How to pronounce "parmesan"
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The Cambridge Dictionaries Online entry for the pronunciation of parmesan (cheese) in American English is a fine example of broad-transcription IPA style:
But the button labelled with an audio icon and a blue "US" leads to
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/media/american-english/us_pron/u/usb/usb02/usb02227.mp3
which is an interesting surprise:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
If you're wondering whether the audio for "parmesan" can be found listed under "Pennsylvania", the answer is "apparently not":
[h/t Stephen Dodson]
Glenys Hanson said,
May 19, 2015 @ 5:44 pm
Very surprising!
But reassuring to see that it isn't just amateurs like me that get their sound files mixed up.
But I couldn't see the transcription here – I had to go to http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/american-english/parmesan-cheese?q=parmesan
Glenys Hanson said,
May 19, 2015 @ 5:50 pm
Then as soon as I'd posted my comment I could see it??? But only in this browser. I tried on both Windows & Mac.
Oh, and now I can see the bit about Pennsylvania.
Curiouser and curiouser!
Michael Rank said,
May 19, 2015 @ 6:00 pm
But the audio says "Pennsylvania". Is that an error or am I missing something?
maidhc said,
May 19, 2015 @ 6:03 pm
That's for cream cheese, not Parmesan.
Gene Callahan said,
May 19, 2015 @ 7:37 pm
'But the audio says "Pennsylvania". Is that an error or am I missing something?'
Yes, you are missing the point of this post.
Eric P Smith said,
May 19, 2015 @ 8:20 pm
I have a theory. The audio file was planted there by my father (died 1978). He never could tell one cheese from another, and he mixed up Pennsylvania with Philadelphia.
Rubrick said,
May 19, 2015 @ 8:54 pm
A very interesting cheese mistake (or "cheesestake" for short).
Jeff W said,
May 19, 2015 @ 10:25 pm
And, if anyone is curious about how the word is actually pronounced, go here, here, here, here, here, here, here or (the way I pronounce it) here [US pronunciation] and here—all of which made me wonder how the voice talent for each dictionary gets chosen.
Jacob said,
May 19, 2015 @ 10:33 pm
This Parmesan is clearly Gene, in disguise.
Deborah Pickett said,
May 20, 2015 @ 12:13 am
At the risk of being irrelevantly relevant, why DO some people say it with /ʒ/? I did a bit of a search online but could not find any explanation of why, only that, there is this pronunciation. The best I can come up with is that it is a cross-breeding of "parmigiana" with "Parmesan", with the speaker hedging their bets.
Bob Ladd said,
May 20, 2015 @ 12:32 am
Quite apart from the problem of confused sound files, does anyone know where the [ʒ] in the North American pronunciation of Parmesan comes from? That is, why do people who see the intervocalic orthographic S without a following orthographic I pronounce it /ʒ/ instead of /z/?
[(myl) I've always supposed that it's palatal leakage from the Italian version.]
Gregory Kusnick said,
May 20, 2015 @ 1:04 am
Bob Ladd: Perhaps the real question is how did parmigiano come to be spelled with an s in English?
Nate said,
May 20, 2015 @ 1:46 am
@ Bob Ladd:
My guess is that it's a hyperforeignism, like "Bei[ʒ]ing" or "habañero." Are you sure that pronunciation isn't found elsewhere?
American English Pronunciation Ch – 10. OO, UH, EH | HINDI ALPHABET said,
May 20, 2015 @ 1:58 am
[…] How to pronounce "parmesan" […]
Ran Ari-Gur said,
May 20, 2015 @ 2:03 am
> That is, why do people who see the intervocalic orthographic S without a following orthographic I pronounce it /ʒ/ instead of /z/?
That's a very strange way of putting it; it makes it sound like many different people are starting with the spelling 'Parmesan' and independently coming up with the same /ʒ/ pronunciation. Obviously that's not really the case; rather, many different people have learned that there is a word spelled 'Parmesan' and pronounced with /ʒ/, just as they have learned many other irregular sound-spelling correspondences. (You might as well ask why people who see the <olo> in 'colonel' pronounce it /ɝ/.)
