"Fung guy"

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:58 AM -0400 7/30/09, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>A glance at the handy dictionaries shows "fun-jie" /fVndZaj/ or so in
>ALL (including Century, EB, MW, AHD, RHUD).
>
>The more recent dictionaries ALSO show "fung-ghie" /fVNgaj/ or so
>(including AHD, RHUD).
>
>MW3 shows the both, MW2 only the one.
>
>It looks like the MW Collegiate dictionary changed from only-one to both
>around the 1950's (between 6th and 7th?).
>
>Both pronunciations seem to be familiar to me.
>
>I suppose one can try to avoid the issue by using "funguses".
>
>Latin is still offered at my local high school, and it seems popular (I
>_think_ the other language choices are limited to French and Spanish).
>As James Harbeck says, though, this doesn't signify since the Classical
>Latin pronunciation is 'not one of the choices'.
>
Latin is in fact still offered quite widely in public high schools,
and a fortiori in private ones, to judge from the students in my
Words classes, and my daughter took Latin a few years ago in our
local (not top of the line) public high school.  I'm not sure there's
as much insistence on the classical pronunciations as there was when
I took it...um...many years ago.

LH

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