meranghy

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:10 PM -0500 2/16/11, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>I know next to nothing about accents--I can probably tell apart some of
>the locals along upper Atlantic Coast, but, beyond that, I'm lost--I
>would probably confuse accents from Texas, Tennessee and Maryland. [Save
>the jokes about what it is that I *do* know for later...] But I can tell
>an annoying accent when I hear one--because it is, well, annoying. The
>most annoying accent in a cooking show belongs to Ingrid Hoffmann, who
>has dual TV shows on the Cooking Channel and on Galavision (essentially
>the same show in different languages). I am not sure where the annoying
>part comes from--she grew up in Cali and lives in Miami, so maybe she
>picked it up from the Miami snowbirds. But when she drops Spanish words
>(e.g., "jalapeno") in her English-language show, she sounds like Jimmy
>Smits in his infamous SNL episode--it sounds exaggerated even though I
>am sure it's impeccable Spanish (for some dialect).
>
>But this is not the part that got me today--instead, it was her
>pronunciation of "meringue". What I heard was "mehRANghy", with a
>classic [Midwestern?] open [æ] and a very distinct [ž] at the end [not a
>schwa, which did appear in the first syllable]. I've heard some odd
>pronunciations of that word, but this one was a head-scratcher [for me],
>particularly from a long-time TV personality and restaurateur.
>
>VS-)
>
Except for the last comment about the speaker
being a food person, this would strike me as a
simple spelling pronunciation, although then
you'd expect the stressed vowel to be [I] rather
than the more traditional [ae].  But maybe it's
been influenced by the almost-eponymous dance?

Puzzled,
LH

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