John Walden said,
May 20, 2015 @ 2:40 am
As errors go, this one doesn't particularly grate but it is a bit flaky.
Chris Waters said,
May 20, 2015 @ 3:49 am
Indeed, I learned to pronounce the word (with /ʒ/) before I learned to spell. Anything. So the spelling didn't factor in at all.
I've also heard it with a /z/ often enough that it also sounds natural and correct to me—but now that I know that the true pronunciation is /ˌpɛnsɨlˈveɪnjə/, I'll stick with that! :)
[(myl) "Would you like a little grated Pennsylvania on your pasta, madam?" I like it.]
John Walden said,
May 20, 2015 @ 5:55 am
To compensate for my earlier contribution I've been doing some light digging.
This might be the cause of the z:
http://eml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial%C3%A8tt_pramzan
pep said,
May 20, 2015 @ 6:12 am
Another interesting thing is how to pronounce parmesan…in parmesan: it´s something like prmzan, because emilian dialects tend to avoid all vocals -but one- per word.
(a famous example is bolognese for hospital, it. ospedale: sbel)
I lived in Parma for a year; the language was in bad shape, but was still loved by everyone in the city.
here a sample of the dialect (italianized but still with the characteristic sound "r"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehlGBoXgeTk
here a (sad) song in the closely related dialect of Modena; it´s a version of a catalan song (I´am a catalan myself):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO8tBn8rz38
John Coleman said,
May 20, 2015 @ 6:46 am
Just a theory, but I long assumed that the [ʒ] in the North American pronunciation of Parmesan has nothing to do with the spelling, but is modified from the [dʒ] in "Parmigiana". You hear the same substitution in English speakers' approximations to Chinese names like Zhang. [dʒ] would be easier and more accurate, but [ʒ] signals "foreign", like in French. [ʒ] is non-native in English, especially in word-initial and word-final positions. Medially its occurrence in "measure" etc, though old, can be analyzed as /zj/, in which case [ʒ] is not phonemic at all, except for the loans.
pep said,
May 20, 2015 @ 7:12 am
(My previous comment has been cancelled; I don´t think it was off-topic, I´ll repost it)
Another interesting thing is how to pronounce parmesan… in parmesan: it´s something like prmzan, because in this language they tend to avoid vocals and sometimes leave just one per word
(a classic example is Bolognese for hospital, it. ospedale: sbdel)
I lived in Parma for a year; the language is in bad shape, but everybody loves it.
a recent sample of the language, here (strongly italianized, but you can listen to that characteristic “r” of the dialect):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehlGBoXgeTk
a (sad) song in the closely related dialect of Modena; it´s a version of a catalan song (I´m a Catalan myself):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO8tBn8rz38
pep said,
May 20, 2015 @ 7:14 am
oh, it just popped up again, sorry :-(
Vanya said,
May 20, 2015 @ 8:31 am
I assume the American pronunciation /ʒ/ of "Parmesan" would have been influenced by the Neapolitan/Calabrian pronunciations of "Parmigiano" common among Italian Americans on the East Coast of the US.
Bob Ladd said,
May 20, 2015 @ 8:51 am
@Gregory Kusnick, @John Walden: Presumably the form Parmesan comes into English from French, like many English versions of Italian place names (cf. Naples, Florence, Venice [almost], Turin, Piedmont, etc.).
@Ran Ari-Gur @ Chris Waters: I was just trying to get at the mismatch between the pronunciation and the spelling, and to suggest that [ʒ] must be the innovation, not [z].
@Nate, @John Coleman: The idea that [ʒ] is a hyper-foreignism (as in Bei[ʒ]ing) seems plausible, though I have the impression that there are a couple of other words in which intervocalic S (not followed by I) is pronounced [ʒ] as well. Can't think of any offhand, though.
