Timeline for Why is baba ghanouj pronounced with a final "sh" sound?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
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| Sep 19, 2014 at 15:03 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @PLL We do have [ʒ] word-finally after short vowels, as you’d surely know if there were enough of an interior design in you that you regularly had to zhuzh things up. Incidentally, I’ve always heard and pronounced baba ghanouj pronounced with a final [ʒ], and a long [u] preceding it. I also pronounce it with a [ɣ], but I realise that’s probably just my own affectation. | |
| Dec 27, 2010 at 1:19 | comment | added | Kosmonaut | "Since we don't have [ɣ] in English, there's not really any way it could avoid getting approximated to [g]." Right, but since we borrowed the word into English, with Latin orthography, there was also no reason — in terms of pronunciation — to include the "h" at all in the spelling. The "gh" digraph is in the word only as a nod to the Arabic spelling, as a way to represent غ. | |
| Dec 26, 2010 at 17:42 | comment | added | PLL | The two ways are a bit different, though. Since we don't have [ɣ] in English, there's not really any way it could avoid getting approximated to [g]. But we do have [ʒ], and even word-finally, so we could use that if wanted to. (Though I guess we don't have [ʒ] word-finally after short vowels - so if we didn't devoice it in baba ghanouj, maybe we'd end up lengthening the vowel to make it rhyme with eg rouge?) | |
| Dec 13, 2010 at 15:55 | vote | accept | JSBձոգչ | ||
| Dec 10, 2010 at 13:20 | comment | added | Kosmonaut | Side note: we also pronounce the "gh" as a [g] sound, even though in Arabic it is pronounced like [ɣ], which is what the "gh" represents. So the word is reflecting Arabic orthography in two ways that are not retained in the English pronunciation. | |
| Dec 9, 2010 at 17:45 | history | answered | Kosmonaut | CC BY-SA 2.5 |