How to pronounce tricky food names

this is not a guide for how to pronounce various potentially challenging food names or words rather this is the first draft of a manifesto for how each of us might choose from between conflicting pronunciations and how we might for ourselves balance the occasionally competing objectives of intelligibility authenticity and not sounding like a pompous ass let's consider each of these objectives individually first one intelligibility a lot of people would argue that's the only thing that matters when it comes to any kind of communication are you understood if you are mission accomplished foe may be a foe pronunciation of but it's hard to imagine that I could walk into any Vietnamese joint here in the US and not be immediately understood upon ordering pho likewise if I go to a Greek place and ask for tzatziki or tzatziki I'm gonna get what I want either way if however I were to ask for teas at Zakai they probably wouldn't have any idea what the hell I was talking about and I wouldn't get what I wanted and therefore that pronunciation you could say is objectively wrong at least Vasavi intelligibility which I think we would all agree is at least the most important objective right most important thing is that we be understood though there are other considerations such as authenticity certainly all of these objectives are intertwined to some extent you got to achieve a certain level of authenticity in order to be understood at all you got to get pretty close to how other people say it if I order bruschetta that's not only a world away from how Italians pronounce the delicious antipasto they invented it's also probably going to be unintelligible to any waiter if I order bruschetta I probably will be understood but will I be authentic certainly I think most people in Italy would say something closer to bruschetta and since this basic recipe of grilled bread with stuff on top does hail from Italy one could argue pretty convincingly that bruschetta is therefore the authentic pronunciation and therefore should be favored but other people can lay claim to authenticity right the United States where I live has been home to a huge Italian immigrant community since the 19th century as many as 4 million southern Italians poured into the American northeast between 1890 and 1920 part of what some scholars identify as the largest voluntary emigration in recorded human history this incredible human wave had many results one of which is me another one is italian-american culture a distinct culture in its own right descended from a land across the sea but independently evolved right here Italian Americans cook differently from Italians and they say the words differently I think they generally say bruschetta or at least some of them do certainly it's rare to hear a second or third-generation italian-american call it bolognese sauce they we say something like bolognaise and indeed the dish that pronunciation describes might not even be the same thing what my New York Italian grandmother called Bolognese is basically just a very meaty tomato sauce whereas the sauce they make in Bologna is based on milk and meat and has hardly any tomato at all in it usually just a squeeze of tomato paste according to most recipes I've read so to whom are we to be authentic well I think one thing it might help to consider is what version of the dish are we trying to describe is it the version that's kind of like from over here where they pronounced it this way or is it the version that's kind of like from over here where they pronounced it that way I have no idea how people in hunan would pronounce the name of General Tso's chicken a dish that scholars trace in some nascent form to that Chinese province but this is a uniquely chinese-american restaurant dish apparently quite different from anything widely consumed in Hunan therefore I would argue the authentic pronunciation is whatever Chinese Americans say but of course even that is problematic because Chinese Americans are no more monolithic than Chinese people generally the first big wave of Chinese immigrants into what became Manhattan's Chinatown gave us a lot of the classic Chinese American dishes and they were mostly Cantonese speakers but then came the Fuji nice speakers and the Mandarin speakers with a million different regional and ethnic subdivisions among them which particular Chinese or chinese-american person gets to be the one who decides what is the authentic pronunciation I have no good answer to that things get a little clearer though when we consider names that are actually literally owned by specific people or groups of people like this brand name how would you pronounce that there's no vowels so it leaves a lot to the imagination but I happen to know that the actual people who own and operate this company pronounce it clicker and they happen to be the sponsor of this video they also happen to be propping up the phone on which I'm reading these scripts that I wrote here this is a clicker universal stand it's an elegant effective way for me to prop up my phone no more leaning it perilously against something or holding it all wobbly in my hand what I'm trying to watch something or have a video chat with someone it's sleek its compact its convertible its wireless charging compatible its drop tested from up to two meters I'll take their word on that and if you use it as a grip it can help you to hold these phones that are increasingly getting absurdly large now you can just buy the universal stand and attach it to any phone or case but I've got the combined clicker case and grip here I want the color muted enough to not be tacky in my eyes but distinct enough for me to tell my phone apart from my wife's do us all a favor and get yourself one using my link and code in the description clicker is offering you 