Eggcorn Forum

I like this one.

If you were looking up “sexual moreways,” I can see how you might end up at some purple sites.

If I’m not mistaken, it’s the only instance of a gue ending that is pronounced “gway” in English.

Ah, David. You should know by now that it isn’t safe to make a general claim about language on this forum (A bit of information I have acquired the hard way, alas.). There is also “mangue,” pronounced MAN-gway. The Mangues are native Nicaraguans.

I count at least five ways that the terminal ”-gue” can be pronounced in English:

segue – gway
dengue – gay
argue – gyoo
tongue – g

There may be compelling reasons that English has become the most commonly spoken international language. Consistency is not one of them.

Last edited by kem (2010-06-06 11:32:01)

This forum is probably one of the few places on the web where it isn’t safe to make a claim about the pronunciation of “Mangue.” If I know anyone who’s regularly heard a version of the term spoken, it’s David Tuggy.

I don’t recall having heard the word before, but the usual authorities will allow us to choose pretty much any pronunciation we want. The OED’s entry on “Mangue” gives (I’m translating roughly from the IPA) “g(w)ay,” with the parentheses presumably implying that you can retain or delete that w. But their entry on “Oto-manguean” is more elaborate, giving three pronunciations each in British and NAm varieties. Basically, they allow “gway-uhn,” “gay-uhn,” and “gee-uhn” in that order.

The pronunciation guide in the Wikipedia article on Oto-manguean more or less agrees with David but wasn’t written by him. Interestingly, the guide first went up on Sept 8, 2009 and gave the pronunciation as roughly “0h-toh-mahn-gayn.” Within an hour and a half, another editor replaced it with the current pronunciation, remarking that the earlier version was “half Spanish, half English.” Both editors are apparently linguists. This confirms my impression that most ling articles on Wikipedia are being watched intensely all the time.

David T an authority on how a Spanish word is pronounced in English?

Well, neither David nor I set him up as an authority (but I now plan to…).

He would be the last person to ask, wouldn’t he? The authorities on traditional English pronunciations of terms derived from other languages are people who do not speak the source languages.

Sez who? I’m skeptical. A number of lexicographers have been famed for their intimate knowledge of the source-languages they were working with, and I don’t see why that shouldn’t be the case. My conversational Spanish is covered with about a quarter century of rust, but I lived in Mexico for a while, and I never had any problem whatsoever distinguishing between the English and Spanish pronunciations of the same word or phrase. And it’s hard for me to imagine that I would. If I had grown up with both languages, maybe there’d be some cross-over confusion (I’m skeptical even about that), but I acquired most of my Spanish as a late teen, and I’m really quite conscious of the differences between the two.

In fact, I think it’s people who can speak two languages who are most highly aware of the differences in the pronunciation of words shared by both tongues. When I first moved to Southern California, I was a Spanish major, and a number of times people took me to task for my pronunciation of the Silicon Valley town of “Los Gatos.” I say “Loss Gaddis,” not “Lohs Gah-tohs,” because that’s the pronunciation I heard growing up in Northern California. I was well aware that the name means “The Cats” in Spanish, but that didn’t matter—that wasn’t how I’d heard it said. My interlocutors would say things like, “I’m surprised that a Spanish major doesn’t know the correct pronunciation of that town.” And I’d ask them whether they said “Lohs Ahn-heh-less” for Los Angeles or “Sahn Frahn-sees-coh” for San Francisco. And that always ended that discussion. But it amazed me that they had never thought about the possibility that the names of the small, more obscure towns—the ones they’d only seen mentioned in newspaper articles—probably had local, Anglicized pronunciations just like the big towns. But I was, in fact, a Spanish major, and I was quite conscious of the difference. I was a pretty good authority for the local pronunciation of Los Gatos (or San Jose [“Sannozay”], for that matter), and I don’t see why David Tuggy shouldn’t be a good authority for similar terms. [For the record, some Los Gatos locals do in fact use a Hispanicized pronunciation, and that tendency seems to have become more common since the town became the home of many Silicon Valley millionaires. But plenty of old-timers find that version of the name affected.]

And I wonder just who could be the authority on the pronunciation of a word like “Mangue” in English if not people like David. The problem is that there probably isn’t a “traditional” pronunciation of the word. It refers to a language that has been extinct for centuries, and to a people that seems to have been largely assimilated; as far as I can tell, it isn’t used as a term that identifies a well-defined ethnic group in modern-day Nicaragua. So the kinds of people who are talking about the Mangue in English are likely specialists like David—Meso-American linguists, anthropologists, archaeologists, historians—people who can comfortably read a monograph in Spanish, and people who know Spanish orthographic conventions well. If you rule them out as authorities, I doubt you have many potential authorities left.

