What's the consensual "official" English pronunciation? "van Goch"? You should have a question for that too!
I have a vague impression that "van Go" is more common in the US than in the UK. But I might have imagined that, and even if I didn't I don't know why it should be.
that counts as good enough
There's also something both difficult and wrong with breaking into an attempted foreign accent for what (in "croissant") amounts to a loan word anyway. If you intone the word properly as well as getting the right phonemes in the right order then it's hard on the ear, if you don't speak the language then you'll get it wrong, and even if you do it's not necessarily an easy trick to pull without a pause either side. And then you have to decide whether it's "a croissant" or "un croissant".
Some languages and words are easier than others to slide into English -- people might not really notice or care if you say "Layonardo" when they expected "Leeonardo", or "lasagne" when they expected "Lazzanya", but with "van Gogh" the Dutch pronunciation is pretty much unidentifiable if all you know is the English approximations.
I had an argument with metame in 2002 whether it was pretentious of Gary Lineker to pronounce "Nagasaki" with no stressed syllables, and hence sounding to the English ear rather more like "Nagasski" than "NagasAHki". Also whether it made a difference if (a) he speaks a bit of Japanese, having made an effort when he lived there, and he likewise has a slight tendency to accidentally pronounce Spanish place names correctly from time to time (b) he's a jumped-up crisp salesman.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-02-21 11:31 am (UTC)I have a vague impression that "van Go" is more common in the US than in the UK. But I might have imagined that, and even if I didn't I don't know why it should be.
that counts as good enough
There's also something both difficult and wrong with breaking into an attempted foreign accent for what (in "croissant") amounts to a loan word anyway. If you intone the word properly as well as getting the right phonemes in the right order then it's hard on the ear, if you don't speak the language then you'll get it wrong, and even if you do it's not necessarily an easy trick to pull without a pause either side. And then you have to decide whether it's "a croissant" or "un croissant".
Some languages and words are easier than others to slide into English -- people might not really notice or care if you say "Layonardo" when they expected "Leeonardo", or "lasagne" when they expected "Lazzanya", but with "van Gogh" the Dutch pronunciation is pretty much unidentifiable if all you know is the English approximations.
I had an argument with metame in 2002 whether it was pretentious of Gary Lineker to pronounce "Nagasaki" with no stressed syllables, and hence sounding to the English ear rather more like "Nagasski" than "NagasAHki". Also whether it made a difference if (a) he speaks a bit of Japanese, having made an effort when he lived there, and he likewise has a slight tendency to accidentally pronounce Spanish place names correctly from time to time (b) he's a jumped-up crisp salesman.