25% off all products and free shipping on orders over $20 use my link encode in the description for 25% off Thank You clicker now here's another brand name for us to consider pronunciation I think most people in Italy would pronounce these tomatoes something like pasty nay but this is the brand name of a company owned by real living specific people it's their name and I think they get to decide with authority how it's pronounced how do they say it well let's call them up thank you for calling the passing company I was a radio guy for many years this is an old trick of the trade got to know how to pronounce a person's name or a company's name just call and listen to their outgoing message you need to know the name of a place call a local government authority called the County Courthouse or City Hall and just listen to the voice mailbox so get it right away anyway they say Pass Dean hardly surprising that they go with an Americanized pronunciation the company began in Boston's North End neighborhood and now they're in Canton mass it's their name so I think they get to decide how we say it at least generally I think there's a broader theme that's emerging here which is that immigrant communities everywhere have what you might call cultural sovereignty that I think we should respect the old country is not the only country and authenticity doesn't necessarily just mean being authentic to other people it also means being authentic to yourself which leads us to the third and final of these three objectives we're trying to achieve when choosing different pronunciations for foods objective number three is don't sound like a pompous ass I think your risk sounding like a pompous ass when you are not authentic to yourself when you try too hard to sound like someone else and trying too hard to sound like someone else is disrespectful of all parties involved in my opinion in fact is most Italians wouldn't say bruschetta either I suppose they'd say something like bruschetta but I sounded like a tool just then because there are sounds in there that simply don't exist in the mainstream American English dialect that I speak looking at the Rohtak consonants in particular the are sounds we don't have the flap that uh and we don't have the trill or ah those are just sounds that are not on the menu at this particular joint so to be authentic to both other people and to myself here is the guideline that I generally try to follow let's call it ragout CEA's law get as close to the authentic pronunciation as possible by using only the sounds in native tongue bruschetta and bruschetta both only used sounds that are available in mainstream American English but the latter is closer to the original Italian therefore you could argue that's the right one for me bruschetta but then again when there is an established local version of the word in your community or culture that might be the better thing to go with even if it's really different from the original like I'm American McDonald's is from America but I don't get mad when French people call it mcdu that's the thing they really say in France mcdu it's very different from the original but it's an established widely adopted local deviation or evolution from the original it's not a case of just one person being crazy or making a mistake because they don't know any better therefore even though it violates ragu CEA's law I still wouldn't call it wrong let's look at another example remember my little law is get as close as you can to the original while only using sounds from your native dialect or dialects plural the authentic or at least an authentically Greek pronunciation of this food is well I don't wanna get myself into trouble again let's defer to Wiktionary Judas Judas so what's going on here well in Greek this food starts with the Greek letter Gama which in ancient Greek did make a gust sound that's probably why it gets transliterated to a Roman G but in modern Greek a gamma is apparently a voiced velar fricative or a voiced palatal fricative that is not a sound that exists in my native tongue so i have two options i can either round it up to a gun or i can round it down to a yea giro or gyro gah and ya are the most proximate sounds available in my dialect I've said Giro my entire life and I'm certainly not the only American to do so but if the comments section on this recipe of mine is any indication more Americans apparently go with Euro which is fine or we could disregard ragout CEA's law entirely and just go with gyro the Americanized gyro and there's a case to be made for that this is a Greek American developed in this form by Greek immigrants to United States their sandwich here is filled with strips of ground or pureed lamb meatloaf cooked on a vertical broiler again if my comments section is any indication this ain't a Giro in Greece in Greece they apparently make it with whole cuts of pork or chicken so maybe if we're talking about this we should call it a gyro because it's a different thing and therefore deserves a different name now my sense is that gyro has been falling out of popularity over the course of my lifetime but language is ours unless you're talking about name that somebody literally owns there is no institutional authority that gets to say what is right and what is wrong language is one big ongoing act of popular consensus to which we all contribute we're driving this car and we can drive it anywhere we want to whatever we say is right is right and I'm quite eager to find out what you think is right let me know about it as I said this is just the first draft of this manifesto maybe you and I can hammer out a second draft together

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 342,209

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Id: a3u_HgOAse8

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 01 2020