pronouncing non-English words in English
One does what one can with the sounds one has. American has a perfectly respectable and widely (more than in British English) used /a/ sound. What beats me is why they don’t use is in Italian latte but, instead, say /lɑtei/. One would be forgiven for thinking, BTW, that latte meant milk — you know, all the other stuff about lactation and lactic acid. But no. It’s a type of coffee.
I had an argument with an African acquaintance called Mr Ngakane about how English-speakers might pronounce words like his name which began with /ŋ/. I can just about do it but my point was that normal (!) speakers would be better off using /j/ which is the closest English-language sound. As it was, they, untutored by me, used the rather uncomfortable-making /nagə/.
At Leeds-university in the 1970s there was a Mr Woodhead in the linguistics-department who, annually, would give a very witty talk and demonstration of click-consonants. He would amusingly imply that, the rest of the time, he was kept in a cupboard and only “wheeled out” (his term) every year to entertain the second-year English-language students with his Zulu voiceless affricated velar plosives. It came as something of a pleasant surprise to undergraduates in a long-term emotional relationship to discover that they had been practising bilabial ingressives in the back-row of the cinema without even knowing it. The question is, which closest sound in English does one choose to do for clicks? /k/ or /t/, I suppose, but how boring,
Suddenly bursting, mid-sentence, into a foreign pronunciation of just one or two words, only to lapse back into one’s estuaryese can disturb one’s audience and, even, in my case, sometimes wake them. Imagine you’re pontificating one night at a bus-shelter in Poplar about French politics and decide, perhaps a paragraph ahead of time, that you’re going to have a shot at an authentic rendition (without a safety-net) of Ségolène Royal. You’re all limbering-up for the delicious /ʁ/ at the start of her surname yet, when you do it, people think you’ve been slightly sick and offer a tissue. Try an authentic Dutch pronunciation and they give you a cough-sweet, German and they back off, Italian and they think you’re drunk.
Never try to order Grolsch lager while affecting an authentic Dutch accent. Barmen will check if you’re actually after a White Horse whisky, or maybe you need a hot toddy for that nasty cold you’ve got. If you don’t want to die of thirst, give in, go with the grain and pronounce it like it was German. Same problem with Oranjeboom lager. You’ll never get your laughing-gear around a frothy pint of that stuff in London if you don’t ask for an orange boom (which is like white noise only louder).
No, best to stick to English’s reliable old set of some 40 phonemes and, while you’re about it, really relish the final /s/ or (better still) /z/ in the well-established Parisss, Marseillezzz and Lyonzzz.
This brings me to the time-honoured British tradition of Irritating the French, which includes scrupulously pronouncing otherwise silent terminal letters. Dijon mustard must be /di’ʒɔn/ (where getting the stress wrong too really rubs it in). If a gentleman is a doyen, be sure to describe him as a doyenne. The first elements of en suite and en route are an absolute gift, and none can forget the exquisite habit of Mr John Major, former British prime minister, of pronouncing the French president’s first name as though it was something you used to change a flat tyre on a lorry.
Of course, such phonemic warfare is waged in the opposite direction. Across the Fifth Republic and her former dominions, schoolchildren are, according to a Napoleonic timetable, drilled in ensuring that their pronunciation of beat and bit are identical. This is unfortunate if, like one TV-chef I heard, you end up telling people to put items for cooking into the oven on what sounded un-nervingly like a baking-shit.
