Franglais

[David Costa]

Another example is 'Cesar Chavez', whose name is pronounced (by Anglos) as
'Shavez' with distressing frequency. I've heard it that way continuously
since the 1970's.

I think some site like language log (or someone like that) discussed this,
that there's a known pattern in English of assuming that all foreign
languages pronounce their letters like French.

The most egregious example of this is the phrase 'Bolshoi Ballet'. I read an
article a long time ago that certain American theatergoers were pronouncing
'Bolshoi' as 'Bol-SHWAH', on the model of French. Argh.

Dave 


>> Although it may be justified when the origin is French, the pronunciation
>> of ch as sh has recently become an annoying problem in the Santa Barbara
>> area.
> 
> It's not just Santa Barbara.  I call it "NPR English".  Although I'm not sure
> they're the only purveyors of the fricative pronunciation of "ch" and "j",
> they're certainly among the major offenders.  They can't make up their mind
> about Ahmed Chalabi (does Arabic even have a tch?), but they seem quite
> content with AzerbaiZHan, BeiZHing, FuZHian and various Chinese political
> figures whose names have "j".  I guess they must have had a year or two of
> High School French and think of it as "THE foreign language".  Apparently only
> English has the "dj" sound, as in "jazz".  All other languages just have "zh".
> 
> Bob
> 
>