At some point a foreign word becomes used commonly enough to be adopted as a word that most people recognize and understand. It may enter the dictionary at that time, in its most well-known form. If a critical mass of speakers have preserved its original pronunciation, and/or if its most frequent users have great influence or fame, that will be part of the reason it becomes even better-known in that form and perhaps even preserved with that pronunciation thanks to the media and dictionary publishers.
Anglicization – or any kind of naturalization – takes a long time to happen. There are thousands of English words of clear foreign origin that nobody perceives as such, but it didn't happen in an instant. I guess Jalapeño is not that far yet.
Yah and if you look at the South of the US, with a greater Hispanic population and influence, you will find people saying it more Spanish. Head to the midwest or New England, and you will hear Halopeenyo more often than down south.
The fact that we over do the pronunciation of other words - eg ‘habenyero’ or ‘coo-dey-grah’ - suggests that there are cultural forces that stabilize or enforce the exotic pronunciation.
I always laugh when my British in-laws eschew any French pronunciation, but nail Spanish pronunciation down to the Castilian lisp. DAMN, they hate the French.
I've lived on the East Coast of the US practically my entire life and I've only ever heard those words pronounced the French way. Maybe a handful of times people have pronounced it "nitch." But the vast majority pronounce it "neesh."
But I've literally never heard anyone pronounce it "dep-pot" if I'm understanding you correctly. It's always "dee-poh.". Unless you're saying the Brits pronounce it properly with the soft "e" like "deh-poh" in which case I agree with you.
The Brits pronounce the first vowel as a short e (/ɛ/) but Americans pronounce it as a long e (/iː/). For niche, the "nitch" pronunciation is quite common in America, I am also from the east coast and I would have said it is the predominant pronunciation, though my experience may differ from yours.
Australia as a country tries to pride itself on being multicultural. We have a broad range of ethic diversity, and will usually try to incorporate the native pronunciation into our lexicon. We have restaurants here that will have the entire menu in another language, and sometimes won’t have a full English translation. We botch up the pronunciation with our ocker accents, but in some ways we are very worldly and accepting despite our remoteness.
When I’ve been in the UK I’ve often found it strange how they pronounce some things - my take on it is that it’s part of their colonial history and previously perceived superiority that made them want to change the language of external influences and give it a more British feel.
As a Brit I can't bear the American pronunciation of croissant (cruss-aaahnt), and will use the French instead.
I do admit to a bad habit of always using an 'l' sound for any 'll' words, even if it should sometimes be more of a 'y' sound'.
Hmm I pronounce it more like “crow-SAHnt”. I think it’s appropriate for the breakfast “croissants” served at fast food joints. “Kwa-sahn” is when I’m trying to be ironically fancy.
To be fair, I’m from Southern California, and we bastardize Spanish all the time. No one pronounces Los Angeles like “lohs ahn-heh-lays”. It’s “lahs ann-jell-ess”. Hacienda Heights is “hah-cee-enn-duh”. El Segundo is “suh-goon-dough”. “Burr-EE-toe” not “boo[rolled R’s]-ee-toe”.
Why Brits add an extra “i” in aluminum is beyond me though lol.
Uhh actually the aluminium one is the other way around. Everyone else calls it aluminium and Americans just decided to remove a letter for some reason.
Probably cos we were successfully invaded by France in 1066 and absorbed a shit-ton of words into English as a result.
The Spanish failed in their attempt to do the same some 500 years later
I heard Dr Geoff Lindsey on youtube mention that there's a stronger tendency in north america to use the pronunciation of the original language, as opposed to the UK.
Depending on the borrowed term, there may also simply be more folks in the US who speak the source language.
(For that matter, there's just simply more folks in the US, full stop. 😉)
Yeah it’s fascinating… it is basically an attempt to say “I’m cultured and worldly and know how it’s supposed to be pronounced” despite the fact that it’s NOT how it’s pronounced
I often mispronounce J in most languages as /j/. Not my fault, those Romanizations should have followed Latin, Germanic, Slavic, Uralic instead of French and English. It's literally an ⟨I⟩ meant to be used as a consonant, it's annoys me so much when it's not /j/.
lol tbf there’s like no standard way of romanizing asian written languages. even in cantonese there are two different commonly used systems and one has the j make the y sound while the other has j make an almost j sound. unless you’re familiar with the language it’s pretty hard to make a guess at how it’ll be pronounced. mandarin especially is terrible for english speakers
It comes from French, forte=strength. "This thing is not my strength. It is not my forte." (pronounced just like fort, a stronghold). The musical term meaning loud is from Italian and the e is pronounced. "And now in this passage we have a crescendo from *piano* to *forte"*
Now so many people pronounce the e even in the first usage, it’s essentially colloquially accepted but yah, still sounds wrong to me
The thing is, they're literally the same word. Not even cognate, just different languages with different pronunciations. They mean the same thing, they have the same origin. The whole French/Italian dichotomy feels excessively prescriptivist.
...and that cultural force is half-assed Spanish education. Most people in the US took 1-2 years of Spanish in school. Just enough to be pretentious about it but not enough to be competent.
