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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 February 24

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February 24

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Mongrel pronunciations

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Speaking of giving words half-French and half-English pronunciations (see avoirdupois above) reminded me of words like jalapeño. It seems most everyone knows that the j, being in a Spanish word, is pronounced h. But it also seems that hardly anyone knows that the final consonant is not an n but an ñ and should be pronounced [nj]. Se we get "hala-peeno", half-Spanish and half-English.

I'm sure there are other examples of mongrel pronunciations. Please suggest some. -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 19:52, 24 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

One example is "chaise longue".—Wavelength (talk) 20:00, 24 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Ah yes, all those chaise lounges I've slept on.  :) -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 23:11, 24 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Other examples might be found in Category:Lists of English words of foreign origin.
—Wavelength (talk) 22:15, 24 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
And how often have you heard the word "suite" pronounced like "suit" instead of "sweet"? Or "filet" pronounced "fil-it" instead of "fil-lay:? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:18, 24 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Never, actually. Are you saying you've heard these pronunciations? Mnudelman (talk) 00:31, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
From my pov (South African English speaker) the "fee-lay" pronunciation when ordering steak in English marks the speaker as a pretentious twat, and probably an insufferable wine snob too. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 21:39, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
As an English English speaker, I concur wholeheartedly with Roger's comment above. DuncanHill (talk) 21:44, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
In America, more like "fil-lay" than "fee-lay". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:22, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
We spell it "fillet", and pronounce it "fill-it". I understand that Americans spell it "filet", and pronounce it "bizarrely". DuncanHill (talk) 23:27, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
French is "filet" and its Anglicized variant is "fillet". If pronouncing it more like the original French is "bizarre", I don't know what to tell you. We have filet mignon, French-approximated as "fil-lay min-yohn". We call it "fil-lit mig-nun" as a joke. We also have the McDonald's "Filet-O-Fish", pronounced "fil-lay". And we have the restaurant chain called "Chick-fil-A", the "A" being the long A, of course. The Chick-fil-A article makes the rather pretentious statement that it's a play on "fillet". No, it's a play on "filet". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:58, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
British English appears to prefer to more thoroughly Anglicize French pronunciations than American does (reminds me of a book I recently read, called "1000 Years of Annoying the French"!). "Garage" is another example, where American goes for something like "gar-azhe" while English goes for "garridge" - the Welsh language took the word from BrE and explicitly spells it "garej". -- Arwel Parry (talk) 11:06, 27 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
They were lucky they had enough vowels to go round. KägeTorä - (影虎) (もしもし！) 18:00, 28 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Gnocchi - while lots of people get the final bits passably close to the Italian, few pronounce the first consonant as the Italians do (NY or ɲ). So we might say NOH-kee is half Italian half English in pronunciation. Many English speakers get the 'gn' right in lasagne, so it's not as if the sound is too hard for us to make. SemanticMantis (talk) 22:21, 24 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
A lot of people know to do something different for the "gn" part (though /nj/ is usually the best they can manage; /ɲ/ is asking a bit much). The problem is that they get the o totally wrong. Even Italian-Americans of relatively recent extraction. I'm not sure why; it's not like English doesn't have the "aw" sound. --Trovatore (talk) 20:03, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
For me (South African English speaker) it rhymes with "hockey" with the initial "gn" like a "n" that starts in the back of the mouth, it's hard to explain. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 21:39, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
"Hockey" could be a close rhyme depending on whether you have the cot–caught merger. I don't know whether that exists in SAE or not. Of course you should also geminate the /k/, but again, that's asking a lot of anglophones. --Trovatore (talk) 22:26, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Changed my mind about the struck-out sentence. "Hockey" uses the "cot" vowel, for me anyway. You want the "caught" vowel. --Trovatore (talk) 22:27, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Pronouncing "gnocchi" with the vowel in "caught" would sound utterly bizarre to me. It (gnocchi) rhymes with "hockey" in British English. DuncanHill (talk) 22:38, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
In America, hockey is usually pronounced "hah-kee". But Canadian-born players sometimes or maybe often say it more like "haw-kee". (Mark Messier, for one) ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:21, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The "hock" of "hockey" rhymes with "dock", "cock", and "lock". DuncanHill (talk) 23:29, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It's reasonable to expect that whether it's "ahk" or "awk" locally, it would be pronounced consistently across those other examples. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:52, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Here's the proper pronunciation of the singular of gnocchi. μηδείς (talk) 02:12, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Beijing - in USA, people commonly say the "j" as "zh" like "Jacques" in French, with the rest of the name basically correct for Mandarin [1]. So saying "Bay-zhing" is a Mandarin/French pronunciation, heard perhaps only from Anglophones... SemanticMantis (talk) 22:28, 24 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
French seems to be a sort of international default for the uneducated. Russians called Andrey (ahn-drey) often get called "on-drey" in the West, as if they were French. -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 23:08, 24 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
