# Is "sch" EVER pronounced "sh" in Italy? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 30, 2010, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815 "2010-04-30T01:51:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Rumor\_Watkins](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/d9b06d/32.png) [@Rumor\_Watkins](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rumor_Watkins)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2010, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/21 "2010-05-01T18:45:43Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > 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.) I think the distinguishing point here is what’s hinted at in the OP: it’s not the ch itself, it’s the “sch” that may force the pronounciation into bruschetta. I don’t know linguistics at all, though, so it may be wrong. > [@](#): > > 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. Again, and i’m not a linguist, it may be because that’s how these words are pronounced in the english language, or it may be that there is no native pronounciation of the “foreign” run on of letters (meaning like zz, gui, ci, cc). ---
**Author:** ![fachverwirrt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/94ad74/32.png) [@fachverwirrt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fachverwirrt)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2010, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/22 "2010-05-01T19:13:06Z")
> [@Anaglyph](#): > > 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 > [@SanVito](#): > > I’d call it a harder ‘ch’ sound. As in ciao. In “correct” Italian (what you’d learn from a textbook), it’s [tʃ] as in chalk. However, there are dialects where it’s softened to [ʃ]. Central Tuscany, for instance. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2010, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/23 "2010-05-01T20:43:16Z")
> [@Rumor\_Watkins](#): > > Again, and i’m not a linguist, it may be because that’s how these words are pronounced in the english language, or it may be that there is no native pronounciation of the “foreign” run on of letters (meaning like zz, gui, ci, cc). What group of letters has a “native pronunciation” in English? I don’t have a link here, but I think the essay where someone spelled potato starting with a gh (as in hiccough) is from GB Shaw. ---
**Author:** ![Rumor\_Watkins](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/d9b06d/32.png) [@Rumor\_Watkins](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rumor_Watkins)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2010, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/24 "2010-05-01T21:00:12Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > What group of letters has a “native pronunciation” in English? I don’t have a link here, but I think the essay where someone spelled potato starting with a gh (as in hiccough) is from GB Shaw. do languages not have set pronunciation rules? what i mean by “native pronunciation” is that if the letters, for example “zd” aren’t used together in a certain language, it won’t have a pronunciation for it, so you would have to use the foreign pronunciation of the word (because the word would be coming from a foreign lexicon, as “zd” wouldn’t be an english word [yet]) ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2010, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/25 "2010-05-01T21:02:13Z")
English doesn’t seem to have one, no. It’s one of the main complaints of ESL people, that it’s not like learning a language but like learning two. Too many words which have been picked up at different times, by people from different dialects, and had either the spelling or the pronunciation change in different ways. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2010, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/26 "2010-05-01T21:11:02Z")
I seem to recall that all languages have rules, even English. A rule doesn’t mean there can’t be exceptions. French is perhaps the second most irregular popular language, and after awhile, you can make a pretty good guess at how a new word is pronounced. English is a a frankenlanguage hybrid between Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, so got strange aspects of each. I have a name that is fairly common in the US, but not phonetic in English. I still get people who somehow can’t pronounce it, or can but make comments about how it “looks weird.” The language it comes from may look hard to pronounce to us, but is rather regular. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2010, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/27 "2010-05-01T21:21:23Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > What group of letters has a “native pronunciation” in English? I don’t have a link here, but I think the essay where someone spelled potato starting with a gh (as in hiccough) is from GB Shaw. It’s an imitation of Shaw. > [@](#): > > The playwright and would-be spelling reformer George Bernard Shaw famously pointed out that, using only common English spellings, we could write the word fish as ghoti: > F: gh as in rough > I: o as in women > SH: ti as in nation > > Shaw couldn’t have been trying very hard, if this was the best he could come up with. If he’d turned his attention to the other half of Britain’s national dish, he could perfectly well have come up with ghoughbteighpteau for potato: > P: gh as in hiccough > O: ough as in though > T: bt as in debt > A: eigh as in neighbour > T: pt as in pterodactyl > O: eau as in bureau Among other weaknesses, I’ve never quite understood the P here. Do Brits _say_ “hiccup” and write “hiccough”? Because I always understood them to be different words, and I’ve heard people pronounce the latter to rhyme with the obviously-related “cough”–that is, with an “f” sound. ---
