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Re: How you pronunce foreign place names

From:<li_sasxsek@...>
Date:Tuesday, January 23, 2007, 15:49
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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Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...>