Finale

[Joel S. Berson]

Ah -- My dim eyes saw "the reporter pronounced
the word 'finale' as [fI'nAl]" and mistook the el
at the end as another I -- so I assumed the
pronunciation was "fee-nigh".  So not faux
French, a la Marseille (or Marseilles, as my
spell-checker tells me is American).

Joel

At 5/21/2009 01:36 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>At 9:53 AM -0400 5/21/09, David Bowie wrote:
>>This morning on NPR news (i didn't get the reporter's name--it was
>>during the half-hourly 5-minute news summaries, and i was simultaneously
>>trying to quell an argument among children, so i don't even remember the
>>context) the reporter pronounced the word 'finale' as [fI'nAl] (where
>>[A] is the low back unrounded vowel).
>>
>>As far as i can recall, i've only ever heard this word pronounced
>>[fI'nQ.li] (where [Q] is the short-a). A cursory online search of
>>dictionaries turns up [fI'nA.li], which i can imagine i may have heard
>>before and simply reprocessed to [fI'nQ.li], but no two-syllable ones.
>>
>>So whence this two-syllable pronunciation? Nativization? A Britishism? A
>>pronunciation i wasn't aware of before?
>Hypercorrection by someone who was told that the
>word they'd been pronouncing as "for-TAY"
>all'italiano should really be pronounced "FORT" à
>la française?
>
>LH
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org