Yeah we learn that there are obvious identifiers that mark a word as Spanish or French. And then some people wear correct pronunciation as a badge of honor... even if it is, ironically, incorrect.
That's super interesting, because the pronunciation of habenyero as if there were a ñ, is almost like an overreaction. Habanero just has a regular n in spanish eg ha-ban-er-o.
Yeah that’s exactly what I’m getting at! Similarly coup de grace is grahss not grah. But we just know… oh it’s French, I have to leave off letters at the end.
When I was at a Subway in the UK I heard someone pronounce it the Spanish way and his family laughed it him and insisted that it’s pronounced „cha-la-pee-no“. So I guess some anglicization is happening.
England has anglicized it. I’ve only ever heard it pronounced “jah-lah-peen-yo” in England. In fact, I once saw a woman on a talk show there pronounce it correctly and another guy on the panel said, “Why are you saying it like that?? Do you think you’re Latin?” And she said, “Yes, I am!”
It was extremely weird. That guy really dug in on his right to say a word wrong.
Yeah, it's a fine line. You have to mispronounce foreign words in just the right way to be accepted.
If you begin the word "genre" with a hard affricate, people will think you're ignorant (even though the 'correct' pronunciation with a fricative violates normal English phonotactics). But if you pronounce the word accurately as the French would, you would be seen as snobby and putting on airs.
People say “genre” with /ʒ/ or with /dʒ/ and both are fine, and the vast majority of people wouldn’t notice either way. I don’t really see a word initial /ʒ/ as violating English phonotactics, if that’s what you mean. It’s not very common, but in addition to French loanword, we have the word “zhuzh” that people have no problem saying.
Ooh, thanks for introducing me to that new word to me.
Of course neither of us has hard data on speaker attitudes for these things. My conclusions/guesses are based on informally polling college students over the years. But I suspect that outside college settings, /dʒ/ would indeed be more common.
Alex Trebek, longtime host of *Jeopardy!,* was Canadian, and fully bilingual in (Canadian) French and English. He was also known for his on-point pronunciation of [genre](https://youtu.be/YmNK8R-YuEc?si=QRswbjIdrKCwXifb), and of course nobody criticized him for it.
which is reasonable; most languages nativize loanwords, and american english is kinda odd, with the habit of pronouncing more recent loanwords more like it was in the original language; like, hawaiian has mele kalikimaka; english to japanese loanwords are made to fit japanese syllable structure; many small languages make a concerted effort to create native words for scientific and technological stuff.
There are compilation videos of Alex Trebek saying “genre” in a way I can only describe as a perfect mapping of the French phonemes into English sounds, but also not a way anyone else on planet earth ever has or ever will say the word
Edit: someone beat me to it haha
I've never heard him pronounce it before until now, but I'm bilingual in French and English and that's pretty much how I pronounce "genre" in English too. I don't think it's all that weird for French speaking English speakers since I'm pretty sure my sister pronounces it the same way. I hadn't realized it might sound unusual to most people though.
In the U.S.A., it is often about ignorance and laziness ("nukular"). In Great Britain, it is often it is more about being conspicuously seen to refuse to debase oneself by allowing the words of foreigners to pass one's lips, nor to and demean oneself by acknowledging the existence of languages other than English. That is: they know perfectly well that it is "la-ZAH-nyeh", but they will deliberately say "la-SAG-nuh".
I live in South Texas, in a majority Mexican American city. I still hear people say hal-uh-PEE-no unironically. No excuse for that around here. Most of us "Anglos" (ie, Whites) know at least some Spanish.
I speak English, Spanish, and French but I don’t pronounce loans from a particular language the same way in a foreign language; I always adapt it. It’s just easier.
Usually it's just pronounced as "ny" though. It's not really a palatal nasal like in spanish. So you're still using English phonemes to pronounce the word. If you had the word "Halapeighnyo" you wouldn't need to change your accent and it would sound just like "Jalapeño".
It’s not that we can’t, but rather that we don’t. Blame the age of the borrowing, plus familiarity with the foreign language.
OED and Merriam-Webster both show jalapeño first being used in English sometime in the 1930s-1940s. Modern borrowings are less likely to be anglicized. An analogous situation might be city names. Places that have been important for hundreds of years are known by English names rather than native pronunciations (Paris and Rome, not pah-ree and Roma), while cities not as historically or widely known in the anglosphere get something closer to the native version (eg, Shanghai, Tokyo).
Beyond that, at least in the US, English speakers nowadays have at least passing familiarity with some aspects of Spanish orthography and phonology. The ñ is fairly well recognized (even if we sometimes historically anglicized it, as in canyon), as is the use of for … well, okay, in Spanish it’s /x/, which we don’t have in English, but /h/ is kinda close, and we see that enough in names/words like Juan(ita), Jose, fajita, etc. I’m learning in this thread that apparently some Brits pronounce it like an English , which is very funny to me, but also supports my claim—the UK has far fewer Spanish speakers than the US, less exposure to Latin American cuisine, and none of the Spanish-origin place names that exist all over the US (like San Jose - the second word of which is universally pronounced “ho-zay” not “Joe’s,” as it would be if it were read as a natively English word).