Bob Ladd said,
May 20, 2015 @ 8:59 am
Vanya commented while I was posting my last comment. The suggestion that this comes from Neapolitan/Calabrian pronunciation seems much more plausible than the hyper-foreignism idea (though the latter could reinforce the pronunciation with [ʒ] once it got started) and would also explain the apparent fact that the pronunciation with [ʒ] is largely restricted to the US.
Larry said,
May 20, 2015 @ 9:22 am
This is a little off topic, but why do your phonetic transcriptions appear as "[ʒ]" on my computer?
D.O. said,
May 20, 2015 @ 9:50 am
ʒ/z/s variatoin is normal in geographic names with -Vsia such as Tunisia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Andalusia. This morning I've heard the news on NPR about Indonesia and Malaysia taking in some refugees, with -sia pronounced differently for these countries side-to-side.
John said,
May 20, 2015 @ 11:52 am
@Bob Ladd I'm sure that's right, especially given that it's gastronomic. But the z is the mystery.
How is Parmesan pronounced in French?
dw said,
May 20, 2015 @ 11:59 am
At the risk of being irrelevantly relevant, why DO some people say it with /ʒ/?
I'd love to believe that it's because of some dialect spoken by Italian immigrants to the US: however, my suspicion is that it's just a hyperforeignism. /ʒ/ has become the all-purpose "I'm not sure how to pronounce this foreign word but it sounds sophisticated" consonant — see its use in "Beijing", "Taj Mahal", etc.
dw said,
May 20, 2015 @ 12:00 pm
@John:
How is Parmesan pronounced in French?
/paʁməzɑ̃/
Gregory Kusnick said,
May 20, 2015 @ 12:27 pm
Larry: Because he left out the closing semicolon.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 20, 2015 @ 12:52 pm
The /ʒ/ in what I would think of as standard AmEng pronunciation of Indonesia, at least, is not a hyperforeignism at all because it's just the standard way English words ending in -esia are pronounced. Now, many of those are sort of high-falutin' or technical ("synesthesia"), but e.g. "amnesia" or "milk of magnesia" have been fully assimilated into non-elite registers. I'm not convinced by the claim that it's "non-native" in that sort of intersyllabic position (a la "measure" etc.). It may not occur in words that entered the lexicon prior to 1066, but it's had plenty of time to get domesticated. ("Indonesia" is rhymed with "gonna please ya" in the Alex Chilton song "Bangkok," but it's one of those close-enough-for-rock-and-roll imperfect rhymes.)
bratschegirl said,
May 20, 2015 @ 1:09 pm
"Palatal leakage" sounds like one of those things discussed in commercials directing one to "ask your doctor if ExpensiveNewDrug is right for you."
Eric P Smith said,
May 20, 2015 @ 1:31 pm
@J.W.Brewer: I'm old-fashioned enough to maintain that, in most parts of the UK, the standard way to pronounce English words ending in -esia is [iːzɪə] (in Scotland, [iːzɪʌ]). http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/ gives /iːzɪə/ as the only pronunciation for "synaesthesia" and "amnesia", and gives it as one of three pronunciations for "magnesia".
Bob Ladd said,
May 20, 2015 @ 1:44 pm
@J. W. Brewer, @D.O.: There's definitely a British/American difference with respect to -Vsia endings, especially in place names. Many such words that in North American English routinely have [ʒ] (there, I remembered the semicolon) in many British accents have [zj] (e.g. Tunisia, which for me ends in [-iʒə], in the UK normally ends in [-ɪzjə]), and Asia is often pronounced with [ʃ] rather than [ʒ]. So John Coleman may well have different phonemic intuitions about [ʒ] than most North American speakers.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 20, 2015 @ 2:07 pm
Well, "hyperforeignism" is rather a different diagnosis-or-peeve for a deprecated pronunciation than "Americanism," isn't it? Unless there's a British stereotype (which I guess I can't rule out) that Americans (rank-and-file median Americans, not pretentious college-town bobo NPR listeners) are unusually prone to hyperforeignisms?
