Jack Windsor Lewis has brought up the subject of the letter ‘j’ and its interpretation by English speakers when it comes in non-English words. It is a problem: in the Germanic languages, plus Polish, Czech and Italian it is regularly pronounced [j] (i.e. like the English consonantal ‘y’), but in Spanish it is a voiceless velar fricative [x], while in French and Portuguese it is a voiced palato-alveolar fricative [ʒ]. Only in English, among the languages best known in English-speaking countries, does ‘j’ (and sometimes ‘g’) represent a palato-alveolar affricate [dʒ]. So, what are English speakers to do when confronted with ‘j’ in a word or name of foreign origin? Jack mentions adagio, Beijing, Gigli, raj, and Taj (Mahal). To these, I can add an even stranger one: Abidjan, the capital of Côte d’Ivoire, in which the letter combination ‘dj’ makes it quite clear that the affricate is intended. Nevertheless, BBC reporters – even those stationed in West Africa – frequently pronounce this with a fricative rather than an affricate.

In one name, where the orthography has initial G, the ‘mistake’ is to use a velar plosive instead of the affricate: Genghis Khan. The -gh- in the middle gives away the fact that we have borrowed this spelling from Italian (perhaps as far back as Marco Polo), and that therefore while the medial consonant is a velar plosive, the initial one is intended to be an affricate. Confirmation of this comes from the German spelling given in the Duden Aussprachewörterbuch: Tschingis, and the names of various present-day Central Asians: Chingiz, although oddly, French seems to have opted for the opposite to the English mistake, and gone for two fricatives: Gengis, pronounced [ʒɛ̃ʒis] – at least according to the Larousse Dictionnaire de la prononciation. We are obviously afraid of the affricate – perhaps we know that it is rare in European languages, and assume that therefore it can’t ever be the right sound in a foreign word. But to my ears the result is not that we replace the affricate with the straight forward palato-alveolar fricative [ʒ] that occurs in pleasure ['pleʒə], which is usually lip-rounded and laminal, but with a less lip-rounded, and often apical articulation.

Has anyone else noticed this?

My post on the use of third person pronouns and the problems of sexism in language has generated quite a few comments. In fact, although we can bemoan the lack of a neutral third person singular pronoun in English, at least we can get round it by using ‘they’ and making the sentence plural. The Romance languages have it even harder: the third person plurals are also gender-specific. How do French, Spanish, Italian, etc. feminists cope with that?

In that paragraph, I used the word “gender-specific”. I meant precisely that: that the Romance language pronouns show the grammatical gender of the nouns they refer to. They do not indicate the sex of the animate beings. Or do they? What does French do when confronted with the necessity for using a pronoun for the second reference to army recruits? The French for recruit is “la recrue”, despite the fact that until fairly recently, they will all have been male. Similarly “la sentinelle”. I have read quite extensively in French, but I don’t recall ever coming across a solution to this conundrum. Any evidence will be very welcome …