[Sca-cooks] A necesseary instructional video

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Dec 14, 2010, at 1:21 PM, Alexander Clark wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Dec 2010 23:36:42 -0500, "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <
> adamantius1 at verizon.net> wrote:
>> The one that drives me crazy is the pseudo-Greek back-documented
>> pronunciation of gyro, which is a little like the insistence on a faux
>> French pronunciation for Claudette Chauchoin's American stage name of
>> Colbert, which was intended to hide her French ancestry, and properly
>> pronounced COLL-burt, not Kohl-bear.
> 
> 
> Apparently the original Greek is supposed to have another of those weird
> palatal sounds that English speakers can't handle. It can be approximated in
> English-compatible phonemes by a French "j", or "z" as in "azure". (This is
> supposed to be the correct pronunciation in one or two Greek dialects.) But
> it seems like it ought to have a final "s", unless you're also using the
> Greek declension. Usually the correct form of a noun as a loan-word in
> English is the nominative singular, with the plural being formed by adding
> an "s" (or "es").
> 
> BTW, if you have it on a long bun, that's a "gyro hero". :-)

Well, my issue is with the fact that the original Greek would, by most authorities, actually be pronounced "DOH-ner KE-bab," or "Sha-WAR-ma," while the original Greek-accented English would be pronounced "JIE-roh". The early antecedents of the dish are Greco-Turkic and Middle Eastern, and there are names for them. It's my understanding that only when the product starts getting produced by industrial meat-packing plants in the US for restaurant use in conjunction with the eponymous patent vertical rotisserie does the gyro name arrive... 

Adamantius






"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls, when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter