[Sca-cooks] A necesseary instructional video

[Alexander Clark]

On Mon, 13 Dec 2010 23:36:42 -0500, "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <
adamantius1 at verizon.net> wrote:

>
> On Dec 13, 2010, at 10:02 PM, Margaret Rendell wrote:
>
> > PS is that the standard US pronunciation of gnocchi?
>
> As far as I know, the standard US pronunciation is NYO-ki.
>

Wiktionary/Wikipedia seem to be saying that in Italian the initial consonant
is supposed to be articulated with the tongue raised to the hard palate,
about halfway between English "n" and "ng". Apparently "ny" is a way of
saying, "I don't know how to put my tongue there, but here's a sound that it
might remind me of."


> 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". :-)

-- 
Alex/Henry