Forteh: UK pronunciation

[Wilson Gray]

Larry writes:

"I grew up mostly hearing "fortay" and at some point I consciously
switched to "fort"once I realized it was a French loan and not an Italian,
Spanish, or Latin one.  I hear both in the U.S., but usually the bisyllabic
version."

To paraphrase him slightly:

I grew up reading "forte" as "for-tay" and at some point I consciously
switched to "fort," once I read somewhere or other that this word is
French in the relevant meaning. I hear both in the U.S., but almost
always the disyllabic version.

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 12:09 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Forteh: UK pronunciation
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 11:32 AM +0000 1/8/09, Damien Hall wrote:
>>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.
>
> It might have been in threads discussing the "fortay" or "for-tay"
> pronunciation (vs. "fort").  I'm not sure I'd have used "forteh",
> which looks as though it should end with an open /E/ sound.  It's
> really a question of bisyllabicity vs. mono-.  I grew up mostly
> hearing "fortay" and at some point I consciously switched to "fort"
> once I realized it was a French loan and not an Italian, Spanish, or
> Latin one.  I hear both in the U.S., but usually the bisyllabic
> version.
>
> LH
>
> P.S.  I tend not to pronounce it at all unless I'm reading someone
> else's prose, because it's not quite a homonym with "fort", having
> more of a pronounced final -t, while the one in the defensive (or, in
> this season, snow) building is unreleased.
>
>>
>>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/
>>
>>------------------------------------------------------------
>>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org