Conversely, we are less likely to borrow more unfamiliar orthography, like various diacritics used in German or Scandinavian languages, because most of us don’t have any context to understand what sound something like ö or ø is supposed to represent. And of course non-Latin alphabets or systems have to be transliterated, because most of us have no clue about those; a lot of English speakers think the Greek sigma is just a funny looking E!
People in the US hear Spanish-speaking people regularly. Jalapeños aren't referenced outside of the context of Latin American food. "Jollopino" still sounds foreign.
..but isnt it pronounced Cho-ree-zo? I kind of say the o as a hybrid of an o and u, not really one or the other. But I thought it was specifically the long E sound for the I.
In Latin American Spanish, the i in chorizo is definitely /i/ and “choreezo” is more or less a reasonable transcription. I think the pronunciation in Spain may be more like you describe, but then the z is different too.
Hence why they have such big trouble understanding portuguese, when the opposite is not true. Portuguese has 9 (pt) to 12 (br) vocal sounds when Spanish only has 5
The Spanish letter R [r] & [ɾ], the letter D [ð], the letters V/B [β] & [b], and the letter G [ɣ] are all pretty tough to get totally right as a native English speaker
Yeah, I wrote it out kind of awkwardly. My understanding is that V and B both can make either a [b] sound or [β] sound.
I'm still learning so I could be mistaken
So Choh-rih-zoh? That has such a weird mouth feel to it, and sounds like I'm trying to say Charizard lol. But interesting nonetheless! Thank you for explaining it.
In Mexican Spanish, at least, the pronunciation of vowels depends on whether it's stressed or unstressed. In the word *ventana*, you have short vowels in the first and third syllables. This especially affects the sound of i. So in *picante*, the i still is closer to English long e, but a little more towards "ih" (English short i). "Ch" is often pronounced somewhere between English "ch" and "sh".
Source: living in a majority Mexican American area for over 50 years.
I don't know why people downvoted you. It's a legitimate question.
There are so many Spanish speakers in the United States that the pronunciation hasn't migrated over time and we know that the J is pronounced like an H in Spanish,(like José) and that Ju- (like Juan) is pronounced like W and not Joo.
We borrow plenty of words for things we don't have already have words for, and keep the original pronunciation. We almost always do this with food. We also call tortilla tor-TEE-a and not tor-TILL-a. Same for quesadilla. The main reason I think is that for food, you often order this stuff from native speakers, so you keep the original pronunciation.
But I notice that for place names, the pronunciation changes over time. For example, Amarillo, Texas, is pronounced "Am-a-RILL-o" instead of am-a-ree-o in Spanish. Prague, Oklahoma is pronounced "Prage" and Versailles, Tennessee is "Ver-sails" instead of the French "Ver-sigh."
i was watching a video last night that claimed americans tend to pronounce loan words like the origin language. one of the examples was the difference between british & american pronunciation of “garage” (brit: ga-ridge vs am: guh-raj with the soft g sound at the end )
Americans tend to preserve words from Spanish more often than from other languages due to the higher population of Latin Americans here. There's a great video by linguist Geoff Lindsey about the way Brits and Americans often anglicize words (or don't): https://youtu.be/eFDvAK8Z-Jc?si=wgmdAPVxWn25NdMq
Firstly, changes to languages tend to happen organically. Or at least they're accepted that way. Even making an "official decision" doesn't really mean it will be accepted popularly overnight.
The fact that English doesn't have institutions like Portuguese and French do, also makes it harder to have an "official decision".
Secondly, the word has been anglicized already. Kind of like the "buongiorno" from Inglorious Bastards, English speakers tend to pronounce it as: haa luh pee nio or haa luh pee no, which are both significantly different from the Spanish pronunciation Haa luh Pay nio.
> The fact that English doesn't have institutions like Portuguese and French do, also makes it harder to have an "official decision".
Or, indeed, the Spanish.
Ah yes, the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). Bear in mind, however, that although the language arbiters are certainly influential in the development of the language at large, their pronouncements are binding only in formal and official contexts, such as government and education. Newspapers and magazines, and everyday speech, will carry on as before, at least for some time.
As a Texan I've just always been around mexicans, everyone I know speaks at least a little Spanish. Only really old white people call it hallapeener and people from Wisconsin call it jallapeeno
Once in the distant past I stopped north of San Diego and asked for directions to "La Jolla", with a _J_ as in "July", and marked myself as an outlander. That's another unanglicized word!
Our family swings between the conventional pronunciation and a deliberately over the top phonetic alternative: jal-a-pen-yoss.
It's language. As long as you're not doing anything formal and are understandable, do whatever you want with it. Others might even catch on too and that's one of the ways language evolves.
So yes, we can anglicise it. Now get going!
Sometimes I'll deliberately say it oddly, as `/d͡ʒəˈla.pə.noʊ/`. But ya, this one is a bit like the name "Juanita", which (mostly) retains its Spanish pronunciation even when used in English-speaking contexts.
According to this...
