Vest and Goose
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - february 04 ]
I am a bear of Little Brain, and long words bother me. - Pooh
That's how they pronounce Westinghouse in French: Vest and Goose, more or less, mostly more.
The Westinghouse Factory, "la fabrique Westinghouse", is a landmark near where I live in Quebec. That's where you turn left to go to the Wal-Mart. When I first heard of it, I thought they made goose-down-filled vests there. Then I saw the sign: Westinghouse.
When my French-speaking friends refer to the old James Bond as "Scene KunnerY," or Greenwich Village as "Green Veesh VillAZH," or Abbot and Costello as "a Butt e cost HellO," It reminds me of how English speakers murder French. But our mispronunciations of French are not funny to us English speakers. Neither are French speakers' mispronunciations of English funny to them. Mispronunciation causes misunderstanding and embarrassment.
It's a problem of perception, of hearing, or seeing, while understanding. Both English and French have two interlocking systems of perception within each language, like all written languages. Understanding the spoken language is not the same as understanding the written language. If you ever want to learn to speak a language fluently and correctly, do not learn to read it first.
The way we speak influences the way we spell, and vice versa. We have been spelling French and English for centuries, and over the centuries the pronunciations of both have been changing, so the letters no longer represent the sounds accurately.
French pronunciation goes according to one system; French spelling another. The same is true of English. And for years the systems have been conflicting with and influencing each other as users of the two languages interact. This kind of language change is called creolization. A creole is a language heavily influenced by another language, or a person whose native language has been creolized. English is a creolized language.
English and French have been creolizing each other for centuries. We use French as part of English, for many reasons, and vice versa.
Of course, French speakers are perverse and solipsistic, utterly convinced that for all practical purposes they are the only people in the world, that their way of life is the essence of perfection, especially in essentials like speaking and eating. But that is another matter.
Americans murder French. If you pronounce vis-à-vis as VEEZ a VEE, you should say fleur-de-lis the same way, right?
Wrong. It's FLER — da LEASE. [Yes, it is sometimes spelled lys.]
When we speak, we do not pronounce letters. Rather, we pronounce consonants and vowels, which are vocal sounds. The sounds came before the spelling came, at least they did originally in the sense that speech precedes writing.
Some instances of pronunciation mark English and French speakers as foreigners, some are amusing because of their distortion, and some suggest the speaker's ignorance. In order to show such pronunciation in writing, I am using here some arbitrary, made-up, nonce spelling devices. I must not use the International Phonetic Alphabet, because many readers do not know how to read it. Americans, in particular, are not taught to use the alphabet that represents sounds accurately, the IPA, unless they happen to study a foreign language beyond the introductory course, because of a tradition of using "respelling" instead. American books, including dictionaries, even the scholarly Merriam-Websters, generally use an arbitrary scheme to represent sounds. For example, instead of [æ] they use [a], as in "cat": [kat], and they modify regular letters with accent marks and ligatures to signify particular sounds in a way peculiar to each book.
English users' lack of sophistication about languages in general causes unnecessary and annoying variation. For example, the spelling "Al-Qaeda" got into the media before the more accurate "Al-Qa'ida," probably because journalists respelled the Arabic name, meaning The Base, according to a Latin rule they learned in school, the one that governs the pronunciation of puella ~ puellae: POO-ELLA ~ POO ELLEYE. So Al-Qa'ida, pronounced al-QAÏDa, gets spelled Al-Qaeda, and then pronounced al-KAYDA. So now we have both pronunciations current in English. You may also see spelling variants such as al-Qa'ida, al-Qaeda, and Al-Qa'idat al Jihad.
Americans are mostly language poor. As a nation of immigrants who had to lose the first language in order to fit into American society, perhaps they became averse to languages, xenophobic as to Red Indians and Spanish and French speakers who were already in North America, fearful and disdainful of other immigrants. Americans seem to be proudly ignorant of other languages, and prejudiced against variation, perhaps as part of their British heritage.
Here are some French words and phrases sometimes heard or read in English. In each case the final letter of the spelled word does not represent a sound in speech. We learn these words and phrases either from the page or from the air. In every instance we have to adjust our perception to fit the words, so that we spell and pronounce correctly, and then we generalize our own rules for spelling and pronouncing, and sometimes we make mistakes. From such words as these:
Parler, au fond, chez, à huis clos, à pied, à bon chat, bon rat, au sérieux, aux armes, à propos, bon appétit, beaux yeux, crise de nerfs, en retard, s'il vous plaît, tous frais faits
Al Michaels, the sportscaster, said that the referees were having a tête-à-tête: tête-à-TAY
That was the coup-de-grâce: KOO da GRA
They ate vichysoisse, and sang the Marseillaise: VEE she SWA, Mar say YAY
On NBC News was said: "American troops found a large cache KASHAY [cachet] of arms."
Similarly, speakers may follow either English or French habits [rules] in pronouncing French words used in English. All such variation serves to mark a speaker as a member of a group that pronounces that way. Consequently, often a choice between pronunciations can or must be made so that listeners do not notice the form of a phrase or word. That is, we all adjust our speech to fit our audience, lest we be thought to be outsiders or ignorant.
Here are some French words and phrases along with the English pronunciations that French speakers find anomalous. Anomalous does not necessarily mean bad. It depends on who is speaking in what situation. There are times when a "French" pronunciation seems affected and put on to impress others.
Déja-vu DAYzha VOO
Adieu aDOO [I can no longer stay with you.]
Billet-doux BILee- DOO
Bon voyage Bahn VOIJ
Cerise SeREES
Chaise longue Chayz LAUNJ
Chargé d'affairesCHARjay daFERZ
Chic CHIK
Cul-de-sac KULL da sak
Soupçon SOOPson
Au jus oJOOS
Dégustation DEEgusTAYSHN
Au gratin oGRATN
Au naturel oNACHRL
And so on, including items that have gone back and forth between the languages, such as repartée, which was repartie in French [from repartir], respelled in English as repartée, reparTEE, and then re-pronounced as reparTAY.
And let us not forget the expressions "Tant pis, tant mieux," glossed in Fractured French as "Now that my aunt has relieved herself, she is feeling better," and "eau de toilette," as "what the dog drinks."
In addition, we tend to pronounce Spanish names using French rules. So Che Guevara: Shay GwaVARa instead of Chay. We say MEKsiko instead of MAYheeko. And Don Quixote in America is pronounced Don keeHOtee. In French it is Don keeSHOT, and it Britain it is Don KWIKset.
Go figure.
"Correctness" is arbitrary, a product of the mind of the listener. I once saw an applicant for a teaching position blackballed because in an interview he pronounced elegiac Ella JAKE instead of Ella JIKE or aLEE Jack.
