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The one that endlessly peeves me is that English broadcasters (e.g. BBC, The Economist) will bend over backwards to pronounce French words yet for Spanish words
by thebeardisred 3y ago
The one that endlessly peeves me is that English broadcasters (e.g. BBC, The Economist) will bend over backwards to pronounce French words yet for Spanish words they trample all over them. The frequency with which they mispronounce "junta" is maddening.
- jackcosgrove 3y agoI think trying to get British people to pronounce Spanish words correctly may be a quixotic effort :)
- mc32 3y agoI don't know why people complain of this. Spaniards don't particularly pronounce English words in a very English manner either. They Spaniardize lots of English words: Football, Goal, Twitter, Pub, CD-ROM. Who cares!
- twic 3y ago"Gin tonic"!
- croisillon 3y agoJimi Hendrix!
- kergonath 3y agoThe whole discussion is not very useful. There are sounds in Spanish that don’t exist in English and things that are just weird. And it’s the same the other way around. Not to mention, the same word can sound different with different Spanish accents, so which one should be used? There is nothing wrong with people adapting words from other languages or pronouncing them their way. Besides, it’s cute when they try, but it’s not like most English people can pronounce French, either.
- qingcharles 3y agoTrying to use my European learnt Spanish in the USA always gets laughs from the Latine population, when they can finally figure out what I'm saying.
- thebeardisred 3y agoPossibly not, though I was (mainly) musing about the style guides for publications distributed worldwide.
- anthk 3y ago>different. Almost any. In Spain: za, ce, ci, zo, zu -> tha,the, thi... as in "think". In America they'll use the /s/ sound, but because the Internet usage both spellings are understood fine since "El Chavo del Ocho" times in Spain, Mexican/Venezuelan soap operas and, similarly, with todays' 'La Casa de Papel' from Spain overseas.
- anthk 3y agoFútbol and 'football' sound very close. Goal/Gol /gohl/ , I think not much. We spell 'twitter' with an American accent. At least we correctly say 'pub'.
- AlbertCory 3y agoI was actually on an Explore trip through Spain & Portugal, where everyone was English but me. In a bar I would order "bocadillo con jamon y queso" and they'd say, "Oh, you speak Spanish!"
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoThe English side of Cypress is a trip... You're more likely to find an English pub than Cypriot (or Turkish!) food
- tomcam 3y agoWhich is nice because they’re disappearing from England at an alarming rate
- lebuffon 3y agoBut the butter chicken is to die for!
- cherryteastain 3y agoDo you mean the sovereign base areas? Those are pretty much UK territory.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoLimassol, Pissouri, Paphos, basically the whole southwestern coast
- noneeeed 3y agoNice :)
- mytailorisrich 3y agoI suppose this is because in the UK there is still this whiff of upper class and culture if you can speak French. The new King Charles was the first monarch to give a speech in the French parliament (afaik), and he did it in French, for instance. Spanish? Nah, we sunk the Armada and took Gibraltar, that's about it... and let's not forget the Argies.
- rgblambda 3y ago>Spanish? Nah, we sunk the Armada and took Gibraltar, that's about it. And shared a king: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_II_of_Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_II_of_Spain
- SllX 3y agoNot a highlight in English history as it was a rather bloody time.
- graemep 3y agoThere is still an expectation that even mildly posh British people know how to pronounce French words at least approximately correctly. Speaking French was historically a strong class marker. The phrase "pas devant les domestiques" which as sufficiently commonly used to be contracted to just "pas devant" is a good example (you would not use it if the domestics would understand it). I was born in a country (Sri Lanka) where speaking English is a class marker. Not simply whether you can or can not speak it (lots of people can speak it to some extent) but how well you speak it, your accent, and whether you are a native speaker (in that it is the language you use to talk to your family and friends) or not.
- switch007 3y agoIgnorance is a sport in England
- rhplus 3y agoThis is because French is/was the defacto choice for foreign language option in secondary schools throughout the UK, at least up until the 2000s. French was after all the language of diplomacy and quite a bit more useful in European business last century than Spanish was. Spanish is now catching up and will likely over take in the next couple of years. Latest number of GCSE exam entrants were about 125K for French, 115K for Spanish and 35K for German.
