Franglais

[Carolyn Quintero]

I've often heard Cesar Chavez as sizr s^avez' (nearly rhymes with hwarez').

There's also the English speakers' pseudo-French pronunciation of armoire as
armwa', and vichissoise as vis^iswa', when people are straining to do it
right.

Carolyn

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu
[mailto:owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu] On Behalf Of David Costa
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2006 1:44 PM
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Franglais

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
> 
> 



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