Why "Lincoln" is pronounced like Linking???

Yes, thanks Ashley.

I wish there was a standard pronuncitation symbols in Engish. Lincoln is written in two ways by natives :

ling-ken >>>>>>>> Ashley
and
lincoln = linkun>>>>Brad

We all have different accents but for me the "o" in "Lincoln" is not like the "i" in "hit" but I'd agree that the second "l" is not pronounced. I'm with Simon when he says "the second vowel of Lincoln is a schwa". Schwa is a letter in the IPA which represents the central vowel. Tom's ASCII phonetic alphabet* uses /../ so "Lincoln" is pronounced /link..n/ and "linking" is pronounced /linkiN/.

* http://www.antimoon.com/misc/phonchart-print.htm

Yes, I wish there were a standard pronunciation symbols in Engish too. I've written "Lincoln" in a third way. However, I have used a standard: the Antimoon standard. Check it out in the link.

Come to think of it though, what I wrote in the post above was wrong. The "n" gets pronounced /N/ not /n/ before "k". So the correct version is:

Lincoln ==>> /liNk..n/

linking ==>> /liNkiN/

SAMPA is another standard.