- notahacker 3y agoI think "junta" has had anglicised equivalents for pretty much as long as it's been a word in Spanish Whereas many French derived words are either ostentatiously still-French like foodstuffs or would sound ridiculous with an attempted Anglo pronunciation, eg cafe. We don't exactly fall over to make marmalade or aviation sound French Plus we're terrible at pronouncing the 'j' sound even when it's part of a Spanish person's name
- telesilla 3y agoMany words have been anglicized and so 'junta' wouldn't mean anything to English speakers with a Spanish j. But with a hard j, it has exactly the same meaning to us as it does to you. English is an excellent thief but not respectful of the origins. Even the giant % of the English language that is French, we pronounce in our own way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_French_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...
- Tagbert 3y agoAre you in the UK? In the US it would sound very off to hear “junta” with a hard “j”. That doesn’t mean that English speakers try to fully reproduce how a Spanish speaker would pronounce the word and I think that is appropriate. If you are speaking one language to completely switch pronunciation for one word just breaks the flow of speech. Some compromise can be found.
- adastra22 3y agoCalifornian. I’ve only ever heard it pronounced by non-Spanish speakers with a hard j.
- hackernewds 3y agoThat is basically the colonial mindset, one could argue :) when billions retrain their mother tongue to learn English and accents, it would be a minimal respect to try to learn the origin. For when, GWB invaded Iraq he didn't even ever have the decency to learn to pronounce the country's name - and neither does the populace still.
- bee_rider 3y agoFor some reason this has made me wonder what the most circuitous route for a loan word has been. Imagine if “junta” had taken a trip up through Central Europe and then to the Scandinavians, then down, so we could pronounce it “yunta.”
- lainga 3y agoI might put forth assegaai (a type of throwing spear)...? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/assegaai https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/assegaai Berber -> Arabic -> Spanish -> Dutch -> English each link makes sense if you consider (in order) Caliph Al-Walid, Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles V (or Charles the Bold?), and William III
- baryphonic 3y agoIn America, the reverse is true. Most French words are butchered, most Spanish words are at least pronounced properly (sometimes with an accent). I suspect it has something to do with proximity to native speakers of the language, as France (effectively) borders the UK and Mexico borders the US.
- amyjess 3y ago> In America, the reverse is true. Most French words are butchered And inconsistently so! I've had jury duty several times, and nobody can agree on how to pronounce voir dire. Some courts say "vwahr deer" which is a decent approximation of the French pronunciation, and others say "vore dyer". And while I haven't heard it myself, I wouldn't be surprised if some people pronounce voir as "voyeur".
- shinycode 3y agovwaar deer is close enough but the prononciation is condensed so the r and double e are not strong. No emphasis whatsoever
- idontpost 3y ago[dead]
- renaudg 3y agoFrench person here, I have no idea what "voir dire" means. It's literally "see say".
- hollerith 3y agoVoir dire has a technical meaning among lawyers in the English-speaking countries.
- akavi 3y agoIt's Anglo-Norman[0], and means "to tell the truth" ("voir" being cognates with modern French "vrai", not "voir") [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Norman_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Norman_language
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vidarh 3y agoIf you want to feel better about British willingness to butcher French too (ignoring the huge chunk of older loanwords from French - e.g. most -ion words and -ment words, maby other large groups), look up the English village of Beaulieu (named by French monks, so it's the French "beau lieu"), and how the English pronounce it. It was maddening to me when visiting the place. But as Alexandre Dumas reputedly said, English is just badly pronounced French (ok, so that is an exaggeration; and I cant be bothered to check if that statement is apocryphal or not)
- b112 3y agoGo to youtube and see how NewFoundLand in Canada is pronounced. People just want a single word. It cracks me up that the Foundland wasn't good enough (some place in the UK), so off they went to find New!
- Tagbert 3y agoThat would make French just badly pronounced Latin. And that Latin was just a puffed up corruption of Proto-Indo-European. Of course, language history is just turtles all the way down. All languages change as we speak them.
