Open your kitchen cupboard or a cookbook, and chances are you’ll come across a lot of spices and peppers with recognizable names that you still can’t pronounce properly, like turmeric, cayenne, and habanero. We often give foreign-sounding inflections to foreign-looking words, and many times we’re wrong. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Misplaced Foreign Inflections”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Earlier in the show, we were talking about the difficulty of pronouncing a certain spice.
Yeah, C-U-M-I-N.
Right.
We say cumin or cumin.
But the dictionaries mostly list common.
Exactly.
I don’t know anybody who says that.
It’s so weird.
And I was thinking about this because a lot of spices present this same difficulty, particularly peppers.
If you think about hot peppers.
Oh, really?
Well, think about that really hot, hot, hot red pepper that’s in Tabasco sauce.
It starts with a C.
How do you say it?
I don’t know which way you’re talking.
C-A-Y-E-N.
Oh, cayenne.
You say cayenne.
Cayenne?
Cayenne.
I probably say cayenne when I’m not thinking about it.
Yeah, I know, right?
And now we’re thinking about it, and so we can’t remember.
But the spelling doesn’t conform to my pronunciation.
My pronunciation doesn’t conform to the spelling.
Yeah, and you look at different dictionaries, and they say different things.
It’s like the Collins Dictionary says Cayenne.
Cayenne.
But that’s more of a British publication.
But if you look at Merriam-Webster, it’s Cayenne or Cayenne or Cayenne or Cayenne.
And this pepper is named for a town in French, Guyana.
Guyana.
Yeah.
And so I don’t know how they pronounce it down there, but it’s all over the map, literally.
And think about, but I mean, think about other peppers too.
What about the one that starts with a J, the light green one that’s in so much Mexican food?
Well, that one’s a problem.
It has jalapeno, jalapeno.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And then there’s the people who want to add the tilde or the ñ to habanero, right?
That’s exactly where I was going with that.
Yeah, yeah, jalapenos.
But in Spanish for habanero, you wouldn’t actually say the H, would you?
You wouldn’t say the H.
Yeah, it comes from Havana or Havana.
Havana.
Yeah, and jalapenos come from the Mexican town of Jalapa.
So there’s a couple of difficulties here.
One is these are foreign words that we’re trying to anglicize.
And so they’re being independently anglicized by a lot of different people.
Yes.
Right?
The other one is they’re maybe not primarily transmitted orally.
We’re learning them from books or even from the labels that we see in the store, right?
We’re learning them from the recipes.
Yep.
The recipe says, get this pepper.
You go find it in the store.
And at no point do you talk to another human being necessarily about it.
Right.
Exactly.
And because they’re from place names that are pronounced particular ways in those places.
I mean, the dictionaries are really all over the place.
And so I think the challenge really is to ask that person to hand you the spice and just not sound pretentious.
You know?
Yeah.
I mean, you don’t want to sound boorish about it.
But you also want to just say, look, I’m going to approximate this the best I can and just go make some great food.
Yeah.
That’s the point, right?
The casserole on the table is the result I want, not being 100% exactly precise and say it like somebody from French Guiana.
That’s exactly it.
So it’s the spice of language, right?
Decisive language, yeah, get it right.
Well, we know the kitchen is filled with these kinds of things that are just not quite the same from kitchen to kitchen.
Like, is it turmeric or turmeric, right?
Turmeric is what I would say.
Turmeric is an R, right?
Does everyone pronounce it?
No.
No.
Well, we want to hear your stories about this dispute you had in the kitchen about the way to say a thing.
Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.
