Pronunciation of World Products

I've been bonding with my new Plisson brush; watching it dry from first shave, trying different arrangements of my modest set of badgers and smelling it and realizing many brushmakers use different protocols to take le blaireau out of the badger. I finally ventured onto youtube seeking videos. Once again I am struck how people fail to use this very medium to learn about that they profess to instruct.
Unamed video shave reviewer! It is not PlissoN.
I started an ancient thread on another forum and just rediscovered the notes inside a French edition of Le Petit Prince by ( correct pronunciation)
Antoine de Sant Zupery. Here are said notes in random order, please add if you can.


Cella is CHELLA

Vie-Long is BIE LONK or BIE LON

Speik is SHPIKE

La Toja is LAH TON HAH

Semoghe is SIM OGUH

Pre de Provance is PRE DE PROVAA

Martin de Chandre is MAHTEN DE CAND UH

La Occitane is LOX Y TAUN

and, one more time Plisson is PLISSOH

I'm all for correct pronunciation. Much like Florence really should be pronounced Firenze and Cologne Köln :b

Trying to get a perfect pronunciation isn't easy and I imagine even this list could be refined. I was talking art with a neighbor and a third party with great gravitas told me it's VAN GO and not VAN HO. I grew up hearing Friesian Nederlandersie spoken by my maternal grandfather and wanted to spill his light beer. One of my music programs is hosted by a Chicana who loves rolling her Rs and correcting people. Then she puts on a 'celtic music' CD and butchers DAY uh ER uh Moody? Oh I have so much trouble reading GAY lick. I'm screaming at the radio IT'S DERMOT ya bloody fool!!!!!!!!!!!! If we are going to enjoy this global feast we should at least attempt
pronouncing it correctly. I am going to shave in a few minutes ( up late last night) with that fine American soap WEE Lambs.

There's a time and a place for everything, and correcting everyone at every occasion is not good use of one's time, neither for oneself nor the ones corrected in most cases (unless having solicited such corrections one way or the other) IMO.

I know you didn't ask for it, but it's neither Van Go nor Van Ho. Make an o shape with your lips while trying to hiss like a cat, continue with "oh" and you're getting there. The extent to which the hiss is harsh or softer depends on if you're going for he Dutch or Belgian pronunciation

Edit: happy shaving!

My grandfather was first generation Michigan Dutch with a mysterious father and false teeth. My dutch came out HO from his upper always slipping and I cannot correct it. Now, if Grieg's father was from Scotland how do you pronounce his name in Norge?

Ah! So you learnt Dutch (and speak it still?). I lived in AMS for nearly 2.5 years without really getting fluent. As is the case many places, their English is just too good. I'll blame it on the locals.

Do you mean Grieg or Van Gogh? Grieg is GRIGG (with rolling r) and van Gogh is FAHNN GOGG. We're pretty straightforward in pronunciation.

It's not WEE LAMBS, it's WILL YUMS.

My Dutch is like my Gaelic and Dine'; in an induced coma from disuse until needed and then it starts to come back. My last steady use was in San Francisco at a long gone Dutch Deli called Hermanns on Geary near the hospital and Dine' while delivering supplies for the Black Mesa Defense committee and also speaking mule. Gaelic comes back on THAT green day and Halloween when I encounter lace curtain politicians, grim INLA holdouts at UCB and Hereditary Wiccans ( a Saxon word) who get cute thinking 20th century gaelic has anything to do with old Gaelic ( probably the most difficult language on earth. ) On both holidays my command improves hand in hand with drams of ( horrors) my preferred single malt scotch until
it is the purest of the pure as described in Myles na Gopaleen/ Flann O'Brian's story of a linguist recording a conversation in the Gaeltacht not realizing he was standing next to a pigsty in the dark.
It is still courteous and the mark of a gentleman to attempt correct pronunciations when known.

Never condemn a man for not knowing how to pronounce a word. It means he learned it by reading, and that can never be discounted or treated as a negative.

Sure...I could sit on my hump and watch videos of people speaking a completely different language than my own to try and learn how to properly pronounce a French word that I will never grasp the accent properly for. Or I can use my comprehension of phonetics, pronounce it in such a way that just about any individual familiar with the spelling will know to what I am referring, and not worry about trying to strangle my America-born tongue with a French-born accent.

Anyone more concerned with the accent I use than the concept I convey is not likely to be someone I want to spend a large amount of time communicating with, anyhow, so if my slaughter of a foreign accent and pronunciation offends them badly enough, it will be a good excuse for us to both excuse ourselves from the conversation...

I'm all for proper grammar, definitions, and usage of words when speaking one's native tongue. Insisting on a native pronunciation of a foreign word in polite conversation is akin to picking fly poop out of pepper. If you don't understand me, it's not the accent...

What I mean is...if we are talking, and I say "plissoN" or "Sella" or "seemoge" and you don't know what I am referring to, it has nothing to do with the way I pronounced the words...

I am in no position to correct anyone's pronunciation; I grew up in the Iowa of the West (Long Beach, CA), talking about my mother "warshing" my clothes.