English pronunciation of foreign words

[Damien Hall]

dInIs' post in the thread that began about 'Nicaragua' is going to be very
useful for some work that I am doing because it summarises at least some of the
constraints at work when English speakers try to work out how to pronounce
foreign words.  But I have to question one assumption:

"Paris"
can't be "paREE" because of (at least) the stress pattern and the
"r"

What about *café* = [kaef'ej], *bureau* = [bj^'row] (etc), then?  When I first
came to this country, the American final stress on these and other French
loan-words (in the UK they are nativised to ['kaefej] and ['bj^:row], in all
dialects, AFAIK) struck me so forcibly that I actually wrote a paper about it.
A little exploratory stats on 50 loan-words (and 25 control non-loan words)
pronounced by 10 Americans and 10 Brits confirmed that the stresses used by the
two countries' populations *were* significantly different.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that it doesn't look to me as if final stress in a
two-syllable word is something that most dialects of American English can't do.

Having said it, I have always been a strong advocate of pronouncing foreign
words in the English way if there is one that can be said to be accepted, or is
at least traditional.  For me, *that*'s why Paris can't be 'paREE':  because
English has a perfectly good way to pronounce it, ['paerIs].  (And this is from
a French-speaker who doesn't hesitate to pronounce French names for which there
is no accepted English version in the French way!)

Similarly, 'Don Quixote' has an accepted, or at least traditional, way to
pronounce it, as has also been said.  Once, there was in London a play of that
story, and someone told me they were going to see what they pronounced 'Donkey
Oté'.  That's literally what I thought they were saying;  I needed some
explanation before I worked out what they meant.  Their strategy for adapting
Spanish [x] to English was simply to omit it.

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania