Mine was Pil-ates.
Hey, it’s not our fault English just borrows and never adapts the spelling. Or updates spelling as pronunciations change.
English spelling is atrocious.
Funniest thing for me as a bilingual French is people butcheringpronouncing French words like hors d’oeuvre or whatever. I mean it’s funny but okay, that’s both no big deal and you can always educate someone and give them the real French pronunciation if they absolutely wanna sound posh.
But then I’m always so torn when somebody has a clearly French name but again, their pronunciation is atrocious. Like, I try to just ignore it, but sometimes I can just imagine myself jumping at them and screaming how they are pronouncing it wrooooooong, hahaha!
My father had a terrific sense of humour and would deliberately mispronounce certain words to wind up his fancy-pants daughters. “Patio” became “pay-tio”, that kind of thing. But one word in particular has entered the family lexicon: “gnome”, pronounced “ganOmee”. Not meaning a garden ornament, but a young man of dubious moral/intellectual qualities. Our boyfriends were almost always declared gnomes.
Phonetic transcription exists for a reason. The comments here are full of “this is pronounced as this”. Which isn’t very helpful.
Fyoog is just so wrong
