The typical American pronunciation is “brushetta” but anyone with a minimal knowledge of Italian orthography knows it’s pronounced closer to “brusketta.”
I am having an argument, that a waiter or whatever used the “sh” pronunciation when they were visiting Italy. Two possibilities are faulty memory or the person was dumbing it down for the tourists.
Italy also have approximately 8000 dialects, some of which barely resemble the parent language. Do any of these use this pronunciation?
I suppose it’s possible, though I have never come across it. Standard pronunciation for ‘ch’ is, as you say, ‘k’ - brusketta, kianti (chianti). If your friend really did hear a waiter pronounce it the anglo-way, I would place all my money on him adapting the word for the foreign tourist. Was your friend somewhere really touristy, like Rome, Florence or Venice?
if an e or i comes directly after a g or c, it is pronounced with a “sh” sound. If an h stands between the c/g and the e/i, the c/g is pronounced with a “k” type sound
I’d call it a harder ‘ch’ sound. As in ciao.
The answer is no. Never. Ever. Except in the possible case of a loanword from German, but then it would be likely to respell it as <sci-> the Italian way. As for bruschetta, a native Italian word, absolutely not. This has been driving me crazy the past few years. I’ve had guys try to “correct” me when I say it with a /k/.
We’ve been through this before with the name Schiavo, which is the Italian word for ‘slave’, pronounced /skja:vo/ (skYAHvoh). I had been reading it in the news, and in my mind applied the Italian pronunciation. Not to be elitist or anything, but because I can’t help reading Italian as Italian… and I honestly cannot predict how Americans will mangle the pronunciation of Italian names, or at any rate not that one, without hearing it on the radio. Since I mostly read the news instead of listen, it took me months before I found out how everybody was saying it.
I’d go with this. In a high-tourist area it might be easier to “dumb it down” than to have one’s speech met with blank stares.
Well, the technical answer to the title-thread question is, “Yeah, all the time. Whenever someone in Italy is speaking German, in the Trentino-Alto Aldige area where there is a Germanophone population of Italian nationals, whenever they are speaking of a person with an Sch- German-descent name…” But the intended question, more or less “Does the -sch- consonant cluster ever carry the /sh/* sound in the Italian language?” appears to be “No.”
What I usually do is go to Wikipedia, find the symbol on some page (usually starting with vowel or consonant) and then copy it. /ʃ/. Yes, it is difficult and long, especially when trying to phonetically write entire words or sentences. OTOH it seems a bunch of them are readily available on the Wikipedia page for the International Phonetic Alphabet.
I think they pronounced it “shaivo”, right? Which not only does not include the ‘k’ sound, but also inverts two vowels. I’ve heard Americans invert sounds in this way for French names as well: Chiasson (“Chaison”) and Favre (“Farv”).
Thanks guys. This isn’t necessarily going into my “I was right” bank, I don’t think SDMB will be considered a valid cite for those purposes. I’ll attribute it to being willful. It is nice to have some backup, though.
Polycarp, does this show up? I think it’s what you want.
ʃ
I’ve had a waitress in an Italian-run restaurant in the UK correct me from “broosketta” to “brooshetta”. I thought it was odd but I didn’t labour the point. She looked and sounded Italian to me but was probably UK-born.
For all anybody knows she’d could’ve been Argentinian - the owners might just have hired someone who looked and sounded ‘medi’.
After the second or third time I had a waiter (here in the U.S.) do the same thing, I began to doubt myself, but it’s apparently just a very widespread mispronunciation (or perfectly acceptable variation, depending on how easygoing one is about such things). I’m not, and it annoys me.
Mamma mia you’re clever.
http://ipa.typeit.org/ (It only covers English IPA, though. It was annoying trying to transcribe that Icelandic Mountain-glacier the way I heard it.)
Not only do Americans (excepting, of course, myself and a select few) widely mispronounce the word, they also often use it to refer to the toppings, rather than the whole dish.
The next time I am “corrected,” I will ask if they serve “shianti” wine, as well. 
once the word hits and enters the lexicon of the language you’re speaking, it ought to adapt to the way it’s pronounced in the “new host” language
people that insist on pronouncing it as brusketta, moozarella, insert any other foreign word that has become internalized into the english language, bla bla bla all come across as, as i have mentioned in another thread that touched on this topic, having some type of ersatz pretentiousness to them.
you don’t hear anyone else pronouncing “the Internet” with some nasaly, hard-vowled American pronounciation that sounds like innernet
Before agreeing or disagreeing with you, I’m afraid I’d need to hear your proununciation of “ersatz.”
Why would you pronounce it moozarella? It’s an o, not an u… mohzarel-la, if you want, but not moozarella.
“Mootsarell” or something similar, is a common Italian-American pronunciation of “mozzarella.” I believe it stems from southern Italian dialects, whence most Italian immigrants to the US came. Or perhaps it developed here–I’m not exactly sure. I think Johnanna may be better able to speak to this.
I agree with you, for the most part. “Bruschetta” is a weird one, though, because I see no good reason why it isn’t pronounced with a hard “k.” After all, we pronounce “chianti,” “orchetti,” and “gnocchi” with a hard “k” (And we even do our best to imitate the “gn” sound.) Other Italian food words have also generally become a reasonable approximation of the way the word sounds in the original language. Granted, it’s become Americanized, but “pizza” is “peet-suh” not “pizz-uh,” “linguine” is not “lin-GEEN” or “LIN-gwin”, “porcini” is not “pour-SEE-nee”, “cacciatore” is not “KAK-ee-a-tore,” etc.
It just seems odd to me that “bruschetta” is the one that’s left out, especially since the hard-k pronunciation is perfectly easy for an English speaker. Personally, I tend to vacillate between the two pronunciations, but the “sh” pronunciation really irks me for whatever reason.