Food Pronunciation Guide for the Dim-witted

[Luckylies]

sous vide anybody? is it sue veed? soos ve-day?

what's up? boil a meal has never been harder to pronounce.

[therese]

sous vide anybody? is it sue veed? soos ve-day?

what's up? boil a meal has never been harder to pronounce.

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soo (or sue as you say, unambiguous to us since we're both anglophone) veed

And "boil" would be pretty hard for a lot of people to say, come to think of it.

[ludja]

My time us better spent teaching bartenders how to say Blue Curacao

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Wait, I need help on this one, is it

Blue Coor-ah-sow? or

Blue Coor-ah-cow?

Is it the former, as I believe there is an accent cedille on the "c").

And where is the accent?

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help

Edited February 13, 2005 by ludja (log)

[*Deborah*]

My time us better spent teaching bartenders how to say Blue Curacao

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Wait, I need help on this one, is it

Blue Coor-ah-sow? or

Blue Coor-ah-cow?

Is it the former, as I believe there is an accent cedille on the "c").

And where is the accent?

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help

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Spelled Curaçao, pronounced coor-a-sow. (Not coor-a-K-O, as I heard once )

[lexy]

since we're discussing alcohol, how do you pronounce 'julep', as in a mint julep? is it 'jew-lep', 'jew-lip', or 'jew-lup'? I've wanted to order one of these for ages but haven't quite been able to overcome my dread of mispronouncing the name

edited for poor spelling

Edited February 15, 2005 by lexy (log)

[therese]

since we're discussing alcohol, how do you pronounce 'julep', as in a mint julep? is it 'jew-lep', 'jew-lip', or 'jew-lup'? I've wanted to order one of these for ages but haven't quite been able to overcome my dread of mispronouncing the name

edited for poor spelling

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None of these pronunciations is sufficiently different from the others to get anybody all upset. The key is actually to emphasize the first syllable, JOO-lup (there's a vowel sound in the second syllable, but not much of one, really just the upside down e/schwa thing).

But the real question here is why on earth do you need to pronounce this word in the first place? Even those of us who do drink them do so rarely (on Derby Day).

[cakewalk]

since we're discussing alcohol, how do you pronounce 'julep', as in a mint julep? is it 'jew-lep', 'jew-lip', or 'jew-lup'? I've wanted to order one of these for ages but haven't quite been able to overcome my dread of mispronouncing the name

edited for poor spelling

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Wow. Woody Allen would have a field day with this post.

[MarketStEl]

Gyro.  Is it like 'Jai-Roh' or 'Eeh-Roh', I have heard both are supposedly authentic...

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for gyro think hero...thats how iv e heard it pronounced in many a greek restaurant

Yes, but with the "he-" a bit aspirated, if that's the right term, and the "r" not as "errr" as in English.

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I've seen posters in a number of Greek diners that say:

"Ask for YEE'-ROS"

I believe the proper Greek word for the ground lamb/beef dish is spelled (in the Roman alphabet) "gyros" and pronounced as in the poster text above. I've seen it spelled without the "s" often enough, though, and assume that in that variation, it would be pronounced YEE-ro.

[MarketStEl]

noo-queue-ler  

Who let W in here?

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Who said anything about W.?

I've always associated that pronunciation with Georgia's own President, Jimmy Carter.

[Busboy]

Gyro.  Is it like 'Jai-Roh' or 'Eeh-Roh', I have heard both are supposedly authentic...

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for gyro think hero...thats how iv e heard it pronounced in many a greek restaurant

Yes, but with the "he-" a bit aspirated, if that's the right term, and the "r" not as "errr" as in English.

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I've seen posters in a number of Greek diners that say:

"Ask for YEE'-ROS"

I believe the proper Greek word for the ground lamb/beef dish is spelled (in the Roman alphabet) "gyros" and pronounced as in the poster text above. I've seen it spelled without the "s" often enough, though, and assume that in that variation, it would be pronounced YEE-ro.

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I stand by my earlier pronunciation (above), perfected within walking distance of the Acropolis last summer. YEE-ros is just an attempt by friendly Greeks to help us out by adapting the pronunciation to American tongues.

Edited February 15, 2005 by Busboy (log)

[Gifted Gourmet]

I've always associated that pronunciation with Georgia's own President, Jimmy Carter.