Andrew (not the same one) said,
May 20, 2015 @ 3:45 pm
We don't, though, seem to have any analogous cases of the phoneme in question being used for a plain 's'; it is variously used for 'si', for 'zh' and for 'j'. I would take it that the first is seen (in some places) simply as the standard way to pronounce the combination; with the second it's a plausible attempt to work out the pronunciation, by analogy with 'sh'; with the third it probably is hyperforeignism, based on how it's pronounced in French. But its use in 'Parmesan' would seem to have some other source.
iraguisan said,
May 20, 2015 @ 3:57 pm
I'm pretty sure Bob Ladd is right that "parmesan" came from French (same process as It. cortigiano > Fr. courtisan), so [s] precedes [ʒ]. As to why [ʒ], Deborah Pickett's guess would make it not just hyperforeignism but perhaps an eggcorn: *Parmigian for both the cheese and the dish, or as my school cafeteria used to spell it, Veal Parma John.
This seems to be a widespread tradition in cafeteria-speak:
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/letters-editor-july-11-2010
Jeff W said,
May 20, 2015 @ 4:07 pm
As someone (originally from the New York City area) who pronounces “parmesan” with a /ʒ/ I’d say that I made a connection between it and parmigiano which I also pronounce with a /ʒ/—I don’t think it was some hyperforeignism. (I know better than to pronounce “Beijing” or “Zhang” with a /ʒ/ and I’m not that familiar with Mandarin.)
Pflaumbaum said,
May 20, 2015 @ 4:56 pm
My (North Yorkshire) grandmother always pronounced it with the stress on the middle syllable, which was /iː/. So: /pɑː'miːzən/
Total outlier, I'm guessing.
AB said,
May 20, 2015 @ 5:05 pm
@JW
I think there might be such a stereotype. This Brit acquired it from watching Americans on TV talk about food. "Fillay". "erbs", "habañeros", "au jus sauce", "parmezhan", WTF?….
British English has a fine repertoire of what on might call anti-foreignisms, or words of foreign origin that seem to be deliberately pronounced as distantly from the original as possible. Most are titles or place-names: "Bewlee" [Beaulieu], "Beechum" [beauchamp], "Ma[r]leebun","leftenant", "kernel"….
maidhc said,
May 20, 2015 @ 6:14 pm
AB: I believe that the British pronunciation of words like Beaulieu comes from the original medieval Norman French pronunciation. Hence it is not the same as modern standard French.
But if I'm wrong, this will be the place to find out.
maidhc said,
May 20, 2015 @ 6:28 pm
AB: "Jaguar" and "Nicaragua", on the other hand …
My older relatives always call the cheese "par-MEE-zan".
Jeff W said,
May 20, 2015 @ 6:38 pm
Slightly OT but still on the topic of hyperforeignism: James Fallows of The Atlantic pins the /ʒ/ of “Beijing” on Walter Cronkite. (The Atlantic piece doesn’t say so but Cronkite’s pronunciation during CBS's coverage of Nixon's 1972 trip to China coincided roughly with the decline of the use of “Peking” and the ascendance of “Beijing”—“Peking” appears to have, um, peaked around 1968—so, perhaps, he was uniquely situated to place his stamp on the pronunciation.)
Levantine said,
May 20, 2015 @ 6:59 pm
Is the educated American pronunciation of the last syllable of 'processes' (to rhyme with the -es of 'indices', 'crises', etc.) an example of a hyperforeignism? Being a Brit who lived in the States for many years, I certainly hold the view that Americans are keener than us to preserve the pronunciation of foreign borrowings. 'Guillotine' said without the L and 'junta' with an H are two instances that spring to mind.
Eli Nelson said,
May 20, 2015 @ 8:04 pm
@Levantine: I'm American and I see that pronunciation as based on a false analogy, and as such not especially "educated" sounding. I wouldn't call it a "hyperforeignism" though, since all of the words involved are pretty well assimilated to English phonology.
Ben Zimmer said,
May 20, 2015 @ 10:00 pm
Jeff W: …all of which made me wonder how the voice talent for each dictionary gets chosen.
