chard

Charles Doyle cdoyle at UGA.EDU
Thu Jul 12 14:12:02 UTC 2007


And, by somewhat different processes, the most "standard" faux-frenchified pronunciation of all: "lingerie"!

As for "processes," I won't even mention the falsum-latinized pronunciation [pro s@ siz].  Except that in a public lecture by a Ph.D. in comparative literature, I heard the back-formed singular [pro s at s].

--Charlie
____________________________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 20:40:59 -0400
>From: James Harbeck <jharbeck at SYMPATICO.CA>
>
>>And don't forget Pinochet (Pee-no-shay).
>
>Not to mention [klare'] for claret (should be [klE'rIt]), [fraI'SEne] for Freixenet, vichyssoise with the last [z] left off, al dente as [al da~'te] rather than [al den'te], [hela'to] rather than [dZela'to] for gelato, several East Asian words with ei being pronounced [aj]... I once heard Mein Kampf pronounced [ma~ ka~].
>
>I gotta admit, the [beI-ZIN] one drives me nuts, though. Man, the
>correct sound for the j is almost identical to the English
>pronunication of j! But because it's a foreign word, it couldn't
>possibly be that, could it... One finds that if a person hears a
>foreign word pronounced two ways, one of which seems sensible and the
>other of which is surprising (or at least not as English-sounding),
>the person will likely tend to assume that the surprising
>pronunciation must be correct, or else why would it have been used?
>And, yes, many people get very slap-happy with assorted rules picked
>up from this and that foreign language, because they don't really
>know the languages in question and just have a sort of general muddle
>of "foreign" pronunciations that they apply where it seems
>appropriate.
>
>James Harbeck.

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