Re: How you pronunce foreign place names

li [Mark J. Reed] mi tulis la

> When sufficiently educated (whether formally or via life experience),
> Anglophones have two distinct sets of rules for converting unfamiliar
> written words to speech sounds: one for English words and one for
> "foreign" words.  The latter includes the Latin vowels, /Z/ or /j/ for
> |j|,  etc.  So unfamiliar names often come out with a pronunciation
> that conforms to neither Englsh or native patterns.
I wonder how much of this is related to French. After all, English borrowed a
lot of vocabulary from French over its history and possibly left a legacy of
<j> being /Z/ in loanwords, at least until the loanwords become more
assimilated where they will take on the fully anglicized /dZ/. We still have
words like "garage" with the last <g> being /dZ/ or /Z/ depending on the
speaker.

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