Opera singers, with their attention to enunciation and knowledge of IPA, make great pronouncers. See my 2008 post, "Operatic IPA and the Visual Thesaurus." (The pron files are now used for Vocabulary.com as well.)
American Heritage prons, meanwhile, have mostly been done by a single person: the great David Jost, Houghton-Mifflin VP for Digital Content. David talked about this in a 2013 MLA panel discussion on "Digital Dictionaries" that I was also a part of.
John Walden said,
May 21, 2015 @ 2:18 am
So, summing up, it's a French word, and one that made its way into English in 1510, predating our colonial adventures in the Americas:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=parmesan&searchmode=none
and its French pronunciation is emphatically the z sound:
http://www.larousse.com/en/dictionaries/french/parmesan/58261?q=parmesan#57916
as is largely its BrE and perhaps less largely its AmE.
Then it's always been pronounced, perhaps especially in culinary circles, with a z, more or less exactly as it was when it was borrowed?
The /ʒ/ seems to be more of an AmE thing, and perhaps influenced by the Italian.
John Walden said,
May 21, 2015 @ 2:23 am
So, summing up, it's a French word, and one that made its way into English in 1510, predating our colonial adventures in the Americas:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=parmesan&searchmode=none
and its French pronunciation is emphatically the z sound:
http://www.larousse.com/en/dictionaries/french/parmesan/58261?q=parmesan#57916
as is, largely, its BrE and perhaps less largely its AmE.
Then it's always been pronounced, perhaps especially in culinary circles, with a z, more or less exactly as it was when it was borrowed?
The /ʒ/ seems to be more of an AmE thing, and perhaps influenced by the Italian.
John Walden said,
May 21, 2015 @ 2:24 am
Oops
Levantine said,
May 21, 2015 @ 3:45 am
Eli Nelson, I meant hyperforeignism in the same way that 'octopi' might be classed as such — a well-assimilated word pluralised in a pseudo-Latin way. Based on what I experienced at graduate school, I would say the '-eez' pronunciation is prevalent among at least younger educated Americans.
John Coleman said,
May 21, 2015 @ 5:03 am
Bob Ladd probably has a point about differences between phonemic intuitions in BrE and AmE (though my comment was based on distributional analysis, not intuition at all). AmE English also has final [ʒ] in "garAGE", which Brits usually don't. But I regard this as a "foreignism" too, as it has very un-Germanic (in fact, French) stress on the final syllable, betraying its status as a recent loan. So I can't agree with Eli Nelson that [ʒ] in American English is "particularly well assimilated to English phonology", though I guess it is clearly accepted more in American English phonology.
There was a certain amount of humour in the recent UK general election about the pronunciation of Nigel Farage's surname: whether to use final [ʒ] (which he prefers, being of French heritage), or to say it Anglicized as "FARRidge", to be deliberately annoying to his supporters.
John Coleman said,
May 21, 2015 @ 5:45 am
Having a [ʒ] in the pronunciation is not enough to establish it as phonemic. It is not necessary to analyse the [ʒ] in Indonesia etc (if you say it like that) as a phoneme /ʒ/; /zj/ pronounced as [ʒ] will do fine, just like "miss you" with -/s j/- is pronounced with a [ʃ] by some people (like word internally, for many people "issue" is [ɪʃu], but for some it's still [ɪsju], so the phonemic representation /ɪsju/ can cover both cases nicely.
Eli Nelson said,
May 21, 2015 @ 7:23 am
@John Coleman: there seems to have been a mix-up; what I called well-assimilated to English phonology was not /ʒ/, but the word "process/processes" and the words its plural has been spuriously analogized with, such as "thesis/theses" or "hypothesis/hypotheses." None of these are really foreign any longer, so I think a better term than "hyperforeignism" would be "hypercorrection" in reference to /prɒsɛsiːz/. But it's a moot point really.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 21, 2015 @ 11:01 am
I suspect that John Coleman may be focused on issues of phonemic representation at a higher level of theoretical rigor than I may have the competence or interest to engage with. But whether or not the ʒ in AmEng "Indonesia" is phonemic seems a different issue from whether it is a foreignism. If it is not phonemic but merely a particular "realization" of an "underlying" (if those are the right technical terms for this analysis) /zj/, it would seem to be an example of a well-established process in English parallel to the historical path by which e.g. "temptation" shrank from tetrasyllabic to trisyllabic with a ʃ that was not present in the tetrasyllabic pronunciation popping up as a result. (To return to where we began, Pennsylvania at least in AmEng has presumably shrunk along the way from pentasyllabic to tetrasyllabic, but the /nj/ combination doesn't turn into anything particularly interesting as a result.)
