Re: Non-English US Proper Name Pronunciation: 'Boisfeuillet'!

On 5/29/2006, CDB posted this:
Gene E. Bloch wrote:
On 5/29/2006, CDB posted this:
Gene E. Bloch wrote:
On 5/28/2006, CDB posted this:
Halcombe wrote:
One Boisfeuillet Jones, Jr. is CEO of the Washington Post.

How in Jesu's name do you pronounce that Chrisian name?
[...]
[boofly]
Some years later it might have worked; for a while, the Beaulieu
winery, which is not far from here, advertised their wine with
lessons on how to pronounce their name.

Bewley?

Truly.

The vintner did not really say boh-liUH, but BOH-liuh, or even had
nearly equal stress on the two syllables, IIRC.

I come from Ottawa ON, on the Quebec border. French words are pronounced by local anglos more or less correctly but with English stress patterns, as in your second example. Stress in French is almost equally distributed, but the tone changes on the last syllable of an utterance: I think this gives English speakers the idea that it's stressed more strongly than it really is.

I like boofly. It's the most fun thing so far in this thread, IMO.

It's like shoofly, except you throw a scare into the miserable little invetebrates.

Oh, dear. I thought it was pronounced to rhyme with 'truly' or 'aloofly' ... My bad (but what the hell, it was fun).

I note you were careful to say "the last syllable of an *utterance*". Yes.

In these parts (I'm not sure if I mean just California or the whole US), most people accent any foreign word on the last syllable, often with pretty strong stress, which grates enormously on my pedantic ear (the left one).

So we have a classical disk jockey saying, for example, DohnanYI and PachelBEL, and even a sportscaster whose name is shown on-screen as Ibañez (sic - note the unaccented a) referring to a baseball player as ChaVEZ.

OK, that's enough complaining for now :-)

--
Gene E. Bloch (Gino)
letters617blochg3251
(replace the numbers by "at" and "dotcom")


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