[Magdalen] Charleston Receipt.

[Simon Kershaw]

But to add a little bit of fact to this -- the OED first records the word
"garage" as 1902. So it is a modern borrowing from French, which probably
makes the two pronunciations equally valid. Either pattern it on other
earlier borrowings (as the British do) or pronounce it the French way (as
Americans do).

The OED also reminds me that there is an intermediate quite common British
pronunciation as GAR-ahdj with the stress pattern and final consonent of
garij, but a long second syllable more like the US g'rahzh.

simon

Simon Kershaw wrote:
> 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 Kershaw
simon at kershaw.org.uk
Saint Ives, Cambridgeshire