My husband says que-pon and I say coo-pon (coupon).
Koo-pon is preferred and is closer to the original word borrowed from French. However, kyoo-pon is also correct, at least in America. My Illinois family taught me kyoo-pon.
He also says bedroom suit instead of sweet (suite).
That's just wrong.
Chase lounge instead of shays (chaise) lounge.
Well... We Americans have mangled it so bad it's pointless to discuss which way is the baddest. The phrase is
chaise longue, "long chair"! It's an example of metathesis in the written language to "correct" that second word so it became "lounge," something familiar and obviously "right."
Of course the history of the phrase just gets stoopider the further you track it.
Chaise is a bastardized deformation of
chaire--bastardized by the French, not by us. Toward the end of the 19th century Paris became a cosmopolis for adventurous people from all over the world. (They called them Bohemians for the odd reason that since they had to come from somewhere they must all have been from Bohemia, or the Czech Republic as we call it today.) Most Europeans can pronounce the trilled Spanish-style R of southern France, whose original population were the Celtic Gauls. But the original population of northern France were the Germanic Franks, and they brought the gargled German R into the Latin that became Parisian French. Only Germans and Scandinavians can pronounce it. The rest of the travelers mangled it and made it into kind of a Z sound. Soon it became the height of sophistication for Parisians to mimic the mispronunciation of their own language by foreigners. (Geeze is that ever not at all like today's Parisians, eh?) So instead of
Je vais a Paris pour acheter une chaire, they said,
Je vais a Pazis pour acheter une chaise. The
chaire longue was popularized at that time, so it got stuck with the faux-foreign pronunciation, and when we borrowed the furniture the name came with it. So don't worry about how anybody pronounces
chaise longue. Absolutely everyone is both misspelling it and mispronouncing at least one of the two words!
And his latest one is gair-en-sheed wages for garnished wages.
That's another example of metathesis. "Garansheed" sounds like "guaranteed," so it fits a familiar pattern. He's probably heard people in the payroll office talk about "garnishees," the people whose checks get garnished, and that just confuses him further. How does he pronounce it when you sprinkle salt and pepper on a pot roast?
I thought it was just him til I heard his sister talk. Its just a family thing I guess.
We talk about dialects but there is such a thing as an
idiolect, which is the specific language of a single person. I don't know any word for the language of a family, but obviously that level of linguistic community also exists.
My family puts a short A in apricot, a short OO in roof, a short E in envelope, and the nut is a PEE-kon. We do something else that I haven't been able to compare very often with others. We pronounce "rider" and "writer" differently. The I in "rider" is a broad I, a diphthong formed on the A in "father." The I in "writer" is very narrow, a diphthong formed on the U in "up." It's very similar to the IJ sound in Dutch and probably harkens back to the dialect of New Amsterdam. Brits pronounce the two I's the same but they pronounce the D and T differently, as D and T. In America both consonants are reduced to a flap (the Spanish R) so we can't tell the words apart that way. Do you other Americans all say "writer" and "rider" with different vowels like we do?