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Oddly enough, given his background:

Chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the nuclear submarine program, he was assigned to Schenectady, N.Y., where he took graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics, and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf.

[MaxH]

Wow! Vast thread.

French has its irregularities but still seems much more consistent than English. Therefore many words are pronounced by regular rules. What I found interesting in the wine names are the irregularities -- which many people pronounce "wrong," even natives.

In 1980 in Boston, having even less French than now, I attended a tasting. When the speaker said "Cos d'Estournel," sounding the first S, I asked about it. He said that the people there pronounce it that way, though of course "they could be wrong."

GG mentioned "Montrachet," one of the famous. (Both Ts silent.) A nearby case is Aloxe-Corton, "Aloss" unlike the X of "fixe." (Probably we should not talk about these in public, because they are superb shibboleths for anyone who pretends false expertise of the wines, these words always give them away.) (Like "Scheveningen" in the second world war, or "Schipol." Years of practice with tolerant native Nederlanders are necessary [1]). Back to France, "Tastevin" is mixed: Some pronounce the S, some don't (even within a single well-known winemaking family, in Burgundy). (Hint: Starts with D.)

Austrian wines are colorful: Grüner Veltliner, Blaufränkisch, Weissburgunder, Rotgipfler. They have regular German pronunciation. "Grüner" is somewhere between Greener and Gruner, veering to the former to my ear. "Veltliner" is felt-leaner in US phoneticization. Think of feeling leaner while you sip!

The region where I live has many Vietnamese immigrants and thousands of Pho restaurants and I have always heard "fuh." (Of course, "they could be wrong.")

FWIW! -- Max

[1] Once there I naively pronounced the name of Gouda cheese as “goo-dah” with the hard G. This prompted incredulity, and many demands for encore. The Nederlanders had never heard such a word before, and would not believe my story that this pronunciation was common in the US. ("Must be French influence," they speculatd, "at least the vowel part.") To them the G was the strongly aspirated H sound of of loCH and Omar KHayyám; the vowel sound was OW, not OO.

[therese]

[1] Once there I naively pronounced the name of Gouda cheese as “goo-dah” with the hard G. This prompted incredulity, and many demands for encore. The Nederlanders had never heard such a word before, and would not believe my story that this pronunciation was common in the US. ("Must be French influence," they speculatd, "at least the vowel part.")  To them the G was the strongly aspirated H sound of  of loCH and Omar KHayyám; the vowel sound was OW, not OO.

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While at a meeting recently in Europe one of my Dutch colleagues introduced me to one of his colleagues. "He's from Howda. You know, like the cheese." I figured it out, but only after a few moments of forehead wrinkling.

[browniebaker]

[1] Once there I naively pronounced the name of Gouda cheese as “goo-dah” with the hard G. This prompted incredulity, and many demands for encore. The Nederlanders had never heard such a word before, and would not believe my story that this pronunciation was common in the US. ("Must be French influence," they speculatd, "at least the vowel part.")  To them the G was the strongly aspirated H sound of  of loCH and Omar KHayyám; the vowel sound was OW, not OO.

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While at a meeting recently in Europe one of my Dutch colleagues introduced me to one of his colleagues. "He's from Howda. You know, like the cheese." I figured it out, but only after a few moments of forehead wrinkling.

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However, with some food names, there is simply the reality that there exists a standard American-English mispronunciation. Even if I know how "Gouda" is pronounced in Dutch, I am not going to use that pronunciation if I anticipate that (1) my listener will not understand what I am referring to, and (2) my listener might consider my pronunciation pretentious.

When I am with non-French-speaking friends, I consciously tone down the French pronunciation of French words for foods, using the standard English (mis)pronunciation instead. The times I have forgotten to do so with Americans, my listener has appeared put off or intimidated by my use of correct French.

Many of the English persons I have known have take almost a chauvinistic pride in insisting on the standard English mispronunciation of French words such as "fillet": they maintain, "It's FILL-ette!"

[Tepee]

Since it's food-related, how's the French hypermarket Carrefour pronounced? Most people here either call it Car-4 or Kah-Foo.