But what if the Russian is called André? DuncanHill (talk) 21:46, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
What's the right way to say Beijing? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:16, 24 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
(I clearly cited a video that contains a detailed explanation of how Mandarin speakers say it, right after the word "Mandarin" :) SemanticMantis (talk) 17:43, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It depends on the Chinese dialect in question - we have a separate sidebar with Transcriptions in Beijing. For standard Mandarin, we claim this: --Stephan Schulz (talk) 23:29, 24 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The j in Beijing is pronounced close to an English j, certainly not like the /ʒ/ sound in "vision". More accurately, the tip of your tongue should be closer to your teeth and your lips slightly more pursed than in an English j. But an English j is more acceptable than a /ʒ/. Mnudelman (talk) 00:37, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The j of Jalapeño is pronounced like the final consonant of Loch, isn't it? HOTmag (talk) 00:13, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Now that you mention it, my Chinese-speaking colleagues have typically said it that way, or at worse somewhere between a "j" and a "zh". I think they also de-emphasize the trailing "ng", that is they don't enunciate it as strongly as Americans do. It's somewhere between "jin" and "jing". And, yes, Americans typically soften the strong guttural sound of the Spanish "j" sound (just as they do the Scottish "ch" sound). The issue the OP brings up is the ignoring of the tilde in "jalapeño" and pronouncing it like a normal "n". I would say I've heard it both ways here. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:03, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'm curious as to how people pronounce "Sichuan"/"Szechuan"/"Szechwan" when speaking English. I instinctively spell it as "Sichuan" and so Anglicise the pronunciation to "see-choo'an", but I have also often heard "zer-choo-an" "zer-shoo-an" (non-rhotic). How do you say it? --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 15:56, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
/'se-shwan/ is how a lot of USians say it, but I see now that's not very accurate. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:43, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I did mean "shwan", rather than "chwan". --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 18:40, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The Mandarin pronunciation (ignoring tones) is similar to /sɪ:tʃwɑːn/. The first syllable is like the beginning of "sit" but with the vowel strongly emphasized. The second syllable is like "chwan", with the vowel as in "father". I usually hear English speakers pronounce it as SemanticMantis describes, with the first vowel like the e in "set" and the "ch" pronounced "sh". I accidentally used this pronunciation in China once and the Chinese people I was speaking to did not understand me at all. Mnudelman (talk) 19:38, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The Mandarin pronunciation of the first vowel is not /ɪ:/. It is often anglicised to that, but the point of my question was to see how English speakers in different parts of the world approximate the actual pronunciation - e.g. as /ɪ:/ or /ə/ - both of which are about equally close (or far) from the Mandarin pronunciation. If you found /ɪ:/ more readily understood in China, that might be because - like me - they are more used to the /ɪ:/ anglicisation. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 10:25, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
My pronunciation (South African English speaker) of Sichuan rhymes with "fetch one", with only the f replaced with s. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 21:39, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Is /æi/ a sound that only exists in Strayan? Also used in /ɡəˈdæi/. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 16:01, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I venture to suggest that /æi/ may also be found in Estuary English. Nevertheless, PalaceGuard, it is common knowledge that Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, usw...--Shirt58 (talk) 13:30, 28 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Japanese '/samjurai/ is a good example. KägeTorä - (影虎) (もしもし！) 16:06, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Jack, I would dispute your premise, or at least say that it's not what I've observed. On the Left Coast, everyone says jalapeño more-or-less-correctly (the vowels are a little different, of course; Spanish monopthongs become English dipthongs, but it's as close as you can get while still speaking California English).
There you go. Califorñia has loñg Spañish coññectioñs, so that is ñot too surprising. -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 20:21, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Cute. But if "ñ" were used in the state's name, it would be "Califorña" - as with "España" instead of the older name "Hispania". And there's no "Spañish" but there is "español". The Anglicized version could be "Spañsh". That variant on "connections", if it had all those tildes in it, might sound like someone with a cleft palate. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:10, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
And yet I've met educated people who lived their whole life in California and can't be bothered to learn to pronounce Spanish names accurately. —Tamfang (talk) 01:59, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Such as San Pedro called "san PEE-dro" instead of "san PAY-dro". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:03, 27 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Well, that's just its name. It's fully naturalized. It's silly to say "san PAYdro" unless you also say "lohs AHN-hey-leys". --Trovatore (talk) 01:28, 1 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
