Post #764275 by swizzle on Thu, May 26, 2016 8:26 PM

On 2016-05-26 14:12, lunavideogames wrote:

I wonder if it is a different dialect in Martinique though? I would assume for Martinique to be isolated far from France that they wouldn't speak French in the exact same way as in France. I mean we can all agree that Americans and Europeans to not speak English the same, I wonder if we are just debating what is correct in different regions of the world? There may be no correct answer if it is pronounced correctly in two different ways in two different places...

This sums it up perfectly Treg.

I was born in Australia but both my parents are Hungarian and i have spoken Hungarian my whole life. In high school we had both French and German lessons and my German teacher told me early on that i would do well in the class because i had very good pronunciation and that is because i can roll my "R's", which is something that surprisingly most people just cannot do.

When people ask me how to say something in Hungarian and/or get me to teach them how to say a particular English word (yes, they are usually curse words) in Hungarian, the thing that i find is that because vowels in pretty much all European languages are pronounced differently and westerners are not used to using/saying them that way, so when they repeat the word back to me it just doesn't sound right.

Most of the time i have to think of a word in English that phonetically sounds the same as the word being translated and then tell the person to say it that way but replace letter X with letter Y and they should get very close. For example, "Hogy vagy?" is "How are you?".

Obviously the 'O' and the 'A' are going to sound different but the 'GY' in both words comes out sounding the same. Now at the moment i cannot thing of an English word that phonetically sounds the same as "Hogy" (this is because of what i mentioned above about vowels being pronuounced in a different way in European language) but i can say that if you take the English word "podge", replace the P with the V and say it exactly the same way, then you would have pronounced the word "vagy" perfectly. So podge/vodge=vagy, but trying that with hodge/hogy doesn't work. I cannot even begin to think about how to type what the 'ho' part sounds like that would make sense. You would need to hear me actually say it.

And just to comment on what this actual thread is about, i'm going to say with 100% certainty that Pernod is indeed pronounced as Per-No. But i'm also going to say that Pair-No is far likely to be far more accurate. Per-No is how a westerner would say it. Pair-No is how a European would say it, but they would also 'roll' the R and at the same time it would sound almost silent, like the T in orgeat. It wouldn't be a harsh R. Again, it is impossible to describe that sound in type. You'd need to actually hear it being said in person.

I called my first cat Pernod because when i was trying to think of a name for him i was just getting into cocktails and had read about and was fascinated by absinth(e) (which at the time was really only available in the U.K.). Learning about absinth(e) and all the liquers that are classed as a pastis, i was reading how those types of spirits 'louche', or go cloudy. And the cat was gray. Haha.

Anyway, not long after he had been christened i came across a very cool advertisment in a magazine for Pernod (which i know i still have somewhere but unfortunately couldn't find doing a Google search) in which the letter D from the logo had 'fallen' off the page and the caption read, "In France/French?, we drop the D". So if an actual advertisment for the product tells you how you say it, then i'm going to have to go with what they say as being correct.

[ Edited by: swizzle 2016-05-26 20:34 ]