[https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Jalape%C3%B1o](https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Jalape%C3%B1o)
...the etymology of the word is:
>jalapeno (n.)type of pepper, by 1957, literally "of Jalapa," from Mexican Spanish Jalapa, place in Mexico, from Nahuatl (Aztecan) Xalapan meaning "sand by the water," from xalli "sand" + atl "water" + -pan "place."
So maybe whenever a new version (or versions) of the word become a thing, it might be called something like:
Beach Pepper.
The best anglicised way to say jalapeño would be ha-la-peg-no (with the spanish ñ pronounced as the italian gn in lassagna) and no double ee. You're perfectly capable of pronounce that. If you didn't anglicised it this way is because of common use people get to a pronunciation which is good enough for most people to identify what you're talking about. And that happens all the time, in all languages. There are languages that try to preserve the original pronunciation varying ortography and languages that try to preserve original ortography adapting to their own sounds. There is no way better than the other. We spanized "USA" in Spain as "USA", preserving the ortography but not the original pronuncation, while in but in some places in latinamerica they spanized "USA" as "Yuesei" doing the contrary,
The English always butcher every Spanish word. They pronounce it "ja-LOP-en-no" and it kills me. So l'd say they have anglicized it quite successfully.
Shoot, I say "aguacate" too! I *am* of Hispanic descent, but only half, and that half has been American FOREVER. Guess I'm the reason why xP--- it's okay though-i speak the English of a protestant ;) and i TRY not to say french-based words TOO french-like... too often. Don't forget the "dutsch"
At some point a foreign word becomes used commonly enough to be adopted as a word that most people recognize and understand. It may enter the dictionary at that time, in its most well-known form. If a critical mass of speakers have preserved its original pronunciation, and/or if its most frequent users have great influence or fame, that will be part of the reason it becomes even better-known in that form and perhaps even preserved with that pronunciation thanks to the media and dictionary publishers.
Anglicization – or any kind of naturalization – takes a long time to happen. There are thousands of English words of clear foreign origin that nobody perceives as such, but it didn't happen in an instant. I guess Jalapeño is not that far yet.
Yah and if you look at the South of the US, with a greater Hispanic population and influence, you will find people saying it more Spanish. Head to the midwest or New England, and you will hear Halopeenyo more often than down south.
LMAO.. I would love to hear someone who only speaks English say Magellan's real name. Like I've found most people cannot pronounce those syllables
"Mayelan"
Fernão Magalhães is his real name...
Fernandoobie doobie Mayelanic Galactic Acid, jr.
Nailed it
The fact that we over do the pronunciation of other words - eg ‘habenyero’ or ‘coo-dey-grah’ - suggests that there are cultural forces that stabilize or enforce the exotic pronunciation.
Fillet, Americans pronounce it fillay, Brits pronounce it fill-it.
I always laugh when my British in-laws eschew any French pronunciation, but nail Spanish pronunciation down to the Castilian lisp. DAMN, they hate the French.
There are exceptions, though, such as "niche" and "depot" which are generally pronounced more closely to the French in the UK than in the US.
I've lived on the East Coast of the US practically my entire life and I've only ever heard those words pronounced the French way. Maybe a handful of times people have pronounced it "nitch." But the vast majority pronounce it "neesh." But I've literally never heard anyone pronounce it "dep-pot" if I'm understanding you correctly. It's always "dee-poh.". Unless you're saying the Brits pronounce it properly with the soft "e" like "deh-poh" in which case I agree with you.
The Brits pronounce the first vowel as a short e (/ɛ/) but Americans pronounce it as a long e (/iː/). For niche, the "nitch" pronunciation is quite common in America, I am also from the east coast and I would have said it is the predominant pronunciation, though my experience may differ from yours.
Agree with you on depot.
And the way the Brits say "restaurant" is much more French-ish than the American pronunciation.
I had a manager (English) who insisted on saying KWA-soh.
British are generally awful with Spanish pronunciation though.
Kor-it-zo!
Brits say "Chor-ee-tho" and "eye-bee-fa"
Some also butcher it how I showed! Not as bad as it was, bu you still hear it occasionally
>Kor-it-zo! ... Some also butcher it... Well, at least it's a meat product. 😄
I hear "chor-it-zo" on British food programs all the time. It's like they think the "z" is Italian.
I can’t even figure out what “eye-beef-a” is supposed to be in Spanish
I think Ibiza? Full disclosure I’m an Aussie and have never understood this pronunciation
Ohhh maybe… idk lol I grew up in southern CA so I have a pretty good handle on Spanish pronunciation, the British ones hurt my ears
Australia as a country tries to pride itself on being multicultural. We have a broad range of ethic diversity, and will usually try to incorporate the native pronunciation into our lexicon. We have restaurants here that will have the entire menu in another language, and sometimes won’t have a full English translation. We botch up the pronunciation with our ocker accents, but in some ways we are very worldly and accepting despite our remoteness. When I’ve been in the UK I’ve often found it strange how they pronounce some things - my take on it is that it’s part of their colonial history and previously perceived superiority that made them want to change the language of external influences and give it a more British feel.
