Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
For what little it's worth, the attempts to make loan words in English sound more French almost invariably sound bizarre to my ears. I'd rather unilingual English speakers just go all in and call them croysants or freedom buns or whatever. Dropping the "r" sound is not more correct; there's an "r" sound in French and it is significant. "Croix" and "quoi" aren't the same word, for example.
It's the same in French when people borrow English words and stumble over them. The right thing to do is to make them conform to the set of phonemes you can speak and the person you're speaking to can easily disambiguate.
I applaud Middle America for its honest use of language in this particular case.
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Oh, I very much disagree. We're not Middle America, we're bilingual Canada. I think we should be retaining as much French pronunciation as possible where it occurs.
But not in an ostentatious way. It may sound like I'm contradicting myself, but I think there's a happy medium here that is proper and best suited to anglo-Canada. I cringe when I hear
craw-sayant, but I also don't like the way CBC radio personalities break out the Quebec accents for French names in the middle of otherwise English sentences.
I'm sure it's the house policy, but it's jarring. You're following along with a story when all of a sudden a name like "Giselle Bergeron" is smothered in the caramel vowels of Quebec City, and you half wonder if somehow the signals of the French feed didn't get crossed over into the English feed.
I suspect my reaction is due to my geographical location outside of the bilingual loop of Ottawa and environs. I'm guessing that people in Ottawa would disagree with me on this. But "bilingual Canada" actually feels distant and abstract once you get west of Kingston on the 401, never mind Saskatchewan. Which is probably why so many people around here say "craw-sayant."
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