Re: French phonetics

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "david_russell_watson" <liberty@...>
wrote:

>
>
> > I don't know why so many Anglophones believe that if a word is
> > foreign, it must be pronounced according to French rules of
> > pronunciation.
>
> I don't think that it's French pronunciation per se that
> they're aiming for, at least not here in the U.S. Rather
> it's just a vague concept and set of internalized rules
> gathered from limited observation about what's proper to
> foreign speech.
>
> Similarly a rule seems to apply to the letters 'i' and 'u',
> which many Anglophones think must always be /i/ and /u/
> when in foreign words. The Arabic name 'Malik' is popular
> with African-Americans here in the U.S., who almost always
> pronounce it /m&.lik/, stressing the second syllable, and
> the reporter Linda Ellerbee's annoying pronunciation of the
> Indian word 'dalit' to sound the same as English 'delete',
> including the stress on the second syllable, also comes to
> mind. The common use of /pHun.dZ�b/ for 'Punjab' is also
> pretty amusing.

Yes, unwitting hypercorrection.

>
> In Canada the French example might well be the main source
> of some of these rules, but I tend to think it is Spanish
> here in the U.S.
>
> David
>

Yes, you're probably right that in Canada it's due to the French
presence and the teaching of French in our schools. But note also:
most people I hear pronounce "Gouda" cheese as [gu:d&], as though it
were a French name, even though its Dutch origin requires a diphthong
similar to our [aU], as <ou> is most typically pronounced in native
words, i.e. [gaUd&], as one would pronounce it using typical English
rules, would be a good approximation of its original pronunciation. I
suspect that the pronunciation [gu:d&] is predominant in the U.S. too, no?

Andrew

P.S. Why are "Chicago" and "Michigan" pronounced with [S] rather than
[tS]? Never understood those ones.