**Author:** ![put\_down\_the\_sabre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/da6949/32.png) [@put\_down\_the\_sabre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/put_down_the_sabre)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2010, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/28 "2010-05-01T22:45:17Z")
I am extremely descriptivist – ‘broo shetta’ is a totally acceptable pronunciation, especially in English. I would never think less of someone for using it. What I can’t bear is when people ‘correct’ me when I pronounce it the ‘original’ way. _That_ is annoying: they combine an ignorance of language (since presumably they think that they are correcting me about the Standard Italian) and an ignorance of linguistics (since they are prescriptivist in this correct-a-stranger way). pdts ---
**Author:** ![Rumor\_Watkins](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/d9b06d/32.png) [@Rumor\_Watkins](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rumor_Watkins)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2010, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/29 "2010-05-01T22:51:12Z")
> [@put\_down\_the\_sabre](#): > > I am extremely descriptivist – ‘broo shetta’ is a totally acceptable pronunciation, especially in English. I would never think less of someone for using it. > > What I can’t bear is when people ‘correct’ me when I pronounce it the ‘original’ way. _That_ is annoying: they combine an ignorance of language (since presumably they think that they are correcting me about the Standard Italian) and an ignorance of linguistics (since they are prescriptivist in this correct-a-stranger way). > > pdts i wouldn’t correct you, but i’d think you were really pretentious. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2010, 12:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/30 "2010-05-02T00:22:05Z")
How about an American who grew up in an immigrant family where Italian was spoken at home, who studied Italian from an early age as her main second language and could speak, read, and write it with fluency, and, upon reading a new Italian word, could not help hearing it in her mind with the standard Italian pronunciation? And was honestly incapable of predicting the random ways Americans will mangle Italian words and names? Do you call that “pretentious” too? To me, that word would literally mean pretending to be someone you aren’t. But that isn’t how I hear it used these days, since it became so popular. It’s more often used to mean ‘unable or unwilling to dumb oneself down to the most dumbed-down level of all’ or ‘daring to let on that one has more learning than a high-school dropout’ (the nerve!). The funny thing is, the people who fling the word around here at SDMB so carelessly are certainly better educated than that. So people who misuse the word in this way are ironically behaving very pretentiously. 😛 Since there are no English words deriving from Anglo-Saxon that use the letter combination \, that criterion is eliminated as a basis for evaluating its pronunciation. There are, of course, words deriving from Greek such as _scheme_, _schizoid_, or _scholar_; from Dutch, such as _schipperke_; and even, wonder of wonders, from Italian, like _scherzo_. Then there’s _schooner_, of unknown etymology (it sounds Dutch to me). Many of them words that even high- **sch** ool dropouts know how to pronounce. So it’s hardly a slam-dunk to assume that an Italian word must be pronounced according to German orthography. Why German? I really have to wonder. Without bringing loaded, overused words like “pretentious” into it. BTW, we got the word _schizophrenia_ from German (it was coined in German as _Schizophrenie_ by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1910). Go figure… ---
**Author:** ![SanVito](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sanvito/32/2805_2.png) [@SanVito](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SanVito)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2010, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/31 "2010-05-07T12:57:22Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > “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’ve heard it’s because so many Italians-Americans have specifically Sicilian routes - e.g. ‘pasta fazool’ instead of ‘fagioli’. ---
**Author:** ![Ellis\_Aponte\_Jr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@Ellis\_Aponte\_Jr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ellis_Aponte_Jr)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2010, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/32 "2010-05-07T15:12:46Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > So it’s hardly a slam-dunk to assume that an Italian word must be pronounced according to German orthography. Why German? I really have to wonder. Without bringing loaded, overused words like “pretentious” into it. We have to consider the fact that 17.1% of the American population has German ancestry. That’s more than have _English_ ancestry. More than have Irish, and far more than have Italian. German is the number one ethnicity in the US, in fact. So there’s that, with all of the German names like Schwartz and Schneider. Not to mention Anheuser-Busch. “Sch” just looks like [∫] to most Americans, despite the counter-examples you provide. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2010, 6:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/33 "2010-05-10T06:56:45Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > What group of letters has a “native pronunciation” in English? . All of them, as far as I know. 🙂 Unfortunately they also all have native spelling. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2010, 7:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815/34 "2010-05-10T07:10:31Z")
> [@Polycarp](#): > > 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.” Indeed. In fact, an Italian teacher once explained to me that the “h” in spelling serves to indicate that it isn’t “bru-shett-a”, but “brusketta”. The “i” serves an analogous purpose before back vowels (a, o, and u). This same teacher told us that the “i” in this case also is just another orthographical symbol and not pronounced. So the Ciu-Ciu wine designation is pronounced much like “choo-choo”, and not "chi-u - “chi-u”. Giovanni would be pronounced more like Joe-vonny, and not Gee-oh-vonnie like most English speakers pronounce it. Of course I wouldn’t be surprised if this varies with different dialects. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-sch-ever-pronounced-sh-in-italy/537815.md?page=1)