about people who pronounce cayenne "kye-ann"

[GrandTheftQuarto]

They should all be shot.

See also: chewmeric, cardamon, and cummin.

Yes I know this is unreasonable. Especially for cummin.

Grandtheft, no I wasn't counting chill sauce etc. But I live where the supermarkets have lots and lots of different kinds of dried and fresh peppers (I'm not counting fresh, mainly because I have very little fresh in the house right now but if I wanted to walk to the store five minutes away has two different types of fresh jalapeño for instance, plus fresh poblanos and habeneros). For instance, our equivalent of Tesco (Ralphs) own brand has several different types of chill powder including ancho (dried poblano) and chipotle (smoked jalapeño), we have a jar of red chill flakes, DH likes them on pizza. I also have whole ancho peppers and pasillas from when we learned how to make tamales and bought them along with corn husks and a gigantic pork shoulder from Costco. They make great mole in the blender. I have chill de arbol for when soup needs a little spicy something. BTW while we are talking about pasillas wonder if anyone knows how to pronounce Oaxaca (don't cheat!) it is a state in Mexico which is known here for making cheese that is great on quesadillas. I also have three different kinds of paprika, hot, sweet and smoked (my favourite, especially on poached eggs) and then I have the usual peppercorn type of peppers.

selfconfessedspoonyfucker

I agree with Scone, I live very close to the Mexican border so it would be wrong and weird here to, say, pronounce guacamole with a g

Mexicans pronounce "guacamole" with a "g".

The "g" before the ua dipthong is not softened to a throaty "g"/softish "h" sound as it would be before an "i" ( like "gigante", pronounced "heeGANtay") or an "e" (like "generacion" pronounced "henerasION" ).

It's a hard "g" - gwackamolay - another example of this is the word for "glove " - guante pronounced "gwantay".

Good question re Oaxaca, spoony. I won't give it away but there is a chain of resturants in London which has as its name the phonetic spelling of "Oaxaca".

My dp drives me nuts, he says "New Luke" for new look.
"Hawoleen" for Halloween.
"Chester drawers" for chest of drawers.
"Three pea sweet" for three puice suite.
My new bugbear" the back kitchen" we've just moved to a house where the kitchen is in the front but to him it's still "the back kitchen"

Food wise- how about pain au chocolat?

We're in Liverpool and I say "pan o chocola" sounds strange though:)

Do people really get het up about these things?

I suppose then it is OK for me to sneer at all those who insists on pronouncing HYUNDAI as Hye-un Day. Nope. It is a Korean Company, and should be pronounced Hyun-deh. Simple, but seems to be impossible for ignorant Westerners to do. The company does not even try to correct as they feel it is beyond your capability to pronounce it correctly.

See - pretty petty and really NOT important.

For the person above who was being snotty about Parmesan - nope, an Italian would cringe as it is Parmigiano (par-me-gi-ahn- oh) Romana. Parmesan is an English bastardisation. If you are going to be snotty, at least be accurate.

I could continue:

Sushi is not Sue-she, but suh-she, sushi is equally pronounced incorrectly
soba is not So-bah, but so-bah
satsuma is not Sat-SUE-msah, but SAT-suh-mah
etc.

Really, who cares?!?!

sashimi is equally mispronounced (!)

I give up - stupid autocorrect. Soba is -soh-bah

Jessie, here it is pronounced like hwa-ca-mole

...which is probably because it isn't originally spanish in origin.

They should all be shot.

See also: chewmeric, cardamon, and cummin.

Yes I know this is unreasonable. Especially for cummin.

Good God no, not unreasonable AT ALL! Where do people get off thinking it's okay to ignore letters that are clearly there? Turmeric has an R in it FFS, it's there quite clearly for all to see, and I can't think of a single other word that would be similarly abused. It doesn't happen with surmount, surmise, turnaround or burka, does it?

And why change letters for no good reason? It's Cardamom. Read it. CARDAMOM.

I live in an Islamic country and I am and at how many expats who have lived here for years and should know better, still call Ramadan Ramadam. Eejits.

MuddhaofSuburbia you asked upthread

*clear something up for me would you

have skimmed thread and none the wiser

I SWEAR in Mexico chorizo is ccccchorEEEzo (where the cccchhh is a gargle rather than soft, and the zed is just a zed)

but here it seems to be shor ITZ oh [BOGGLE]

where is that t from? Is it Correct?

i know in Spanish spanish it would be with a thththth -but that shorley showing off*

My humble attempt at a definitive guide:

CH: In all forms of Spanish this is the same as our "ch" in chips. Exactly the same. No soft gargling or throatiness or any sound that doesn't come naturally to an English speaker.

