How do you pronounce ciabatta

[TrixieFranklin]

I've just realised my husband, mum and dad all pronounce Ciabatta completely differently.
Between them they say:
Key-a-bar-ter
Chee-bar-ter
Chee-a-bat-cha

Now I've been saying it, looking at it and thinking about it too much and the whole word looks ridiculous now!

How do you say it?

“Thank you! That is how I have always pronounced tagliatelle, but this thread made me panic a bit, and start thinking ‘spaghetti has a hard g in the middle...’

It’s the “gli” sound that makes the difference. It’s a what do you call it? A dipthong possibly? Find me a year 2 child to ask.

Chee-a-batta
Though I did hear someone pronounce it Chee-parts yesterday.

Tagliatelle - basically in Italian, ‘gli’ makes a sound that’s something like the ‘ll’ in the middle of ‘millionaire’. A sort of ‘yee’ sound, but not quite.

So it’s something like ‘ta -yee - a - TELL - eh’ although the ‘yee-a’ is almost pronounced as one.

The good thing about Italian though is that as far as pronunciation goes, once you know the rules for the various letter combinations you can pronounce almost anything, or at least have a good crack at it!

uppershopping but surely 'ch' in Spanish is pronounced like an English 'ch', like in 'mucho' and 'churros'.

uppershopping  but surely 'ch' in Spanish is pronounced like an English 'ch', like in 'mucho' and 'churros'.

Nope. The Spanish CH is not pronounced in the English way. It's pronounced in the Spanish way

But mucho is of course

Yes, 'gl' is ly in Italian. The reason the g in spaghetti is a hard g is because of the h. That's the reason the h is there, otherwise it would be pronounced spajetti, because g and c are soft before i or e, but hard before a, o and u (much like in English).

upper - I'm baffled. I'm an MFL teacher (French and German) and am studying Spanish (I'm at roughly intermediate level). I listen to loads of Spanish podcasts by native speakers and I have never heard any of them say ch as a throaty huh sound. Nor any of the Spanish teachers I've worked with. Of course it doesn't sound exactly like an English ch, but it still sounds like a ch!

Japanese language use a lot of English loan words which bare almost no resemblance to original English word. It's one of my fave things about the language

My Spanish teacher definitely said "ch".

That's funny because to me it definitely isn't as harsh as the English CH. My Spanish teacher is Columbian. I'll ask later on.

If you go on Google translate, type in chorizo and then listen to the native Spanish audio clip, it's definitely pronounced choreetho.

I conceded, it just not as harsh in conversation as an English speaker saying CH

I'm sure I've made the whole thing up now. I was so sure too. But only in the word Chorizo. I'm racking my brains to remember where I heard it. Oh well. I consider myself corrrcted anyway.

CheBATTuh.

Maybe there's some dialect where it sounds like that... The whole Spanish c=th/s thing in different areas takes a bit of getting used to!

@uppershopping

Are you thinking of the sound that sometimes replaces J and G?

As in José and Jorge? Ho-say and Hor-hey?

No, definitely chorizo! It must have been a weird dream after a hard lesson.

It must have! Ah well, these things happen.

Why do we translate foreign cities into English?

French say Londres. They also call Putin Poutine - phonetic spelling of their pronunciation, presumably, but sounds funny.

That explains it, Upper. Castilian Spanish spoken in Spain is different from Colombian Spanish and pronunciations differ, for example I know their 'll' sound is more like a hard j than a y.

Chuh-butta

Chuh-batta

a bit like..

Chewbacca

sivola - I think the ch is still ch though.

Agreed. I'm wondering if whoever said hreetho thought it started with an x so xorizo and got it wrong themselves.