I grew up in south Georgia and now live in a semi-rural area of north Georgia, and when I try to say “jag-wire” and “jag-wahr” aloud basically makes the same sound unless I really try. I must admit I got a little defensive at all the yokel comments, but it’s not like people saying a southern accent makes you sound stupid is anything new.
I’m in the Midwest and all I’ve ever heard is jag-wire. It’s how I pronounce it, too.
I started a thread a year or so about this very thing. There was a news story about some dumb woman that was trying to take a selfie with a jaguar at a zoo and the jaguar attacked her and injured the woman’s hand. I brought it up because Savannah Guthrie and/or Hoda kept pronouncing it as jag-wire. It was driving me crazy.
I’m from Minnesota - most people here do not say jag-wire. It’s jag-whar.
My boss told me that for all of his childhood he thought it was pronounced jew-ger!
Man, if she was screaming, “Help! Get this jag-wire off me!” I would just turn and walk away.
This is because when Britain incorporates a foreign word they change the pronunciation to what they believe that “spelling” should sound like in English. They do not appear to have taken to the concept of borrow words literally. This is why they say “jag-you-err” “pass-tuh” “tack-oh” “gar-idge” etc. In the US we try to keep to the word’s native pronunciation as close as possible using English phonemes.
Now that I think about it, where I’m from there really are not many sounds like in “jag-whar” that would rhyme with “car” but start with a “W” sound. War, warrior, warden, award, … The “W” transforms the “a” that follows into sounding more like the O in “or”. Only the words from Spanish or Italian get the “war” sounding like “wahr” after a U, like “Eduardo” or “LaGuardia”.
And it would sound really, really weird if someone who said “Jag-wire” pronounced LaGuardia Airport as “LaGwire-dia”. Do they?
Assuming they don’t, I’m going to further posit that the association with Spanish and the word “jaguar” is lost on people who think of it, at some level, as “the name of that NFL team from Jacksonville”. A word they don’t think of in the same context as obviously non-English words or names in origin.
Douche is French. :dubious:
I’ve always said jag-whar because the car is named after the animal, and that’s how the animal’s name is pronounced. If you drove a Cougar would you pronounce it co-OO-gar?
I’m from Utah and that’s all I ever heard. I still remember the disconnect between seeing it written and wondering why it was said jag-wire, but that’s the local pronunciation.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone pronounce it “jag-whar.”
I’ve heard jag-war, the British jag-you-are, and the awful jag-wire, but never jag-whar.
I remember thinking the exact same thing. I probably just assumed it was a foreign word, as it isn’t exactly uncommon to pronounce things different than how they appear (like any word that is even remotely French).