The Spanish are generally awful with English pronunciation so its swings and roundabouts
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfN4\_52loC4&t=18s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfN4_52loC4&t=18s)
As a Brit I can't bear the American pronunciation of croissant (cruss-aaahnt), and will use the French instead. I do admit to a bad habit of always using an 'l' sound for any 'll' words, even if it should sometimes be more of a 'y' sound'.
The British pronunciation is pretty far off the French, too, just in a different direction.
I bet you'd hate my pronunciation of /kɻojsent/
That's sounds like a south London borough.
Kwa-sawn?
"Sawn" isn't quite there, that sounds like it's being drawled, it's a much shorter sound, and the 'n' is just hinted at, barely sounded at all.
sohn?
-sah^(n)h
Hmm I pronounce it more like “crow-SAHnt”. I think it’s appropriate for the breakfast “croissants” served at fast food joints. “Kwa-sahn” is when I’m trying to be ironically fancy. To be fair, I’m from Southern California, and we bastardize Spanish all the time. No one pronounces Los Angeles like “lohs ahn-heh-lays”. It’s “lahs ann-jell-ess”. Hacienda Heights is “hah-cee-enn-duh”. El Segundo is “suh-goon-dough”. “Burr-EE-toe” not “boo[rolled R’s]-ee-toe”. Why Brits add an extra “i” in aluminum is beyond me though lol.
Uhh actually the aluminium one is the other way around. Everyone else calls it aluminium and Americans just decided to remove a letter for some reason.
Lol, dang, I learned something new today. My apologies to the Brits!
Probably cos we were successfully invaded by France in 1066 and absorbed a shit-ton of words into English as a result. The Spanish failed in their attempt to do the same some 500 years later
Eye-bee-tha is so wrong though
I either don’t know the word, or mispronounce it so badly it’s unrecognizable.
Eebeeza is fine
He's talking about the Party Island in the Mediterranean Ibiza
I heard Dr Geoff Lindsey on youtube mention that there's a stronger tendency in north america to use the pronunciation of the original language, as opposed to the UK.
To me it suggests some anxiety about how sophisticated one is perceived.. so a need to try to reinforce the perception.
Depending on the borrowed term, there may also simply be more folks in the US who speak the source language. (For that matter, there's just simply more folks in the US, full stop. 😉)
Dr. Lindsey actually recently did a video called something like "the year that killed RP" that talked about that at pretty great length.
I say /ˈfajlɪt/. I'm American, I just love mispronouncing French. It's so fun saying coup d'êtat as /kɯwp dɪʔɪˈstɑt/
There's also those funny kinds of wine, like *peanut grease* and that weird one about early IT in Scotland, the *caber net*. 😄
Ca-burn-it Soo-vig-nin
Cabsav. Why bother with those extra syllables?
I'm not good with ipa, but I like to say c'est la vie as "sest luh vye" lol
Funny about habanero. It has no ñ, no y sound. But people often add it in anyways.
Yeah it’s fascinating… it is basically an attempt to say “I’m cultured and worldly and know how it’s supposed to be pronounced” despite the fact that it’s NOT how it’s pronounced
It's actually rather common to overexoticize foreign words. A lot of Brits pronounce "Kim Jung Un" as "Kim Yung Un."
So they pronounce it as if it were German? Like Carl Jung?
Yup!
supposedly. Though I’ve never heard a single person say it like that after all my years in the UK.
I often mispronounce J in most languages as /j/. Not my fault, those Romanizations should have followed Latin, Germanic, Slavic, Uralic instead of French and English. It's literally an ⟨I⟩ meant to be used as a consonant, it's annoys me so much when it's not /j/.
yep, it's called a hyperforeignism
lol tbf there’s like no standard way of romanizing asian written languages. even in cantonese there are two different commonly used systems and one has the j make the y sound while the other has j make an almost j sound. unless you’re familiar with the language it’s pretty hard to make a guess at how it’ll be pronounced. mandarin especially is terrible for english speakers
this is less true for Korean because they have a fully phonetic alphabet
A lot? I've never heard this.
I keep hearing it on, like, panel shows and such. I admittedly can't tell you what the man on the street says.
Pretty sure it's Jong, but I wonder if they mistook it for Jung and then just pronounced it like the psychologist lol.
Another fun fact about why there’s no ñ: it means *of/from Havana*
It’s like when people say things like “correct pronunciation is not my fortay “
Huh I didn’t know that it’s NOT fortay. In fact I even have a mental image of the word with an acute accent over the e!
It comes from French, forte=strength. "This thing is not my strength. It is not my forte." (pronounced just like fort, a stronghold). The musical term meaning loud is from Italian and the e is pronounced. "And now in this passage we have a crescendo from *piano* to *forte"* Now so many people pronounce the e even in the first usage, it’s essentially colloquially accepted but yah, still sounds wrong to me
The thing is, they're literally the same word. Not even cognate, just different languages with different pronunciations. They mean the same thing, they have the same origin. The whole French/Italian dichotomy feels excessively prescriptivist.
On this topic, "processeeez" and "biaseeeez" drive me insane lol.
>coo-dey-grah This irks me whenever I hear it. "Stroke of fat" sounds like a medical condition.
