Ypres, the WWI battle? I’ve heard it pronounced “wipers” once in a film about WWI, but I’m not sure if that’s correct.
I speak a little French, and I’d pronounce it Eepre, with a short “e” at the end, like in many French words. The “s” is silent.
Come to think of it, the movie I was watching was from the view of British soldiers and their pronunciation of “wipers” was said in jest i think. They had a paper they printed called "The Wipers Times ".
Ypres (/ˈiːprə/ EE-prə , French: [ipʁ]; Dutch: Ieper [ˈipər])
From the Wiki page; it looks like it’s pronounced somewhat differently in Dutch vs French.
Wipers was very deliberately humorous English pronunciation.
Adapting French into military slang was a particularly rich field during the Great War - some Australian examples here.
And the “r” is a soft, voiceless sound, not the hard voiced English r. (“The dog’s growl”, as one of my French teachers called it.)
Sure, but only superficially. What I mean is that it just converts the French long R sound to a Dutch long R sound, making it sound like a native word in either language. English often does the same with words it gets from French, converting -re words to sound like -er. even respelling then American English. For example, “centre” is pronounced the same as the American “center.”
My Grandad was there: he called it “Wipers”.
But he also said that “Coup de grace” was French for lawnmower!
(The French version sounds really strange to my ears…so much so I am not even sure how I would spell that phonetically.)
EE-prah is how I usually hear it spoken.
The pronunciation in the clip is not 100% correct, the “r” sound still contains the rhoticity of an American speaker. To hear the correct pronunciation, go to google translate, switch to French, type in Ypres and click on the speaker icon.
If you were British in WWI it was Wipers; if American it was Yeeps.
also, Yfronts is pronounced “Ee-fron”