Saim wrote:vijayjohn wrote:dEhiN wrote:And even though grande as used by Starbucks is Italian, I said it with a French pronunciation because I know French, not Italian.
This is probably why English-speakers in general often Frenchify words in ways that don't make much sense. Sometimes, they even take actual French words and botch the pronunciation ([ˈlɑnʒəɹej]).
Or [foɹtej]. I only recently made the connection between this word and the nearly identical Catalan fort.
[foɹˈtʰej] sounds like the opposite of what dEhiN was describing, inspired by Italian rather than French. Maybe it's specifically inspired by taking piano lessons.
linguoboy wrote:This helps explain why we so often substitute /ʒ/ for /ʤ/ in foreign names (e.g. Beijing, Taj Mahal) and pronounce ch as /ʃ/ (e.g. Chavez, Chandigarh, bruschetta) or give Germanic names like Mandel final stress.
And why my mom pronounces César Chávez as something like [ˈsiːsər ˈʃæːʋəs] and tres leches more like tress luscious. I still remember this one time that my mom got a tres leches cake from some restaurant and looked at me while telling me she was excited to eat her [ʈrɛs ləˈʃəsss] or whatever. She had a big smile on her face and was moving her eyebrows and licking her lips. It was hilarious because it was almost creepy!
I also remember my advisor complaining about this pattern of pronunciation.
I've never heard anyone pronounce a non-Spanish name with /h/ for j or g, for example.
I think I have with Indian names in particular, but I'm struggling to remember any concrete examples.