genre (was: Woody or tinny?)

At 2:21 pm -0400 19/5/01, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
[snip]
>
>As for "genre", I hate it because a) it's one of the few, if not the only,
>word with an initial /Z/, and b) because it has an /nr/ combination, which
It does have initial /Z/, but not /nr/, please!

The word is /Za~R/ - not an unpleasant IMHO.

But the original complaint IIRC was about the varying American
pronunciations (Brit ones are also odd).  I can well imagine that [nr] may
well appear in them.  But then, surely, initial /dZ/ must also occur?

Here one hears horrors like /ZQnr@/ and /dZQnr@/.  Sometimes there's
attempt at a nasal vowel - but it's almost invariably [Q~] and not the
French [a~] - most of my fellow countrymen, I regret, habitually fail to
distinguish between the French _en_ and _on_.

Ray.



=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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