everything i know about french tells me that this pronunciation is wrong. is it just the americanized way of saying it?
yes
ETA to exapand slightly, people will turn sounds into those that are most convenient for them. There’s nothing in English that sounds like the the French eu, and then to follow that up with vre (VuREH), it’s just too complicated for people who don’t care about getting it right. So euvre turns into the end of the word serve.
For the same reason that Americans visit pear-iss and not pah-ree.
Also the reason Brett Favre is pronounce Favrah or Farve, granted the latter has now become the ‘correct’ pronunciation because that’s how the Favres pronounce it but still…
Yes, but its not because people don’t care about pronouncing it right. There is no such consonant cluster in English, so it creates a phonotactic constraint, hence the resulting pronunciation. Another example is the Vietnamese surname Nguyen. Ask an English speaker to try to get that one.
I say this as a native French speaker: I think hors-d’oeuvre may be one of the most difficult words to correctly pronounce for a non-native.
There once was a girl from Vancouver,
Who when told it was not “horses doover,”
Found she hadn’t the nerve
To ask for hors d’oeuvre
So had soup as a saving manoeuvre.
For the same reason that so many Americans render “chaise longue” as “chaise lounge”. When words are adopted from one language into another , they tend also to be adapted into more familiar forms. In the long run we may see the American spelling of “hors d’oeuvre” to adapt to reflect the common American pronunciation.
But it’s not impossible to learn to pronounce it correctly. Either they don’t care about getting it right or they just accept that it can be pronounced as the English language has transliterated it. It wasn’t really a criticism, just an idea of why people do what they do.
One thing about that particular word is that we hear people pronounce it so differently to how it’s spelled that many people probably don’t even recognise “hors d’oeuvre” as being the collection of letters that represents that word “orderve” (in the same way that it’s not uncommon for people not to recognise “misled” as “miss lead”.) So it may be some time before they figure out it’s pronounced differently from how it should be.
I speak from experience being someone who thought there was a word “orderve” that was rarely mentioned in print, and another word “hors d’oeuvre” that was rarely uttered aloud. I had a big :smack: moment when I realised they’re the same.
Rendezvous
Not ren dez e vus
:smack:
hey i was 9 and it was the name of a brownie/girl scout camp in western NY
I think what happens is the “eu” sound becomes “er” (because English doesn’t really use the sound represented by the “eu”, and “er” is about the closest thing to it that is commonly used in English), and the final “r” is just dropped, because again, English speakers’ mouths aren’t used to adding that little “r” sound after a consonant. (Like, I can’t pronounce “macabre” correctly to save my life.)
Second hand digression.
A friend from high school told me of being in a fancy french restaurant as a child, and mortified his parents by announcing “Hey, they have whores de ovaries, can we have some whores de ovaries?”
I’d leave the whores’ ovaries - they’re rather past their best.
Sorry, hijack… but the American pronunciations of “niche” and “foyer” are a pet peeve.
My favorite is people from Gloucester who can’t pronounce Worcestershire.
Which pronunciations?
“niche” I’d pronounce “neesh” (well, with not quite such a broad “eeee”). I’ve never actually heard people say “nitch” (which I’m guessing is what you’re referring to).
“foyer” I know is more correctly pronounced something like “fwah-YAY” but at least in the US that’d come across as pretentious-sounding. So “FOY err” it is to us Yanks even to me, and I studied French and can be a bit of a pretentious snob about stuff. For example my undies are NOT lawn-jer-AY, dammit!
(but I’m sure glad Feb-you-airy is almost over).
The way I pronounce hors d’oeuvre is this:
APP-uh-TIE-zer
You see the same sort of thing in old German maps. Aside from the additional provinces that belonged to Germany at the time, cities and regions beyond those borders, and outside the German-speaking area completely, would be marked with German names. In most cases these names were vaguely similar to the originals in the same way that “chaise lounge” is to chaise-longue and “or-duurves” is to Hors d’oeuvres. For that matter, it’s the same reason that people say "Brett FAHHrve instead of trying to pronounce Favre as it would be done in French.
I agree. I think the English pronounciation is about as close as you can get with English phonemes. Expecting someone to say it with a French accent seems a bit much.
I get pretty irritated when we borrow foreign words (usually French) and butcher the pronounciation. This isn’t one of the words that bothers me. À tout a l’heurre is a better example, or in German, danke schön.
eh, inserted in the middle of an american english conversational sentence, it’d sound pompous-assish to me to bust out an approximation of proper french pronunciation of hors d’oeuvres, like maybe rolling some r’s at Taco Bell to order some burritos. Not saying it’s never right to try the correct pronunciation, rather that usually it would just be silly.