I was reading about the Matra Djet and it states, “The car was named Djet, because Bonnet thought the French could not pronounce the word jet correctly.”
What would be the problem with the French pronunciation?
Dennis
The French “j” by itself is always pronounced /ʒ/ (the zh sound as in vision). English j is pronounced /dʒ/. To get the French to say it the English way, you have to write a d in front of the j.
Same reason we used to see “Tajik” spelled “Tadzhik,” because it got filtered through Russian, which like French has /ʒ/ but not /dʒ/. They don’t have a single letter to represent /dʒ/.
Same reason Chaikovsky always has that T stuck in front of his name. Because French.
In French, “jet” is pronounced “zheh” and you’d meet it in the sense of a fountain (jet d’eau) or throwing something (“jets de pierres”), but not in relation to jet engines, which are something completely different in French.
So if you’re selling a sports car on the image of a jet engine, you’d presumably want to evoke the sound of the English word to suggest something modern/go-ahead/technologically wizard, and as excitingly foreign as French names can sound for products sold in the English-speaking world.
However, nowadays, jet as in “jet engine” would be pronounced like in English, so if this car was produced now, it would presumably be simply called “jet”. “Djet” just seems bizarre.
I’m not sure how it is pronounced anyway, I never heard anyone say it. I always think 2 syllables, “Dee-jet”.
Dennis
Yeah, it’s like they were hung up on “we don’t want you to pronounce it with a French accent”.
A similar issue arises in the French name for the African nation of Chad. The French have to spell it Tchad, in order to convert the /sh/ sound of French “ch” into the /tsh/ sound that is represented in English by “ch”. Although it is difficult to be convinced of that, French is actually a very phonetic language and adjustments are often made in foreign-word spelling in order to keep orthographic conformity.
Or Francophone Djibouti, Jabuuti in Somali.
As clairobscur says, we just pronounce it the English way. Unless it’s “jet” as in something thrown or a waterhose (“jet d’eau”), in which case the -t is silent and the j is a soft g instead of a hard one (so, no dj, just j).
This reminds me of a French novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet called Djinn, which is about an American woman named Jean. Obviously it would be misleading to title it Jean.
Plus, who would want to miss the opportunity to have a pun in the title itself.
Give the people of Paree credit for preserving the pronunciation of foreign names; Americans don’t. Many of us are even unfamiliar with the French heroine Zhan Dark.
Anecdotically, it’s only around the last episode of the first season of True Blood that I realized the Louisiana town the action takes place in was really called Bon Temps (French for “good times” or “good weather”) rather than Buwntahn or something like that :).