my essays and stuff as "Edgar Alan Popow".
>>
>>I just can't imagine the -ow being pronounced as both consonants. It's Popov to me - heck, the name is so frequent here, it usually takes at least a whole page in the phone book of any decent sized city.
>
>And you'd be abolutely right were it Popov and not Popow. ;)

Any signs of Polish ancestry? Polish language has no v character, they use w instead, but pronounce it as a v. For the w sound, they have the ł, which is pronounced the same (at least to my ear - I hope we don't have any real linguists here). Or maybe it was first transliterated through german, which reads v as f, and w as v, by their phonetic rules (which are "let's spell this so that any other German can read it as it should sound"). Who knows.

Then the name appears in a language where they insist on keeping the spelling and keeping the full liberty of pronunciation (well, within the rules of the language, about which we know all that's needed to know). So a surname ending in an -ow isn't pronounced as -ov anymore, it's now -ough; a Kovács is now a Coa-vax instead of Kovach, and any George (be it the french Zhorzh, romanian ghe-or-ghi, german ghe-org, serbian đorđe, i.e. gyor-gyeh, hungarian györgy etc) becomes a jorj.

Few generations down the line nobody remembers what this was about. Then they invent the internet and you meet people who have some knowledge of the original forms.