[browniebaker]

Since it's food-related, how's the French hypermarket Carrefour pronounced? Most people here either call it Car-4 or Kah-Foo. 

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Kah-rrrrruh-FOOH-(rrrr), the last syllable in parentheses because barely pronounced, and the "rrrrr" referring to what I call the about-to-expectorate sound at the back of the palate

[*Deborah*]

Tepee, more like the second pronunciation, with a hint of growly R in your throat at the end of each syllable.

My favourite non-Anglo pronunciation is Van Gogh, which in Europe they say much as is it spelled, with that nice, throat-clearing 'gh' at the end, as opposed to the sanitized Van-Go we say here. That was a surprise the first time I heard it!

[MaxH]

My favourite non-Anglo pronunciation is Van Gogh, which in Europe they say much as is it spelled, with that nice, throat-clearing 'gh' at the end, as opposed to the sanitized Van-Go we say here.

Yes that's the other famous one in Dutch. If you really hear natives pronouncing it fully, it is an alien thing to Anglophones, almost a cough. It is unphoneticizable in English.

A food-fanatic friend (who is a professor of comp. lit., and functional in various tongues) insists that it is too much to expect native English speakers to use the Dutch pronunciation of van Gogh "if they are in good health."

-- M

[MaxH]

... Many of the English persons I have known have take almost a chauvinistic pride in insisting on the standard English mispronunciation of French words such as "fillet": they maintain, "It's FILL-ette!"

In the weird little classic movie Beat the Devil (1954), the large British actor Robert Morley finds himself in unknown foreign parts and declares to his fellow travelers that the first thing you must do with foreigners is to insist on speaking to them in English. That will let them know who is in charge. (Or similar words.)

[merrybaker]

Speaking of Champagne...how about pronouncing the city of 'Reims'?

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After making a fool of myself in a Paris train station trying to get a ticket to "Reeeems," I can report that Reims/Rheims is pronounced "Rance." That rhymes with dance, the way Americans say dance, not the way the British say it.

[MaxH]

After making a fool of myself in a Paris train station trying to get a ticket to "Reeeems," I can report that Reims/Rheims is pronounced "Rance."  That rhymes with dance, the way Americans say dance, not the way the British say it.

When in Rome ...

This place-name sounds to me (from French people) more like Rhhhannnnnzzz, with a gutteral aspiration in the Rhhh part, a flat prolonged short A vowell, and the N only implied. (That is similar to how US writers have phoneticized it in the past.)

A few years ago when L'Académie française ("institution créée en 1635, chargée de définir la langue française") started defining "Franglaise" out of the language, and fining hapless engineers 100 Francs because they lapsed for a moment and wrote the same modern words everyone else writes, like "byte" and "computer," someone in the US -- in Atlantic Monthly I think -- proposed that, while they were at it, L'Académie ought also to finally rationalize the pronunciation of Rheims.

(When those engineers remember themselves, by the way, they use words from the whole Newspeak vocabulary that had to be created in France -- respectively, "octet" and "ordinateur" for the examples I used above.)

[EdS]

The pronunciation of fillet with a sounded "t" in some dialects of English is entirely correct. Like so many words in the English language, fillet was absorbed into English from another language, in this case Middle French. Once a word enters into a language, that word is subject to any pronunciation, spelling, or usage changes that may occur over time. The word fillet used by an English speaker in an English language context is an English word not a French word.

[Behemoth]

I have no clue when it comes to Italian. Guanciale?

At least German is always consistent.

Umlaut = vowel + e. In fact, if you are on a computer without umlauts, you would spell umlauted vowels with an extra e. Example: Gruener Veltliner.

Our V is their F

Our W is their V

ei is always pronounced eye (e.g. eigen = eye-gen)

ie is always pronounced ee (e.g. riesen = ree-sen)

Are there consistent rules for pronunciation in French? I thought I remembered these from school but it sure has been a while.

[chezcherie]

Back to France, "Tastevin" is mixed: Some pronounce the S, some don't

thanks for reminding me that i don't know how to pronounce this--can you elucidate beyond the s/no s? thanks!

taaah(s)--vahn?

taaaahst--vahn?

taahs(t)-VAHN?

(that's me, practicing...)

[chefzadi]

test e vahn (e like hiccup) does that make it clear?