On the Pronunciation of Loanwords

Aside from the whiffs of elitism and pretense that others have noted in the article above, the argument it advances is based on a serious misconception: the idea that words adopted into the English language are still foreign words. They’re not; they’re English words. And that fact is of primary importance when determining their pronunciation.

English has been borrowing words for centuries. Most of those words eventually conformed to English phonology, stress, and morphology. That is, when we borrowed Zeitgeist, we dropped the initial [ts] and replaced it with a [z] because native English words do not start with [ts] (Consider the word czar/tsar: regardless of its spelling, we pronounce it [zar].)

Similarly, when we borrowed ruble from the Russian рубль rubl’, we dropped the palatalized [l] at the end and certainly did not retain the Russian plural рубли rubli, opting for the usual plural with rubles.

The main thrust of this article’s argument is that these words are not being pronounced the way that native speakers of the languages from which they were taken would pronounce them. But that point is irrelevant. These are English words and are allowed to have an English pronunciation, stress, and morphology.

And so we come to the article’s public enemy number one: karaoke. It does not matter that in Japanese the word is pronounced kah-rah-oh-kay, because the word has become an English word. And that process has changed it. To wit:

• In English it is exceedingly rare that two vowels (v) would come one after the other without a glide in between, either a y or a w sound. So, right away, that CvCvvCv word pattern is going to be altered to CvCvCvCv to make it fit English phonology: ka-ra-yo-ke. We did the same thing with the Greek borrowing χαος chaos (pronounced [xaɔs] kha-os), we not only dropped the velar fricative [x] at the beginning, but we injected a y glide between the vowels and pronounced it [keʲas] kay-yahss.
• The interjection of the glide [j] y between the two a’s affects the quality of the vowel [a] ah turning it to an [i] ee as the presence of the [r] alters the vowel in the first syllable to an [e] ay.
• And since it is unusual for English words ending in unstressed syllables to end with [e] ay, it is not at all unusual for an unstressed final syllable to end in [i] ee.

Thus we come to the English word karaoke and its pronunciation [kerijoki] kayr-ee-yo-kee.

Now, if you’re teaching a class in Japanese and your students keep pronouncing カラオケ as kayreeyokee then fine—correct them. But if we’re talking about the English word karaoke and all the other words mentioned in this article, then leave them be. They’re doing just fine.