Furthermore, aren’t you made just a bit suspicious by the OED pronunciation guides for “Mangue” and “Oto-Manguean”? I mean, c’mon—six different pronunciations for “Oto-Manguean,” a term very few Anglophones will ever encounter in speech? What’s going on with that? How exactly did that thing get written? Maybe the OED editors took a poll at a Meso-American linguistics conference. But my guess is that they guessed. I suspect that they were well aware that the term was too obscure to have a single authoritative pronunciation, and they therefore set out to provide a pragmatic guide that would encompass all the reasonable guesses that a reasonably informed English speaker might come up with. That doesn’t say to me that there’s necessarily anyone out there saying “Man-gway.” I’ll bet that “Man-gay” is, at the very least, much more common.

I’d never encountered the words “gangue” and “cangue” before—so thank you for that. But where’d you get those pronunciations? The OED just gives “gang” and “cang” as the pronunciation.

The OED just gives “gang” and “cang” as the pronunciation.

Indeed. I have made an error. I’ll remove them from the list. The OED is probably trustworthy on this. So now English is a little less irrational (unless someone can think of another example of -gue as J).

An eloquent plea for the trustworthiness of language savants, Pat. But I think you are focusing on exceptions rather than rules. You and I are not good witnesses for the prosecution when it comes to standard pronunciations. A capable defense lawyer would make mincemeat out of us. To tame a unicorn, look for a virgin.

Case in point: Quebec. You can find a number of web sites stating boldly that “k-beck” is the proper pronunciation of “Quebec.” I pronounce the name of the province this way. But I’m also aware that “kwee-beck” is common, especially here in the west of Canada. I find that I can usually correlate the two pronunciations with the level of the person’s exposure to French (The British-oriented OED, by the way, gives “k-beck” as the third pronunciation.). Again, though, this attempt to find authentic pronunciations only goes so far. I don’t hear English-speaking newscasters saying the word “Montreal” with a French pronunciation.

Two of my favorite city-name localisms are “Staunton” and “Cairo.” The name of the Virginia city of Staunton is pronounced by the locals as “stan-ton.” Cairo, a small city in Nebraska I have traveled through a hundred times, is “care-oh” to the locals, not “kye-roh.” Cairo is named after the Egyptian city—most of the dozen or so street names in the little burg are someone’s idea of Middle Eastern place name: Nile St, Egypt St, Thebes St, Mecca St.

Last edited by kem (2010-06-06 16:24:18)

But what I find fairly astonishing is that this process works even on the names of individuals.

There is an asymmetry between the correct way to pronounce places and the correct way to pronounce people’s names. Place names seem to work by consensus, with some implicit weighted voting underlying the consensus. Once consensus is reached, low-frequency dissent is ignored: we don’t change the way we pronounce “Detroit” just because our French cousins insist on “de-TRWAH.” But the way a person pronounces his/her own name¹ is usually taken as the gold standard, even if everyone else tends to pronounce it in a different way. The names of some famous people, especially those with non-English names, can be exceptions to this rule. Almost no one expects Nietzsche’s name to be pronounced the way he would have said it.

An interesting borderline case in this regard is the name of one of the minor U. S. Presidents. Modern students of U. S. history do not pronounce his name the way he did. Because he is a minor president, his own pronunciation should arguably take precedence over subsequent mispronunciations. Anyone want to take a guess who this unfortunate fellow is?

——————-
¹ Dialectic differences are taken into account, of course. I don’t address a fellow named “Chet” as “CHAY-at,” even if he is from Texas.

Last edited by kem (2010-06-06 16:25:13)

Martin van Buren is supposed to have learned English as a second language—his native tongue was Dutch. Since there’s no way “van byoor-in” is the Dutch pronunciation of his name, I’m going with him.

Good guess. Perhaps there are two minor presidents with name pronunciation problems.

The president I was thinking of was Franklin Pierce, who pronounced his last name “purse.” I became aware of this oddity in the 1970s, when I was studying philosophy. Scholars were just discovering the nineteenth-century pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Those in the know pronounced his last name “purse,” as he did.

“Pierce” and “Peirce” appear to be alternate spellings of the same name (cf. “Reid/Ried,” “Keith/Kieth”), so they should be pronounced the same way. In the nineteenth century both were commonly pronounced “purse.” Note that “Pierce” as a name is probably related to “Percy,” which has retained the “ur” sound. In the twentieth century, influences from the sound of the verb “pierce” (which has its own checkered pronunciation history) probably drew the pronunciation of the name to “peerce.”

The OED entry for C. S. Peirce, by the way, gives the wrong pronunciation for his surname.

Chances are that the vintage Pierce-Arrow automobile was originally the “purse-ehr-oh,” since the Arrow was a car built and sold by the nineteenth-century inventor George N. Pierce. I’ve never seen any documentation on this. But, as I mentioned above, the social rules for the pronunciation of thing names and people names are different. If everyone says “peerce-ehr-oh,” then that’s what it is. In the case of the car, semantics may have played a role in the switch (a piercing arrow).

Last edited by kem (2010-06-08 11:37:16)