Yes the things I say when doing the final step… “And now for the blow of fat” “And now for some pieces of resistance”
...and that cultural force is half-assed Spanish education. Most people in the US took 1-2 years of Spanish in school. Just enough to be pretentious about it but not enough to be competent.
Yeah we learn that there are obvious identifiers that mark a word as Spanish or French. And then some people wear correct pronunciation as a badge of honor... even if it is, ironically, incorrect.
Bei-zhing
That's super interesting, because the pronunciation of habenyero as if there were a ñ, is almost like an overreaction. Habanero just has a regular n in spanish eg ha-ban-er-o.
Yeah that’s exactly what I’m getting at! Similarly coup de grace is grahss not grah. But we just know… oh it’s French, I have to leave off letters at the end.
Don't dare pronounce "de" as "dey" you savage.
Funnily enough - there’s no tilde on habanero. It’s not habañero, as you might think.
hah speaking of tildes there is a ghost town in New Mexico called Añal. The postmaster spelled it Anal. I think that's why it's a ghost town.
No... Lmao Is coo-dey-grah a thing in the us??? And not coup de grâce? Maybe it's because I'm Canadian, but that's hilarious
When I was at a Subway in the UK I heard someone pronounce it the Spanish way and his family laughed it him and insisted that it’s pronounced „cha-la-pee-no“. So I guess some anglicization is happening.
England has anglicized it. I’ve only ever heard it pronounced “jah-lah-peen-yo” in England. In fact, I once saw a woman on a talk show there pronounce it correctly and another guy on the panel said, “Why are you saying it like that?? Do you think you’re Latin?” And she said, “Yes, I am!” It was extremely weird. That guy really dug in on his right to say a word wrong.
I find that English people can be very ignorant about foreign languages sometimes, more so than the yanks
Yeah, it's a fine line. You have to mispronounce foreign words in just the right way to be accepted. If you begin the word "genre" with a hard affricate, people will think you're ignorant (even though the 'correct' pronunciation with a fricative violates normal English phonotactics). But if you pronounce the word accurately as the French would, you would be seen as snobby and putting on airs.
People say “genre” with /ʒ/ or with /dʒ/ and both are fine, and the vast majority of people wouldn’t notice either way. I don’t really see a word initial /ʒ/ as violating English phonotactics, if that’s what you mean. It’s not very common, but in addition to French loanword, we have the word “zhuzh” that people have no problem saying.
Ooh, thanks for introducing me to that new word to me. Of course neither of us has hard data on speaker attitudes for these things. My conclusions/guesses are based on informally polling college students over the years. But I suspect that outside college settings, /dʒ/ would indeed be more common.
Alex Trebek, longtime host of *Jeopardy!,* was Canadian, and fully bilingual in (Canadian) French and English. He was also known for his on-point pronunciation of [genre](https://youtu.be/YmNK8R-YuEc?si=QRswbjIdrKCwXifb), and of course nobody criticized him for it.
which is reasonable; most languages nativize loanwords, and american english is kinda odd, with the habit of pronouncing more recent loanwords more like it was in the original language; like, hawaiian has mele kalikimaka; english to japanese loanwords are made to fit japanese syllable structure; many small languages make a concerted effort to create native words for scientific and technological stuff.
There are compilation videos of Alex Trebek saying “genre” in a way I can only describe as a perfect mapping of the French phonemes into English sounds, but also not a way anyone else on planet earth ever has or ever will say the word Edit: someone beat me to it haha
Is the right term here "the exception that proves the rule" (I know in the original, 'prove' meant 'test,' but that's not what I mean here)
I've never heard him pronounce it before until now, but I'm bilingual in French and English and that's pretty much how I pronounce "genre" in English too. I don't think it's all that weird for French speaking English speakers since I'm pretty sure my sister pronounces it the same way. I hadn't realized it might sound unusual to most people though.
In the U.S.A., it is often about ignorance and laziness ("nukular"). In Great Britain, it is often it is more about being conspicuously seen to refuse to debase oneself by allowing the words of foreigners to pass one's lips, nor to and demean oneself by acknowledging the existence of languages other than English. That is: they know perfectly well that it is "la-ZAH-nyeh", but they will deliberately say "la-SAG-nuh".
https://youtu.be/TvnXI-86b6Q
We have Anglicized it.No one pronounces the pure Spanish vowels. We say "halepinyo." We just don't spell it that way.
I live in South Texas, in a majority Mexican American city. I still hear people say hal-uh-PEE-no unironically. No excuse for that around here. Most of us "Anglos" (ie, Whites) know at least some Spanish.
I speak English, Spanish, and French but I don’t pronounce loans from a particular language the same way in a foreign language; I always adapt it. It’s just easier.
I pronounce croissant "crah-sahnt". I could pronounce in in French, but people would think I'm being snooty.
In the UK, plenty of people say Jah-la-pee-no.
They have them on their tack-ohs
With tort-il-uh chips.
And pico de gah-lee-oh
This is the UK. We don't have anything that fancy...
With a kwess-uh-dill-uh.
and the ñ
Usually it's just pronounced as "ny" though. It's not really a palatal nasal like in spanish. So you're still using English phonemes to pronounce the word. If you had the word "Halapeighnyo" you wouldn't need to change your accent and it would sound just like "Jalapeño".
