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Comment by teachrdan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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America 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.

Apparently, workers on the Gemini space program pronounced it "Jeh-mih-nee" back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini#Pronunciation

the 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!

I'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.

The plural is what gets me though crepes (just sounds weird as krehps vs krayps).

I 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. :)

I 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!

>America is at least as guilty of mispronouncing non-english words it's just natural drift.

See also: Cairo, IL or Versailles, KY...

Or Wilkes-Barre, PA

Or Montpelier, VT!

Delhi, Ca -> Del-High

Fontainebleau State Park -> Fountain Blue State Park

These were two off the ones that really stood out from my travels.

Calais, ME

Or Pueblo, Salida and Buena Vista CO

Birmingham, AL

Detroit, MI

Is the Illinois one the same pronunciation as "KAY-ro", Georgia?

Notre Dame, IN

Not just Americans! I will add the small town of L'Ardoise, NS, pronounced "Lordways".

I’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.

It'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.

> 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!

"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.

Interestingly in British english valet would rhyme with cadet if you were referring to a servant and not to someone who will park your car.

Those 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'!

It'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

Yep. 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.)

As a Brit, my understanding of the American pronunciation was from Italian immigrants in the US.

Oybs

So 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.

Surely the American way of saying "REN-uh-saunce" is further from the French than the British pronunciation?

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