Forteh: UK pronunciation

[Damien Hall]

Benjamin Barrett said:

'As has been discussed here before, the forteh pronunciation is apparently
considered standard by most Americans.'

I'm loath to rehash old discussions that are already in the archives, but I
can't remember this one, nor can I find it by searching the archives (I'm
sure it exists, but it's difficult to know what search-term to use; I used
'forteh' and only came up with the present discussion.

Anyway: this opinion about the standard pronunciation of _forte_ for
Americans would make sense given (what I consider as) the tendency of AmE
to nativise pronunciation of Romance loan-words much less than BrE does. I
have a certain amount of actual evidence that that's the tendency, too,
from an experiment I did on two-syllable words a while back.

So now it becomes clear what my point is: as a speaker of BrE (and now back
in England, too, at least for the time being), I pronounce this word
'fortay'. I can't remember hearing any other pronunciation from other BrE
speakers, either. I haven't seen 'The Duchess': does any of the
single-nationality British actors use the word and, if they do, how do they
pronounce it?

Damien

--
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
York YO10 5DD
UK

Tel. (office) 01904 432665
     (mobile) 0771 853 5634
Fax  01904 432673
http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb/

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