I'm also not sure what it means to classify the final ʒ in AmEng "garage" as a foreignism. Is it a claim that it's not a possible word within the default phonotactics AmEng-speaking kids learn natively as toddlers and they thus need to learn to pronounce that word as a "special case" a la the echt-Scots pronunciation of "loch"? I don't think that's the case, but that would at least be an empirical proposition subject to proof one way or another. If "foreignism" doesn't mean that, what does it mean?
J.W. Brewer said,
May 21, 2015 @ 11:12 am
FWIW, although introspection is highly unreliable and I expect my usage probably varies a bit in practice, I *think* my own default pronunciations are /z/ in "parmesan cheese," but /ʒ/ in "veal parmesan." But only in contexts where I'm using one but not using the other close by in the same discourse. I.e. if I actually noticed the lack of parallelism it might seem "wrong" and self-consciousness would set in, but I really don't know which way I'd shift in order to harmonize them.
Jeff W said,
May 21, 2015 @ 1:24 pm
Well, that’s sort of my point and I think Deborah Pickett’s as well. (I didn’t even realize that “veal parmesan” was a standard variant of “veal parmagiana*” but the New York Times and Saveur use it so I guess it is.)
No one pronounces the g in “veal parmagiana” as an “s” or a “z.” People (like me) who pronounce “parmesan” with a /ʒ/ aren’t committing a form of hyperforeignism—they’re just making their pronunciation of that word consistent with their pronunciation of “parmigiana.” (The pronunciation of the g in “parmigiana” as /ʒ/ might be a hyperforeignism but we’re not really talking about that.)
And, surprisingly, according to this site, there actually is no connection with “parmigiana” and the cheese:
So making the pronunciation of “parmesan” consistent with “parmagiana” is actually a form of hypercorrection; there is no reason why they should be consistent (assuming that site is correct)—which means, I guess I’ll switch over to the s sound in “parmesan.”
*Maybe the whole name of the dish is a hyperforeignism since, according to Wikipedia and other sites, in Italian it’s called Cotolette alla Bolognese.
J. W. Brewer said,
May 21, 2015 @ 3:19 pm
The google n-gram viewer shows "veal parmagiana" consistently more common over time than "veal parmesan," although with the latter a quite significant minority variant for at least the last 4-5 decades. Interestingly, it is reversed when you switch meats, as "chicken parmesan" (perhaps a dish devised on this side of the Atlantic and unknown by any name in Italy?) is consistently more common than "chicken parmagiana" in the same dataset.
s/o said,
May 21, 2015 @ 3:28 pm
Jeff W- but why would your pronunciation of the more common word be affected by the less common one? You probably encountered and learned to pronounce the name of the cheese well before the veal dish.
Anyhow, when did the stuff become a household staple in the US? I doubt it was served much in colonial times, or, for that matter, very widely in the UK at that time. The US wouldn't necessarily have inherited the British pronunciation of Parmesan if it was a rarity only found in the fanciest kitchens.
Jeff W said,
May 21, 2015 @ 6:55 pm
Well, I recall having eggplant parmagiana a fair amount growing up— my family pronounced the g in “parmagiana” as a /ʒ/—so I’d surmise that I actually learned that pronunciation first. Quite honestly, until I read this post and checked the various dictionary pronunciations, I would have thought that “parmesan” with a /ʒ/ was far more common than it is so I am not sure learning to pronounce the name of the cheese first would have made a difference.
