Finale

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:53 AM -0400 5/21/09, David Bowie wrote:
>This morning on NPR news (i didn't get the reporter's name--it was
>during the half-hourly 5-minute news summaries, and i was simultaneously
>trying to quell an argument among children, so i don't even remember the
>context) the reporter pronounced the word 'finale' as [fI'nAl] (where
>[A] is the low back unrounded vowel).
>
>As far as i can recall, i've only ever heard this word pronounced
>[fI'nQ.li] (where [Q] is the short-a). A cursory online search of
>dictionaries turns up [fI'nA.li], which i can imagine i may have heard
>before and simply reprocessed to [fI'nQ.li], but no two-syllable ones.
>
>So whence this two-syllable pronunciation? Nativization? A Britishism? A
>pronunciation i wasn't aware of before?
>
Hypercorrection by someone who was told that the
word they'd been pronouncing as "for-TAY"
all'italiano should really be pronounced "FORT" à
la française?

LH

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