O: a short "o" like the o in "off".

R: like the "r" in "reason". It is not excessively rolled, because you only roll in Spanish when you have a double "r" ( example "churros")

I: "ee" like in "cheese". This is the syllable that is stressed.

Z: in Castilian Spanish, "th" as in "thought". In Latin America and some parts of Spain "s" as in "bless". never ever ever for God's sake NEVER "tz". That is nonsense made up by Delia Smith and her ilk who seem to have got mixed up with Italian and are perhaps thinking of something like "Calzone"

O: a longer "o", like the "o" in "only"

"ChawrEEssoh" or "ChawrEEthoh"

Muchas gracias.

*spoony" in Mexico ( I have spent a lot of time there and eaten a lot of guacamole) it's definitely a hard "g".

I think it's okay to pronounce the l in almond or not, as you prefer, like pronouncing the t in often, but it has to stay soft and the first syllable should always rhyme with are not all or pal. I judge people who say all-mond, or who say al-mond to rhyme with pal-mond.

Here you go "spoony" - we are both right! Perhaps the Mexicans near the border (I don't know that area) display the limguistic variation explained here.

spanish.about.com/od/spanishpronunciation/a/Is-The-G-In-Guacamole-Silent.htm

Quite possibly. I've lived here over 15 years (I'm in San Diego and live about twenty miles from the border) and one of my best friends is from Mexico city. I'll have to see how she pronounces it.

My favourite was a pompous git on CDWM who pronounced prosciutto like 'prosecuto.' That was good

I need to really concentrate when reading southern English people's phonetic spellings of certain words - I'm Scottish and obviously we don't say lar-tay for latte because there's no 'r' in there!

Same here Agent - also Scottish.

However I think that the use of the silent English "r" when writing phonetically is useful as it lengthens the preceding syllable. So they write "lar" to signify what we would have to write as "laa". Trouble is that if we forget they are English and read it Scottish-phonetically we read it as "lar", voicing the "r" and wonder what is going on!

I recently learned about the correct pronounciation of the country name "Myanmar" (new name for Burma). In my Scottish way I used to pronounce it "mee- an - marr". But on reading up, and listening to the Burmese people when I visited, I found out that the "r" is silent but the final "a" is long. They don't write in our script at all, so what happened was that it was phonetically transcribed by an RP English speaker who used the "r" to signify the long "a" but never meant it to be pronounced.

My uncle used to say wAsps and not wOsps. Is that wrong? Sounds well stupid. I once repeated it in a kind of take the piss type way and my dad smacked me round the back of the head. So now I never question how people pronounce things.

Yesterday, vagndidit asked

Will someone explain to me how Peugeot becomes "Purr-jhoe".. That drives me batty...

and mamababa replied

How else would you pronounce Peugeot? In France the peu word is pronounced pur. I would also assume in French that g becomes j (but softer, maybe like zh).

and eot is 'oh'

I agreed with mamababa at first on this as she is spot on with the French pronounciation. However looking back at vagndidit's post I wonder if she was being driven batty by people VOICING an "r" in the middle of "Peugeot", hence she said "purr" not "pur"? I think I have indeed heard this.

In which case, vagndidit, I feel your pain!

My (lovely) in laws say h-YOO-moose for hummus. Makes me wince every time.

Maybe they've been watching too much Gigglebiz.

I think those who insist on pronouncing words in the accent of the country from which they originated sound quite daft. I'm sure other countries don't do it, it's just our obsession with class.

I agree with this. I have also never heard of people thinking it would be acceptable to do the same in a chinese or indian restaurant.

I think there's a middle ground though, isn't there? Pronouncing something correctly doesn't necessarily mean putting on a foreign accent.

So think "baguette" for example. We can all say that fine in whatever accent our English mother tongue has given us (English, Scottish, American, South African) without putting on a French accent. However where most people on this thread would draw the line would be if someone insisted on calling it, for example a "bag-you-et".

IMHO this is not about putting on an accent, it's about understanding what sounds the foreign spelling system wants us to use. We can then make those sounds in our own accent. So using my example of "chorizo" above, all the sounds that I described exist in English and so it's perfectly possible to say "chorizo" in an English, Irish or Canadian accent.

Interesting point about people not "doing accents" in a Chinese or Indian restaurant. Agreed, but neither of those cultures writes using our letters. So the names of the dishes have already been transcribed using our spelling system. All we have to do is read them out using the spelling rules that we are familiar with and we will get them right.

I love how every so often someone stomps onto this thread, all upset, and tells us off for being over-invested and taking it all too seriously