I guess saying, as I did in the earlier comment, that people, including me, are “making their pronunciation consistent” isn’t exactly what I meant—it’s more that the /ʒ/ sound in “parmesan,” especially in a phrase like “veal parmesan,” is consistent with the /ʒ/ sound in “parmagiana”; obviously, people learn whatever pronunciation is around them, usually, and might explain their pronunciation by pointing to that consistency.
Mark Mandel said,
May 23, 2015 @ 11:05 am
Eli Nelson said (May 21, 2015 @ 7:23 am)
«there seems to have been a mix-up; what I called well-assimilated to English phonology was not /ʒ/, but the word "process/processes" and the words its plural has been spuriously analogized with, such as "thesis/theses" or "hypothesis/hypotheses."»
How about this for a hypothesis?: "Processes" gets pronounced /ˈpɹ{ɑ,o}sɛsiz/ not (just) for a spurious analogy, but (in part) because the sequence of sibilants /sɛsəz/ sans stress is exceptionally subject to stumbling of the tongue. Replacing schwa with /i/ brings the tongue-tip out of its rut and prevents the esses from smearing together.
Eli Nelson said,
May 23, 2015 @ 7:06 pm
@Mark Mandel:
I've heard this proposed before as a contributing factor, but it seems to me that if it is one, it would be a very small factor. The identical (for me at least) verb form "processes" is never heard with /i/, so it's obviously possible for people to pronounce /sɛsəz/ easily enough.
Eli Nelson said,
May 23, 2015 @ 7:15 pm
I think the biggest contributing factor to /ˈprɑsɛsiz/ is the orthographic ambiguity of "es": this represent /əz/ for some plural words, and /iːz/ for others. Generally people need to explicitly learn that plural forms like "parentheses" are pronounced with /iːz/. Having learned this type of unusual plural form, I think some people overgeneralize "es" = /iːz/. I do think there is a bit of a dispreference for, or at least discomfort with, plurals ending in /səz/ (hence the various hypercorrect alternatives to "penises", such as "penii"), but it seems unlikely to me that this would lead to changing the schwa to an /i/ without the available plural morpheme /iːz/ as a basis for analogy.
Alex Bollinger said,
May 24, 2015 @ 7:49 am
This reminds me of the joke, "Q: How do you pronounce the capital of Kentucky, LOU-ee-ville or LOU-vel? A: Frankfurt!"
Mark Dunan said,
May 25, 2015 @ 10:14 am
Making Italian [dʒi] into [ʒi] seems to be fairly common where I was raised (New York City and environs). I remember hearing the name of baseball player Joe DiMaggio pronounced with a [ʒ] many times, and during the 1994 World Cup, Robert Baggio got [ʒ]'d as well.
And while I don't know enough Italian to say whether they do this in "correct" Italian, Italian-Americans certainly like to drop the final vowel off many words like "capicola" and "mozzarella" and "ricotta" (and zero aspiration on those C's). So this could be a combination of people trying to say "parmigiana" and thinking that that middle g is a [ʒ] and that the final [a] has to disappear, resulting in [paɹməʒan].
PubliusVA said,
May 27, 2015 @ 3:56 pm
What would be awesome is if the sound file for "parquet" said "butter."
nickM said,
May 29, 2015 @ 12:17 pm
What about the closely-related problem of how to say "mozzarella di bufala" in english? I can't bring myself to say "buffalo mozzarella", nor to admit that something so biologically wrong is mere pedantic scruple.
biagio said,
May 31, 2015 @ 3:33 am
To Mark Dunan
In standard Italian you never drop final vowels, ever.
Italian-Americans' pronunciation of some misheard dialectal words is no yardstick as to the correct pronunciation of Italian.
Mark Dunan said,
June 2, 2015 @ 11:12 am
@Biagio – Thank you; I grew up hearing the "wrong" pronunciation all the time. English speakers in the New York area hear these from people with Italian ancestry so we falsely believe that you're *supposed to* drop those vowels.
Here is a non-serious article about this:
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/418951
And here is a more detailed one from the New York Times in 2004:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/20/nyregion/20italian.html