[Sca-cooks] Reptilian Pronunciation

[Laura C. Minnick]

At 08:06 AM 5/23/02 +0100, you wrote:
>On 22 May 2002 at 21:39, Philip & Susan Troy
>wrote:
>
>> Also sprach lilinah at earthlink.net:
>> >BBC newscasters say jag-yew-ar for jaguar
>>
>> I'll concede their right to call the British auto brand by that name,
>> but the animal is very clearly not a jagyewar, unless it is given a
>> new name that is neither Spanish nor indigenous, native South
>> American.
>
>OK, puzzled. How *else* would you pronounce
>"jaguar"? I know Americans tend to turn "e" into "oo"
>at times (hence "noos" for "news"), but how does that
>apply here? Does the "u" go silent, or turned into a
>long "oo", or something?

Jane,

The 'ew' in 'news has an 'oo' sound not because of the e, but because of
the w. In the case of the jaguar though, the American pronunciation treats
the 'u' as a 'w'- quite the opposite as 'news'. So we say jag-waar.

Having recently had occasion to play with writing in Middle English, it is
my observation that there are a great many words which now have 'w' in them
that previously had 'u', and the other way around. Other letters too, but
that one was the most obvious.

American English has had considerably more outside influences thrown at it-
languages are living things, and with an ocean to seperate people, the
evolution of pronunciation and spelling (not to mention vocabulary!) grew
in different directions than did language in Britain.

This of course does not explain why jaguar and guarantee are pronounced so
differently, when the same four-letter pattern is present. Personally, I
think that is a question for Dr. Johnson!

'Lainie
sometime amateur pedant
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