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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
The use the public would be most familiar with is the interrogation of the jury pool, by both parties, to make sure they are suitable (e.g. suitably biased) jurors before trial:
Are you saying people who don't pronounce their aches should use "a" and not "an"? Because that would sound weird trying to pronouce two vowels like that.
We have two main ways of saying words like "hotel". I (with a rather non-descript vaguely southern accent) pronounce the H in hotel, and so say "a hotel". Many people from London and the south east (especially Essex and the parts of the home counties that has a large influx of North Londoners) will generally drop their leading "H" and say "an 'otel".
There is a third accent which is a minority, the rather extreme upper class accent where they also drop a lot of their leading Hs, and therefore use "an". That's not "posh cockney", that's just "posh", a lot of them have always spoken like that. Even among the posh I'd rank that accent as relatively rare these days.
Id does all lead to the occasional argument among slightly dull people about whether you should write "an hotel" or "a hotel".
And of course there is the famous "shedule" vs "skedule" pronunciation for schedule.
And I've never been able to figure out what the correct way to say "homage" is.
And that accent is almost never Spanish. It’s either Mexican, Cuban, or Puerto Rican. My Spanish accent is very much Chicano, because I grew up in such a neighborhood in Southern California. Castilian Spanish sounds effete to me, and of course I sound uneducated to someone from Madrid.
Also, these pronunciations are far more common in the coastal states than flyover country.
90% of the speech outside of the big towns/cities, the Castilles and maybe Cantabria will sound uneducated or 'hick' to a Madrileño. Specially Aragon, Murcia, Extremadura and the infamous Andalusia where even the Risitas guy can be extremely hard to understand to natives outside Andalusia.
Besides, it’s cute when they try, but it’s not like most English people can pronounce French, either.
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.
In a bar I would order "bocadillo con jamon y queso" and they'd say, "Oh, you speak Spanish!"
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.
Spanish? Nah, we sunk the Armada and took Gibraltar, that's about it... and let's not forget the Argies.
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.
And shared a king: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_II_of_Spain
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)
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.
It cracks me up that the Foundland wasn't good enough (some place in the UK), so off they went to find New!
For example “claret” meaning Bordeaux blend wine is pronounced with a hard t
That is literally a valid movement of the tongue to produce a retroflex [ɭ].
In contrast, Spanish phonology lacks retroflex entirely.
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.
It means "strait".
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.
Imagine if “junta” had taken a trip up through Central Europe and then to the Scandinavians, then down, so we could pronounce it “yunta.”
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
I have heard too many people say "jally pea no", but the most frequent pronunciation of jalepeño is with a hard j
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.