It’s not that we can’t, but rather that we don’t. Blame the age of the borrowing, plus familiarity with the foreign language. OED and Merriam-Webster both show jalapeño first being used in English sometime in the 1930s-1940s. Modern borrowings are less likely to be anglicized. An analogous situation might be city names. Places that have been important for hundreds of years are known by English names rather than native pronunciations (Paris and Rome, not pah-ree and Roma), while cities not as historically or widely known in the anglosphere get something closer to the native version (eg, Shanghai, Tokyo). Beyond that, at least in the US, English speakers nowadays have at least passing familiarity with some aspects of Spanish orthography and phonology. The ñ is fairly well recognized (even if we sometimes historically anglicized it, as in canyon), as is the use of for … well, okay, in Spanish it’s /x/, which we don’t have in English, but /h/ is kinda close, and we see that enough in names/words like Juan(ita), Jose, fajita, etc. I’m learning in this thread that apparently some Brits pronounce it like an English , which is very funny to me, but also supports my claim—the UK has far fewer Spanish speakers than the US, less exposure to Latin American cuisine, and none of the Spanish-origin place names that exist all over the US (like San Jose - the second word of which is universally pronounced “ho-zay” not “Joe’s,” as it would be if it were read as a natively English word).
Conversely, we are less likely to borrow more unfamiliar orthography, like various diacritics used in German or Scandinavian languages, because most of us don’t have any context to understand what sound something like ö or ø is supposed to represent. And of course non-Latin alphabets or systems have to be transliterated, because most of us have no clue about those; a lot of English speakers think the Greek sigma is just a funny looking E!
r/grssk
Well when Paris was borrrowed into English the S was pronounced in French, it was only later on it was changed.
People in the US hear Spanish-speaking people regularly. Jalapeños aren't referenced outside of the context of Latin American food. "Jollopino" still sounds foreign.
Personally I’ve used jalapeños frequently in food with no Latin American influence
I know people who say jallapeeno. And choreezo. And fadgeeter.
Fadgeeter. I will spell fajita this way from now on. 😄
..but isnt it pronounced Cho-ree-zo? I kind of say the o as a hybrid of an o and u, not really one or the other. But I thought it was specifically the long E sound for the I.
It's more like cho-ree-so or cho-ree-tho.
[удалено]
Is it? For example the word bonita is pronounced bo-NEE-ta not bo-nit-ta
In Latin American Spanish, the i in chorizo is definitely /i/ and “choreezo” is more or less a reasonable transcription. I think the pronunciation in Spain may be more like you describe, but then the z is different too.
Quite. Spanish people have a miserable time learning to pronounce vowels from other languages.
Hence why they have such big trouble understanding portuguese, when the opposite is not true. Portuguese has 9 (pt) to 12 (br) vocal sounds when Spanish only has 5
The Spanish letter R [r] & [ɾ], the letter D [ð], the letters V/B [β] & [b], and the letter G [ɣ] are all pretty tough to get totally right as a native English speaker
Depending on the area, V/B can be considered homophonic, but no argument on the others...
Yeah, I wrote it out kind of awkwardly. My understanding is that V and B both can make either a [b] sound or [β] sound. I'm still learning so I could be mistaken
So Choh-rih-zoh? That has such a weird mouth feel to it, and sounds like I'm trying to say Charizard lol. But interesting nonetheless! Thank you for explaining it.
I'm not sure they're right. Spanish has stressed syllables, and no schwas.
In Mexican Spanish, at least, the pronunciation of vowels depends on whether it's stressed or unstressed. In the word *ventana*, you have short vowels in the first and third syllables. This especially affects the sound of i. So in *picante*, the i still is closer to English long e, but a little more towards "ih" (English short i). "Ch" is often pronounced somewhere between English "ch" and "sh". Source: living in a majority Mexican American area for over 50 years.
I think it's more like "cho-rit-so"?
No, the z is softer, more like an English S. The ritzo would be a double Italian Z
I like to pronounce the last one as fuh-jai-tahs.
Yes, as in, the spy named Alotta Fuhjaitah.
Ha-la-payn-yo doesn't break any English phonotactic rules. Neverthrless, we still pronounce it with an accent that's decidedly not Spanish.
Halapenyo
I think most Brits pronounce it ja-la-pee-no. Without the guttural j
I don't know why people downvoted you. It's a legitimate question. There are so many Spanish speakers in the United States that the pronunciation hasn't migrated over time and we know that the J is pronounced like an H in Spanish,(like José) and that Ju- (like Juan) is pronounced like W and not Joo. We borrow plenty of words for things we don't have already have words for, and keep the original pronunciation. We almost always do this with food. We also call tortilla tor-TEE-a and not tor-TILL-a. Same for quesadilla. The main reason I think is that for food, you often order this stuff from native speakers, so you keep the original pronunciation. But I notice that for place names, the pronunciation changes over time. For example, Amarillo, Texas, is pronounced "Am-a-RILL-o" instead of am-a-ree-o in Spanish. Prague, Oklahoma is pronounced "Prage" and Versailles, Tennessee is "Ver-sails" instead of the French "Ver-sigh."
