You think that’s bad?
My family had a cat when I was about 10 years old. We named him Buku because my mother told us that “buku” meant “a lot” and he was a a lot of cat.
I didn’t make the connection between buku and beaucoup until about 2 minutes ago while reading this thread. :smack:
Yes, slaughtering foreign words like this is enough to make me want to commit hari-kari.
Fantastic baseball announcer.
“Boo-coo” was the pronunciation in Viet Nam. It was used by Americans and Vietnamese alike. I don’t know who got it from whom, but since the French occupied that country before we showed up, I would suspect it may have been the Vietnamese take on beaucoup. Or maybe they were just humoring us.
One of my company’s vendors has an article on their website entitled “Five Tenants for Successful CRM Implementation.” Clearly they meant tenets, but they made this mistake four or five times in a one-page PDF article.
We all know it’s pronounced “voy-ola”!
:smack: - damn that feels good
Puzzled french speaker here - well, how would you pronounce beaucoup ?
Written out here, boo-coo looks about right, maybe I’m not getting how people actually say this… could be a slightly shorter boo, and sometimes a slight emphasis on the coo
As for voilà - that’s a fun word in modern French - it generally doesn’t mean anything, it’s more like a kind of signal to say “this conversation is over”, you kind of sing it when you’re being nice, otherwise it can be pretty sharp.
Voilà
I always heard it Bow coo its a little different. French is spoken in a lot of places though and some of the accents and dialects can be quite different. I went to a french immersion school starting when I was four, and the nuns the school system brought in from France sounded alot different than my Quebequois college roomate. I wonder if the Boo Coo pronunciation isn’t what 500 years and 3000 miles did to Cajun pronunciation of French?
I seem to remember a Bugs Bunny cartoon in which he did a magic trick and used those generic magic words… “Hocus-pocus, abracadabra, wallaa! The trick is done!”
So I blame Bugs.
A friend of mine has lived in NZ for nearly 20 years. She is Austrian, she is also a “trolley dolly” for Air NZ. Her English is very good. Perfect even. She has her accent though. To her, villagers will always be willagers and windows will always be vindows.
When the language is not one native to us we will talk funny 
Incidentally (because someone who had just learned to swim, drowned yesterday while wading alone in a lake), “drownded” and “drownding” are not words.
[sub]Didn’t hear them on the report, but I’ve heard them enough to be reimded of them by the story.[/sub]
I think it is more common (at least in my region) to say something like “boohoo” bucks, about which word’s etymology I had pondered… thanks for clearing it up. Boohoo is further derived from boocoo. And the people who use it have no idea what they are saying, I imagine. It is not done ironically, but just they heard it somewhere and repeat it.
Dewey Finn:
Yep, sing it again. I’ll join you on the refrain, I’ve sung that song before:
I wouldn’t claim to be a French speaker at this point, but graduated from the Foreign Service Institute’s French language course some years ago, as did my wife, with some degree of fluency. The teachers were French and Francophone. We then lived in a Francophone country for two years. I don’t recall ever hearing the word pronounced as “boocoo”, but more like “bo-coo”, although that’s not really phonetically correct either.
However, I never focused on that particular word, since generally when speaking or hearing the language, I was busy trying to get the verb right and to be understood.
Thinking about the beaucoup business - I wonder if people are getting it mixed up with beau pronounced as in beau and arrow.
In France beaucoup is pronounced sort of like book-oo - with a slightly shorter first syllable…
Quoi qu’il en soit, they talk much French in Alaska ?
No no, Khadaji, the point is moo. 
My research professor kept saying today “critical regiont.” This is a very smart woman, and it baffled me that she was adding the t on the end of the word.
val, actually some of that is dialect differentiation. In English we would say it so it sounds ‘bow koo,’ Frankifying it a bit by dropping the ‘p,’ but the French pronounciation is actually closer to ‘bow koo.’
And that depends more on the DILECT of French you are speaking (or hearing).
Plus, it depends on the dialect of whatever language YOU speak that will depend on how you HEAR it.
To wit: (or should that be too It?)
In the Central Highlands of Vietnam, near the tri-border area with Cambodia (now Kampuchea because of dialect correction) and Laos there is a mixed population (or was, in 1968, anyway) consisting of Cambodians, Laotions, Vietnamese and Montagnyards. Because of the French occupation of that area for time out of mind the languages were somewhat mixed, and dialects were colored by the origin of the speaker.
A favorite phrase in those days was “You beaucoup din ka dau.”* This was a mix of the French ‘beaucoup’ meaning very, or extremely, and the Vietnamese ‘din ka dau’* meaning ‘crazy,’ literal translation meant something about ‘the head’ being messed up, and the English ‘you’ meaning… well, you get my drift…
Now, the Vietnamese said (pseudo phonetic): “U boo koo dinka dau”
American soldiers from the NorthEast said: “Yew beau coo dinky dau”
and American soldiers from the South said “Yiew boo koo dinky dow”
So what way is the right way?
Only a linguist could get it all “right.”
signed,
Suh Nayk
OOps, he meant the French is closer to ‘boo coo’
Malheurusement, seulement dans chez moi! Cretins!
I would like to say something:
Whilst!