At least you knew enough to put that accent on the e.
As we used to say in the military: “If you can order a beer, a burrito, and a bimbo in the local language, you’re fluent.”
Since there’s an English word pronounced parlay already (you know, “parlay”) it never occurred to me that they’d pronounce Parler as parlay too instead of Parlor until someone commented on it a couple weeks ago.
I speak Spanish, not French, and I generally find French’s very loose connection between spelling and pronunciation baffling, and this only adds to it.
Huh. I’ve always pronounced it like “parlor” in my head, and I took four years of French. I thought it was just a cutesy spelling that punned on the French parler “to talk”. So pronounced as if it were English (since it was developed in America and, I assume, mostly an American audience uses it), but echoing the French meaning as well. So you have both the idea of sitting in a parlor with the idea of “to talk”/parler behind it. It’s cute.
You lose that bilingual double meaning if the word is pronounced “par-LAY” in English. (And it seems weird to me. Wouldn’t you want to call it Parlez then, rather than using the infinitive?) So I think it’s kind of stupid that the company originally intended it to be pronounced that way. The other way, in my mind, is much more clever. (Regardless of what you think about the service or the people who are on it.)
That’s not an accurate description; French has pretty clear and consistent rules for pronunciation based on spelling. They’re just different from English rules.
Given how much people are talking about the spelling and pronunciation in this thread, it might well have been a deliberate marketing ploy to make it ambiguous and grammatically/etymologically dubious. And perhaps there are likely to be more liberal tears over grammar?
While in principle I have no problem ascribing impure motives to the far right, I think this theory is far-fetched. For one thing, I see no “liberal tears,” just curiosity and a little informal linguistic analysis.
Well, rhe capital of France is pronunciated “Pair REE”, but only the elitesty of Americans say anything other than “PAIR iss”. Do they get called names, too?
I’ve never heard the word spoken and never even knew it even existed til I read mentions of it on this board within the past week. I never thought it would be said differently from parlor, it just looked like it was in the same style as Twitter/Tumblr/ Flickr, etc.
Parlay.com is already taken and judging from the design of the homepage has been around since the early Nineties.
This is probably the explanation. Some people trying to come up with a catchy name for a communication platform come up with “parlay”. Quick google, find it’s taken, would cost more than a token amount of money to buy it, so use a different spelling, and quirky is good anyway.
Surprised they didn’t go with parlr.
Parler-Parlor-Parlour-Parkour… this appears to be a metaphor for their trajectory. One of my favorite moments from the whole series is the way Andy quietly squeaks “parkour” from inside the box.
This is correct. One conjugation of regular French verbs has the -er ending for the infinitive, and the endings are all pronounced -ay. Remember “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” back in the 70s?
No. I’m not old enough to remember the 70s.
Apparently an existing app called “parlor” has shot to the top of the app store charts:
It was in Moulin Rouge!, too. 
I was going to say – it hit #1 in the US (and many other places worldwide) back in 2001. I remember a time when I couldn’t get away from that song.
I don’t voluntarily watch musicals.
OK, then just take our word for it. parler => par-lay, coucher => koo-shay, donner => don-nay, aimer => aym-ay, etc.