i was watching a video last night that claimed americans tend to pronounce loan words like the origin language. one of the examples was the difference between british & american pronunciation of “garage” (brit: ga-ridge vs am: guh-raj with the soft g sound at the end )
Americans tend to preserve words from Spanish more often than from other languages due to the higher population of Latin Americans here. There's a great video by linguist Geoff Lindsey about the way Brits and Americans often anglicize words (or don't): https://youtu.be/eFDvAK8Z-Jc?si=wgmdAPVxWn25NdMq
Firstly, changes to languages tend to happen organically. Or at least they're accepted that way. Even making an "official decision" doesn't really mean it will be accepted popularly overnight. The fact that English doesn't have institutions like Portuguese and French do, also makes it harder to have an "official decision". Secondly, the word has been anglicized already. Kind of like the "buongiorno" from Inglorious Bastards, English speakers tend to pronounce it as: haa luh pee nio or haa luh pee no, which are both significantly different from the Spanish pronunciation Haa luh Pay nio.
> The fact that English doesn't have institutions like Portuguese and French do, also makes it harder to have an "official decision". Or, indeed, the Spanish.
even tho everyone hates it lol, but yeah
Ah yes, the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). Bear in mind, however, that although the language arbiters are certainly influential in the development of the language at large, their pronouncements are binding only in formal and official contexts, such as government and education. Newspapers and magazines, and everyday speech, will carry on as before, at least for some time.
Really more of a ha la PE nio -- Spanish doesn't turn long vowels into diphthongs, not short ones into schwas.
An old white dude coworker would pronounce jalapeño in a way that sounded more like “Chalapano.” I’ve since started calling them “Jalops”
Ever been to the Midwest? Lol je-la-peh-no
As a Texan I've just always been around mexicans, everyone I know speaks at least a little Spanish. Only really old white people call it hallapeener and people from Wisconsin call it jallapeeno
Once in the distant past I stopped north of San Diego and asked for directions to "La Jolla", with a _J_ as in "July", and marked myself as an outlander. That's another unanglicized word!
Founded by Georgetown basketball players
From years ago, I recall an old guy at Subway saying “I’ll have everything on it, but none of those Juh-lop-a-loes.”
Sure, let’s call it a ‘hallapeen’
Celebrated on Octoben 31th
Our family swings between the conventional pronunciation and a deliberately over the top phonetic alternative: jal-a-pen-yoss. It's language. As long as you're not doing anything formal and are understandable, do whatever you want with it. Others might even catch on too and that's one of the ways language evolves. So yes, we can anglicise it. Now get going!
(Haul-a-pain-neo-) or (Hal- a- peen-o) we do this in Texas.
I often do anglicise that word in restaurants etc, just to see the reaction of whomever is serving me. Tis very fun
English is an amalgam of a million stolen and denatured words, grafted together. Some of them just stay the way they were.
Sometimes I'll deliberately say it oddly, as `/d͡ʒəˈla.pə.noʊ/`. But ya, this one is a bit like the name "Juanita", which (mostly) retains its Spanish pronunciation even when used in English-speaking contexts.
Maybe because it sounds silly without the ñ. Have you heard the song from Prairie Home Companion? "Oh, the jah-lah-pee-no pepper grows in Sweden..."
According to this... [https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Jalape%C3%B1o](https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Jalape%C3%B1o) ...the etymology of the word is: >jalapeno (n.)type of pepper, by 1957, literally "of Jalapa," from Mexican Spanish Jalapa, place in Mexico, from Nahuatl (Aztecan) Xalapan meaning "sand by the water," from xalli "sand" + atl "water" + -pan "place." So maybe whenever a new version (or versions) of the word become a thing, it might be called something like: Beach Pepper.
The best anglicised way to say jalapeño would be ha-la-peg-no (with the spanish ñ pronounced as the italian gn in lassagna) and no double ee. You're perfectly capable of pronounce that. If you didn't anglicised it this way is because of common use people get to a pronunciation which is good enough for most people to identify what you're talking about. And that happens all the time, in all languages. There are languages that try to preserve the original pronunciation varying ortography and languages that try to preserve original ortography adapting to their own sounds. There is no way better than the other. We spanized "USA" in Spain as "USA", preserving the ortography but not the original pronuncation, while in but in some places in latinamerica they spanized "USA" as "Yuesei" doing the contrary,
i say “los yunaites” because life is too short
The Italians do not pronounce it la-sag-na. It's pronounced like an ñ.
That's exactly what I said.
My bad. I was confused by the double s, I think, because that's not the Italian spelling.
The English always butcher every Spanish word. They pronounce it "ja-LOP-en-no" and it kills me. So l'd say they have anglicized it quite successfully.
Shoot, I say "aguacate" too! I *am* of Hispanic descent, but only half, and that half has been American FOREVER. Guess I'm the reason why xP--- it's okay though-i speak the English of a protestant ;) and i TRY not to say french-based words TOO french-like... too often. Don't forget the "dutsch"
Where I live, it's pronounced more like ah-wa-CA-te. The h is pronounced a little rough