As with the San Diego PADD-reez. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:59, 1 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The irritating thing here is that the name of that much more worthwhile pepper, the habanero (meaning "of or pertaining to Havana") gets hypercorrected to *habañero. --Trovatore (talk) 19:58, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Even by people whose first language is Spanish? -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 20:21, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Probably not, no. I think it's the same people who order a "latté". --Trovatore (talk) 20:30, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Right. I'm on record as advocating the removal of diacritic marks when foreign words are forcibly nationalised into English words. That's one thing (and please don't start an argument here today). But introducing diacritics where there were none in the original language's orthography for the word in question, is a whole 'nother matter. It's even worse than adding gratuitous apostrophes to possessive pronouns that happen to end in an -s (yours, hers, ours, its, theirs) or to plural noun's. :) Or, shock! horror! to 3rd person present indicative singular verbs (He eat's noisily). -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 21:29, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Betcha can't top this. —Tamfang (talk) 01:59, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Go'sh! How ab'surd writer's can 'sometime's be! -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 03:32, 26 February 2016 (UTC) [reply]
English is an extraordinarily democratic language. We bring in any word from any language that we think best fits a situation. And, in that same democratic fashion, we butcher the pronunciation. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:12, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
A contemporary example is C. difficile - most people (when not just calling it "C-Diff") pronounce it as if it were French ("di-fi-seel") rather than Latin ("di-fi-kee-lay"). Tevildo (talk) 00:07, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Or like Church Latin, which is roughly Italian (dif fi či le). —Tamfang (talk) 01:59, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I learned the pronunciation of Latin difficile as [dɪfˈfɪ.kɪ.lɛ], where the accent is on the second syllable (the antepenult), both fs are pronounced, and all the vowel sounds are "short".  See wikt:difficile.
—Wavelength (talk) 17:59, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • The proper term for making words even more different from English (or whatever target language) than they actulally are is hyperforeignism, not hypercorrection -- although one would think they are psychologically related "the Raj" as "the Raʒ" instead of the native pronunciation close to "the Rodge" and habanero as mentioned above are examples of hyper foreignism. μηδείς (talk) 00:17, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Well, the first sentence of the hyperforeignism article claims it's a sort of hypercorrection. I'm not sure how reliable that article is (it makes other weird claims, such as that the /bru:'ʃɛtə/ pronunciation of bruschetta is a hypercorrection, when it's clearly an Anglicization; that is, an undercorrection).
But in identifying these usages as hypercorrections, I think it's spot on. The spelling "jalapeño" is more correct than "jalapeno", and the pronunciation /ˌhɑːlə'peɪnjoʊ/, while not "correct" per se, is at least better than /ˌhælə'piːnoʊ/. So the attempt is to make a correction, but for habanero, it winds up making it worse. That's the definition of hypercorrection. --Trovatore (talk) 18:30, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Well, no. The bruschetta example should be removed [I have done so] from our article, sh and sk are both found in all English dialects. That's just an orthographical confusion, and is totally irrelevant.
Hypercorrection occurs when a child is taught a standard that differs from his informal speech, and he over applies it. An example is someone brought up with a non-rhotic accent who says "bananer" for "banana", since he assumes that all final schwas derive from his final -r dropping.
Another example that has died out, but which you hear in old movies, is people saying things like "sody" for "soda" when they have been taught that the final vowel in Missouri is an -ee, not an -uh. Hypercorrection happens across the board, to the entire vocabulary.
Foreignism occurs when relatively rare English phonemes like "zh" are applied to foreign words, since many people interpret "zh" as a 'foreign' sound. If that were hypercorrection, then people who say Tazh Mahal, instead of the better Todge Mahal would also be saying things like Zhorzh Washington or Zhack Zhonson.
Obviously the two phenomena are related psychologically as mistaken reinterpretations, but neither is a subset of the other. μηδείς (talk) 03:21, 27 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
A couple more examples that no one has mentioned yet: forte (meaning "strong point", as in "piano-playing is my forte") is actually from French, so should be pronounced (approx) "fort", but is almost universally pronounced "fortay", as if it were Italian. And cache, meaning a store, which should sound like "cash", is sometimes pronounced "cash-ay", perhaps by confusion with cachet. Oh, and there's that strange (American?) pronunciation of lingerie. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 18:49, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
So someone who excelled in playing piano loudly might say, "Piano forte is my forte" and pronounce them differently... --jpgordon::==( o ) 23:46, 29 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Digression — there's a pleasant-sounding but very strange song by The Who, vintage around 1980, in which the singer assures us that there ain't no bears in there, wherever there is, and without explaining why we might think there would be bears there. It's called Cache Cache, and the liner notes claim that those are some of the lyrics, but what you hear on the record is something like /'kæ'xiː 'kæ'xiː/. Anyone know what that's about? --Trovatore (talk) 19:03, 26 February 2016 (UTC) [reply]
See wikt:dachshund and wikt:Xavier. Compare "Albert Einstein" with fr:Albert Einstein. Compare wikt:Mozart with fr:wikt:Mozart.
—Wavelength (talk) 20:27, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
See "Punjab" (wikt:Punjab) and "Punjabi" (wikt:Punjabi). The "u" has the sound [ʌ] and not the sound [uː]. For alternative spellings, see "Panjab" (wikt:Panjab) and "Panjabi" (wikt:Panjabi).
—Wavelength (talk) 15:42, 28 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know anyone who says "hal-uh-pee-no", other than that non-Americans, and someone I met from somewhere like Wisconsin or maybe it was Nebraska. I can't remember the last time I didn't hear something approximately "hal-uh-pain-yo", "hal-uh-pen-yo", or at least "hal-uh-peen-yo". (Sorry, I'm too tired to futz with IPA right now).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:59, 1 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Must be an Aussie thing. They (not I) also usually talk about "el neeno". The rule Down Here seems to be "Not only be ignorant of foreign words and pronunciations, but be aggressively proud of your ignorance. Extend this to all English words longer than 'cat' ".-- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 22:54, 1 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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