Gendre?

[nancylebov]

One of my friends pronounces genre with a 'd', and I assumed it was a personal idiosyncracy, but I just heard Joni Mitchell pronouncing it the same way. She also says that rock is boogie-woogie played on the guitar, which is the kind of statement I file under "I'm not qualified to judge this, but keep an eye out for evidence one way or the other".

Is "gendre" a regional variation?

Comments

[madfilkentist]

"Zhon'ruh" doesn't come out easily from an English-speaking mouth, so I'm not surprised people change it. But I don't recall ever hearing that pronunciation.

"Rock" is a pretty wide category these days, so some of it may be similar to boogie-woogie, but in general they're quite different.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

It's not a surprising development, starting from the pronunciation "ZHAN-ruh". You have to open the nasal passage at the back of the mouth for the "n" sound, and then close it again for the "r". A slight mismatch in timing and your nasal passage is closed while your tongue is still in position for the "n", and that makes a "d" sound.

This is (part of) how Latin tener- became French tendre, which gave us "tender". And "genre", from French genre, has a doublet, gendre, which gave us "gender": both the French words, genre and gendre, came from Latin gener-.

But I hadn't heard (of) this pronunciation of English "genre" before. I'm going to post your writeup to the American Dialect Soc'y list.

Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Please let me know if they've got any answers.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

A footnote: my friend uses what I'd call a very standard "d", while Joni Mitchell uses a softer sound which, while recognizable as a "d", isn't quite part of English as I usually hear it spoken.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

English "d" and "t" before "r" are normally what you might call "soft", much closer to the "j" and "ch" sounds than to "d(ig)" and "t(ip)".

[gildedacorn.livejournal.com]

According to the OED (and as mentioned above), the word "genre" and the word "gender" have the same root, which in Old French could be spelled either "genre" or "gendre."

However, it is my suspicion that the pronunciation "gendre" comes from the same source as the pronunciation of "nuclear" as "nucular."

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

What source is that?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

For all that people are saying this is an easy piece of drift, I've never had trouble saying it, and have a hard time making myself add the dre ending.

I don't know (anymore) if that's because my mouth is more able to make non-English phonemes (French and Russian, to say nothing of dabbling at German and Italian will do that), but I've been using the word since before I studied any other language.

Now, the people I know who say, "supposively" I understand. It's still wrong to my ear, but I see how it happens.

TK

you meand that it is not

[wolfdancer.livejournal.com]

suposed to have a D?