[Magdalen] Charleston Receipt.

[Simon Kershaw]

I don't think they are "French pronounciations long-since Anglicized".
Rather they are part of a common Anglo-French / Anglo-Norman vocaubulary,
where English and French pronunciation have diverged, and/or English
preserves an earlier pronunciation that the French have changed even more.

"Garage" would in English have been pronounced "ga"-"rage", where the
first syllable is short (i.e. not gar or gah, but more like the "a" in
cat") but stressed; and "rage" to rhyme with "age" ("ayj", not "ahhzh").
This sort of prunciation would have applied to lots of words ending -age,
such as cottage, plumage, homage, shippage, dotage, footage, and garage is
a regular part of that group too.

Because the second syllable is less-stressed it became by the early years
of the 20th century to be commonly pronounced "idj" rather than "ayj". I
have a family, household, dictionary that was my grandfather's, circa
1930, in which the preface-writer bemonad the trend to pronouncing these
words in the "Cockney fashion" as "idj".

For some reason, presumably under direct French influence, Americans have
chosen to pronounce "garage" closer to modern French, as g'rahzh, and have
invented a pseudo-French pronunciation of the less-common "homage" as
"o-mahzh" (the French for homage is "hommage" -- "homage" is a good
Anglo-Norman word pronounced homidj with an initial "h"). and sadly IMHO
this American affectation is catching on in the Arts world.

But do Americans prounced other -age words in the same way? Dotage,
footage (cue image of newsreader saying "here's some f'tahzh of the
incident"), plumage, cottage etc? Surely not?

Another one that always strike us as odd is American prounciation of
"fillet" (as in "fillet steak") as fee-lay, when "fillut" is the way we
say it.

simon

Scott Knitter wrote:
> A visitor from the UK said that's the thing he noticed most about American
> English: our "insistence" on using the French (or French-ish)
> pronunciation
> of things that the British long ago anglicized: guh-RAHZH instead of
> GARE-idge, val-AY for VAL-let, and so on.



-- 
Simon Kershaw
simon at kershaw.org.uk
Saint Ives, Cambridgeshire