Re: genre (was: Woody or tinny?)

Raymond Brown wrote:

>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>

English words with initial /Z/ are extremely rare, generally uncommon, and
almost always mangled.  Ditto for medial and final /Z/ (we discussed
"garage" a while back).

>It does have initial /Z/, but not /nr/, please!
>
>The word is /Za~R/ - not an unpleasant IMHO.>
True-- if you're speaking French.  Also /Za~R@/.

>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_.

I regret to say that your first horror /ZQnr@/ is my pronunciation, and
likely that of most people who would have occasion to use the word in US
English.  Unless I'm being very careful, I too fail to distinguish Fr. /en/
/on/ (and was mortified, when once teaching a linguistics class, to have
been corrected by the two Francophone African students......)

We have, of course, the already acclimated form, "gender".

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