5 ms·
There's also the British penchant for deliberately mispronouncing French words. I have heard "renaissance" pronounced "reh-NAY-sance", "fillet" pronounced "fill
by teachrdan 7mo ago
There's also the British penchant for deliberately mispronouncing French words. I have heard "renaissance" pronounced "reh-NAY-sance", "fillet" pronounced "fill-it", "valet" as "val-it" and so on. I think it's a national point of pride to pronounce the words of their neighbor incorrectly.
- bluepeter 7mo agoYep. And try "lieutenant" or "herb" on for size. (Edit: I guess "herb" is a bit of a complex one... originally from Latin's "herba" where the H was pronounced, but from UK it came most immediately from French's "herbe" with no H sound. So UK did somehow shortcut back to a more original sound.)
- jpfromlondon 7mo agoAmerica is at least as guilty of mispronouncing non-english words it's just natural drift. As to fillet and valet, they joined english before the contemporary french pronunciation, and are much closer to the middle-french.
- hnuser123456 7mo agoApparently, workers on the Gemini space program pronounced it "Jeh-mih-nee" back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini#Pronunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini#Pronunciation
- jpfromlondon 7mo agothe soft g is triggering, I can hear my classics tutor yelling even 20+ years later, don't get me started on the american pronunciation of hegemony!
- rkomorn 7mo agoI'm always amused by some mispronunciations that stray farther away from the original than necessary. My favorite is probably crepe, which Americans pronounce like an almost diphthong-y craype (or crape like grape I guess) when crep (like step) would do just fine and be closer to the original. But as a native French and basically-native American speaker, I also couldn't really care less about it, or about things like Americans pronouncing the t in croissant, or French people being unable to say the.
- tracker1 7mo agoThe plural is what gets me though crepes (just sounds weird as krehps vs krayps).
- rkomorn 7mo agoI kinda get it, but you can say step and stehps, not stayps, so why not krehps? I say it the American way when I speak English anyway because that's just how it is. :)
- jpfromlondon 7mo agoI notice the variance in british and american pronunciation of especially romance + greek words, correct or otherwise and I'm willing to give credit where it's due, I'm also happy to celebrate the differences rather than mock or correct them, I just won't accept the slander!
- djeastm 7mo ago>America is at least as guilty of mispronouncing non-english words it's just natural drift. See also: Cairo, IL or Versailles, KY...
- nobody9999 7mo agoOr Wilkes-Barre, PA
- teachrdan 7mo agoOr Montpelier, VT!
- sanswork 7mo agoDelhi, Ca -> Del-High Fontainebleau State Park -> Fountain Blue State Park These were two off the ones that really stood out from my travels.
- dogmatism 7mo agoCalais, ME
- unzadunza 7mo agoOr Pueblo, Salida and Buena Vista CO
- _0ffh 7mo agoBirmingham, AL
- canucker2016 7mo agoDetroit, MI
- teachrdan 7mo agoIs the Illinois one the same pronunciation as "KAY-ro", Georgia?
- tigerlily 7mo ago
- dhosek 7mo agoI’ve always said that one key difference between British English and American English is that a British speaker will intentionally mispronounce a foreign word, while an American will attempt to pronounce it correctly but get it wrong anyway.
- jpfromlondon 7mo agoIt's much deeper than that probably because the kludge of english is in large part french. But I also completely disagree, I don't think americans are attempting to pronounce croissant correctly for example, whereas brits will be much closer with no attempt at intentional mispronunciation, it just happens that brits are much closer on some and further on others, and vice versa re americans. and I don't think there is any malice, in fact it became common among the british aspirational middle-class in the 70s to adopt french words in an attempt to appear cultured and upper, ironically now a clear marker of non-u.
- GJim 7mo ago> it became common among the british aspirational middle-class in the 70s to adopt french words in an attempt to appear cultured Mon dieu Rodney!
- bloak 7mo ago"Valet" and "cadet" is an interesting pair: they rhyme in French (/va.lɛ/ and /ka.dɛ/), but rhyming them in English would be ... unusual. If there were just French words pronounced in a French way and English words which came from French and are now pronounced in an English way that would be bad enough but in fact we have a whole spectrum of bastardisation.
- sebzim4500 7mo agoInterestingly in British english valet would rhyme with cadet if you were referring to a servant and not to someone who will park your car.
- mattmanser 7mo agoSo this isn't the British being deliberate obtuse, foreigners pronounce English words wrong all the time and we don't accuse them of doing it on purpose. They do it because that's how they would pronounce those words in their language. Fillet/valet are mis-pronounced because of mallet, pallet, etc. Renaissance? Nail, snail, tail, etc. It really is that simple, we're just pronouncing them as if they were an English word.
- OJFord 7mo agoThose are the standard British pronunciations, if you meant 'I have heard' as though it might be a niche or occasional occurrence. ('fill-ay' et al. are AmE pronunciations.) It's not always that way though, consider 'niche': it's AmE that decided it's 'nitch'!
- gib444 7mo agoIt's a national past time for us Brits to annoy the French. Kind of how two cousins who don't like each other would behave at a family gathering
- klondike_klive 7mo agoSurely the American way of saying "REN-uh-saunce" is further from the French than the British pronunciation?