Enjoy =)
That’s the way it’s pronounced by the BBC.
There’s a hotel near me called the Casa dei Cesari. I’m never sure how to pronounce it. I used to read it as “Cass-uh day sez-ARE-ee” but then decided it’s probably “CHEZZ-uh-ree”. I’ve only been there once and forgot to ask. Maybe I should see how they answer their phone…
Do people not get the difference between pronouncing the name similar to how it actually sounds and affecting an accent? The latter may be considered obnoxious, but I though the former was standard. I thought it was standard in American English to convert words into using our phonemes.
There is no /e/ in the most of the American accents of which I am aware. There are only /ɛ/ and /eɪ/. The latter, when spelled as an E, is usually used at the end of words. The former is the more popular realization of E in the middle of the words. Similarly, unaccented back vowels often become neutralized to a schwa. I see ['tʃɛzəreɪ] as a reasonable anglicized pronunciation of the Italian ['tʃezare].
As for why not just use Caesar? Perhaps to contemporize it. While historical names are often translated, modern names often are not. Another idea might be to make it seem more Italian. Still another may be that his name just normally isn’t translated for whatever reason. A Google search shows 388,000 results for “Cesare Borgia” and only 73,500 for “Caesar Borgia.”
At least, that’s my two quadrans.
I don’t see any reason to use an Anglicized approximation of an Italian word when there is slready a perfectly good English version of it. Why then use the English versions of proper names like Rome, Florence, Milan, Italy, France, and so on? The name Lucretia Borgia has been part of the English language for centuries. It annoys me that in a production that is otherwise entirely in Enlish, that all of a sudden she becomes Lucrezia. Lucrezia, at least doesn’t sound stupid the way Jeremy Irons pronounces it whereas his pronunciation of Cesare grates like hell. Chesiree, twin sister of Desiree, the new members of Gemini’s Twin. It’s an SNL sketch.
Is Borgia being referred to as Pope Alexander in the show or Papa Alessandro?
Not in this BBC production it isn’t:
Nicolas Sarkozy to mark De Gaulle broadcast anniversary
Hopefully any artistic emoweenie subversion of BBO has been eradicated,
as it should be.
If they are using the unfamiliar CHEZZ-uh-ree thay could probably improve
their occupancy rate at least 10% by making the switch to sez-ARE-ee.
At least they get the consonants right in “Cesare” that is…What kills my ears is all the people who use a soft “g” when saying Borgia. In ITALIAN a soft “g” sound requires an H before the vowel “i”. If the name were “Borghia” then they’d be saying it right.
to quote smartphrase.com
• before e or i - like g in gymnastics
• otherwise - like g in go
This name is originally Spanish though. Written “Borja” is further proof of the intended abruptness in the name… As an English speaker, show some class and pronounce the name “Borgia” like this: “borr-jia” (or “bor-ja” if you can’t roll an “r” and/or fit that quick “i” sound in)
The “gia” is intended to be pronounced quickly like “Aqua di Gio” cologne. (aqua di “jo” is literally how it should sound fyi)
Maybe because Celi was playing Rodrigo Borgia with an Italian accent (but he did speak English so the phonetic story is wrong). Rodrigo Borgia was not Italian, he was Spanish.
It’s like an actor playing Adolf Hitler. An Austrian accent would be authentic. A mild American or English accent would be wrong but not noticeable. But an incorrect foreign accent is going to be noticeably wrong.
Just to clarify, I think most people use “soft” and “hard” to mean the opposite of your use of the terms.
The terms soft and hard do not actually exist in phonetics. We were taught those words in grade school phonics, as a form of intellectual baby-pap fed to children as a substitute for learning genuine phonetics. But since very few of us ever learned real phonetics in our subsequent education—our educators, for some short-sighted, mistaken reason, have evidently considered phonetics unworthy of being taught—we have never progressed beyond this baby-talk when we need to discuss phonetics. The present exchange is a good example of why soft and hard ought to be banished from the vocabulary of language study, since they have no actual meaning in phonetics: Nobody can really know what anyone else means by those words.
I saw the same terms used in Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie referring to the different pronunciations of /d/ that distinguish the words buḍḍha ‘old man’ and Buddha ‘enlightened’. The sound is a retroflex /ɖ/ in the former word and dental /d/ in the latter, but Rushdie called them “hard” and “soft” respectively, which means nothing at all.
In the case of the name Borgia /ˈbɔrdʒa/ in Italian, the g is pronounced as a voiced palatal affricate /dʒ/, as opposed to a voiced velar stop /ɡ/. Now there is a clear and unambiguous description of a sound that cannot lead to any mistakes.
carey31 is mistaken about there being a “quick i sound” in Borgia. There is no /i/ vowel sound at all. The use of <i> in the spelling between <c> or <g> and another vowel is just to show that there’s a palatal affricate sound as opposed to a velar stop.
I’m not sure I understand your complaint because to my ears virtually everyone on the show is saying Borja(s). At the very least they’re all properly rendering it as two syllables, not the three you’d expect if someone were trying to sound it out as an English word (thankfully not Bore-gee-ahs).
Bahaha whatever I know how it should sound. Just because you studied that shit in a book doesn’t mean you’re authentic. Obviously you don’t pronounce the “i” but it’s like the word “già” which wouldn’t be the same if you wrote it “ga” to someone who actually knows how Italian should sound…fyiiiiii
…without spelling out that “i” bullshit most anglos would say “borJA” like “JAMMING” you scholar you
NM, I’m not having a good day.
Do you understand the terms voiced palatal affricate and voiced velar stop? Do you realize that you’re stating the same thing as me? What exactly are you arguing against?
FYI I was brought up in an Italian-speaking family and my earliest memories are of speaking Italian. I went on to study linguistics.
You’re new here. If you decide to stick around and learn how this community works, you’ll find that they have more respect for knowledge around here. That includes the kind of systematized, organized knowledge found in books.