I consider myself a reasonably competent French speaker. Am I going nuts or is everyone in the English-speaking world mispronouncing “moulin”? I’ve always heard it (and assumed I was hearing it correctly) pronounced “moo-lan” (except with that rather odd nasal sort of “eh” sound like in “fin”).
Now, everywhere in the movie it is pronounced “moo-lon” and of course everyone else assumes this is correct, and then goes on to correct me as if I were some uncultured rube…
A cursory glance at my copy of LaRousse’s Dictionnaire General seems to support my pronounciation, as does my English-French dictionary…
So is it that:
A) The producers of Moulin Rouge decided “moo-lon” rolls off the tongue better than “moo-lan”, and now we’re stuck with it the same way we’re stuck with the butchering of “notre dame.”
B) This is one of those crazy instances where the French generally pronounce it the way LaRousse says it is pronounced, EXCEPT in the instance of the Paris landmark “le Moulin Rouge” and I just didn’t know this.
C) No one in any way related with the movie “Moulin Rouge” knows any French at all.
D) I have no clue what I’m talking about.
E) I should be pronouncing that word at the end of artsy-fartsy foreign films “fon”
If I remember correctly they pronounced it Mu-lawn in the movie. Incedently, I went and saw this disaster the other day. I was expecting a serious love movie. Nope, I couldn’t be so lucky. I sat through as much as an hour before I couldn’t take any more and ran screaming and retching from the theater. Needless to say, I no long have eyes, as I gouged them out on the way out. What has this world come to when such a monstrosity is allow in a “MOVIE THEATER”. That movie made “Dude, where’s my car” seem like Cassablanca in comparison.
The linguistic phenomenon the OP is asking about is called “hypercorrection” (i.e. fixing something that ain’t broken).
desdinova is quite correct that the French -in is pronounced with a nasal vowel similar to the English a in “land”. But English speakers were brought up to think that their pronunciation of the vowel a is incorrect in French. So they (quite wrongly) substitute the broad ah sound when attempting to pronounce French -in.
The English mispronunciation of lingerie as “lonjaray” has been around for many years now. (In real French it’s two syllables: leNzh-ri). This word is a double hypercorrection, substituting the sound of ay for ie.
Yes, welcome, desdinova (cool handle, by the way).
Jomo, I bet you anything that desdinova put Moulin Rouge in quotes, so the rest of the title got eaten. It’s happened to the best of us.
As for the question at hand, the Frenchy pronunciation is correct, but it got Americanized when audiences couldn’t pronounce it at the screenings. At least, that’s what Entertainment Weekly says.
Yup, that’s exactly what happened… I hate misleading thread titles as much as everyone else! I guess that single quotes are the way we get around that around here?
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AHA! That’s exactly what I was looking for… I don’t suppose you have the number of the issue that said that? I’ve got money riding on this now… well, one dollar anyway.
Yes, bobevilsquid, right there in your message is the crux of the whole question.
You wrote that it’s pronounced “mu-lan.” But what exactly is the sound of the a in that? The actual French pronunciation of the vowel in that syllable is similar to English “short a” in land (or in LAN for techies).
But we’ve been brought up to think that it’s incorrect to say that sound in French. For example, divan, to have the French sound, would need the “broad a” sound ah. So English speakers who want to sound French (without really knowing how) replace the “short a” sound with the ah sound.
After all, when you spell it “mulan,” doesn’t it put us in mind of Disney’s film Mulan? That had the broad a sound in it.
The weird English pronunciation of lingerie must have influenced Americans’ attempt at pronouncing Moulin. Come to think of it, that’s quite appropriate.
[Aside]The only movie in which I’ve ever seen this word pronounced correctly is Splash, in a scene in which the department store clerk advises Darryl Hannah to “visit the lingerie department on your way out – the Annie Hall look is out.” From the context, and given the clerk’s broad Bronx accent, it was implied that she was pronouncing it incorrectly. Pretty funny.[/Aside]
