According to MW, there are four variants for its pronounciation.
IMO, the fourth possibility given by MW may be a “we throw in the towel, we give up, if that’s the way people are pronouncing it nowadays, so be it” variant. I have heard people use this variant, but always assumed they had only seen the word in print, and never heard it spoken aloud. Hence, they pronounced it based on the way it looks like it should sound.
I am more interested in determining which, if any, of the first three possibilities is “correct”. I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever heard any of them used.
I had always believed, apprently in error, that the “correct” pronounciation was more along the line of “day-BOCK(L)” with the accent on the 2nd syllable, a long ‘A’ sound in the first syllable (and with only a hint of an “L” sound at the end).
I stress the second syllable, but find myself doing a different phoneme than the two presented for the first syllable - I’m saying duh-BOCK-ul. I don’t know where I picked that up.
I would think this is the most common(ly accepted) way to say the word, if you wish to anglicise it, as most educated would wish to, with two schwas bookending the stressed middle syllable: deh-BA-cehl (where ‘eh’ represents a schwa).
However, some British pronunciation dictionaries give day-BA-cehl, which I think is a bit of an ugly fudge between the French and the (British) English.
It’s a good word to have in the arsenal, though. Can be interchanged with other foreign words, like fiasco (particularly nice word, fiasco), saga (mustn’t forget those Icelanders) or indeed - and how can we forget it? - the word favoured by our Chinese overlords, incident.
"Got a pesky citizen who wants to point out that your coal mines are death traps? Got an unpatriotic greenie bent on stopping the Motherland building its glorious People’s Dam? Killed several thousand of your own unarmed citizens?
Then you need us, incident.com (scroll down to 6th paragraph). No job too big or too small. Applications from copywriters and tankdrivers always welcome."
/d@ `ba kl/ is the only pronunciation I’ve ever heard - de with a schwa sound, ba like a sheep, kl like in “spackle” or “suckle”.
The fourth pronunciation they give matches the Frenchified pronunciation you favor. I don’t understand what your problem with it is. I agree that it sounds silly and pretentious, but that doesn’t make it “wrong” so much as showoffy.
It’s just got the stress on a different syllable. It might not be common, but I don’t see why you find it so offensive. Do I need to go into the problems with linguistic prescriptivism?