- usrusr 3y ago> English is just badly pronounced French At least it got me (barely) passing marks in French lessons at my German school: to write French, I would set up the sentence in my head in English, shake it around violently until all the words not sufficiently French-sounding where replaced with roughly synonymous words that did and then improvised accents and conjugation. Unfortunately that cheat is terribly useless in real life.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago> bend over backwards That is literally a valid movement of the tongue to produce a retroflex [ɭ]. In contrast, Spanish phonology lacks retroflex entirely.
- hammock 3y agoAnd that’s a new thing, historically the British would purposely trample on French words. For example “claret” meaning Bordeaux blend wine is pronounced with a hard t
- TMWNN 3y agoThe classic English-language (not just British) example is the name of Chile's former dictator. "Pinochet" should be pronounced with a hard 't' at the end, as is the case in Spanish, and not the French silent 't'.
- mahkeiro 3y agoBut Pinochet is a French family name why would the French mispronounced it?
- graemep 3y agoSurnames should be pronounced the way the person who has it pronounces it. My family do nor pronounce our Dutch surname "correctly" - but its centuries since the ancestor we got the name from left the Netherlands. We use an archaic spelling too.
- foobiekr 3y agoHonest, I have literally never heard anyone ever say "junta" with a hard /j/ sound. Is this really a thing?
- mistrial9 3y agoyes, this is a real thing
- mcmoor 3y agoIt's adapted into my language as junta with hard /j/ so yes, it's a thing
- mahkeiro 3y agoDon‘t worry the French are not better as the word is junte in French with a [ʒ] sound
- kergonath 3y agoThere is no equivalent to the Spanish /j/ in French. Besides, the -e ending instead of the Spanish -a should tell you that it has been adapted and is used as a loanword, a French word of Spanish origin, not a Spanish word. Spanish itself is full of loanwords, particularly from Arabic, which are not pronounced like in Arabic either (which Arabic, anyway?) There is no better or worse, there are just words that travel across languages.
- mahkeiro 3y agoIt was a joke! And in French we tend to either keep or not the original pronunciation. A funny one is mojito where the j is always replace by a French r.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- desas 3y agoDefinitely a thing in the UK, it's how the Oxford English Dictionary says it's pronounced (noting that it's different in the US). I have heard too many people say "jally pea no", but the most frequent pronunciation of jalepeño is with a hard j
- gerdesj 3y agoYou would go absolutely postal over our pronunciation of Icelandic volcano names 8) I do accept that junta should be pronounced "hunta" (in English). Spanish is easily an important enough language that most people that use a Roman style alphabet should be able to fix up pronunciation of those words/letters to suit the language in play. I often notice that BBC news starts off with an awful pronunciation for a place, concept or whatever that might be considered obscure and then it gets better later on, once someone has noticed and the message has been passed through to the news reader. I think that the last time our news readers had to deal with the pronunciation of junta was in the 1980s and Argentina. It's 2024 now and I hope we treat Spanish with the respect it is due.
- mistrial9 3y agoIn the USA it is a national sport to trample on French origin words.. look at the Motor City "Detroit" !
- lebuffon 3y ago"Foyer" is the classic example.
- noneeeed 3y ago"Niche" is the one that bugs me every time I hear someone pronounce it to rhyme with "itch". For some irrational reason that just irritates :)
- vinay427 3y agoI don’t think most people including those from the area would even associate the name with French, so there isn’t the same intentionality. It’s the same with indigenous language-origin or Spanish-origin place names in the US/Canada, our place names in general that are often centuries old and conceptually separate from their origins, and feels quite distinct from intentionally trying to emulate a foreign language pronunciation for one language but butchering words in another language (not that that’s unique to the UK).
- el-salvador 3y agoI didn't know Detroit had French Origin. Spanish slang from the 90s in my country imported Detroit and Spanish-ized the pronunciation as ditroy. Since it has the same consonants as detrás, Spanish for behind, it can be used a a synonym for behind and also as an euphemism for the behind part of the body.
- LAC-Tech 3y agoI'm more upset at how few 'educated' English speakers can pronounce archaic English. I'm so sick of hearing about the Anglo-Saxon poem "Bay O'Wolf".