Borrowed Nouns & Pronunciation

What do you know about 'borrowed nouns'? Are you familiar with how we can pronounce them? Well, I'm about to teach you them. Let's begin.

Pronunciation of Borrowed Nouns

In this lesson, we are going to look at the pronunciation of borrowed nouns and then proper nouns.

The pronunciation of proper nouns needs to be checked in the dictionary, and the same goes with people's names that should be demanded the addressee to spell them out. Note that, digraphs might appear in proper nouns but their pronunciation is divided into two categories:

1. Borrowed Nouns & Borrowed Pronunciation

This category shows that some common words, especially people's names that are borrowed from other languages, maintain the original orthography and phonology at the same time.

pizza /ˈpiːt.sə/

'pizza' is pronounced as its Italian version.

insouciance /ɪnˈsuː.si.əns/

'cian' as a digraph must be pronounced /ʃ.ən/, but it is pronounced /si.ən/ as it is French origin.

2. Borrowed Nouns & English Pronunciation

This category indicates some borrowed nouns are Anglicized in terms of phonology based on their pronunciation. In other words, such nouns had first the pronunciation form and then were given a standard written form, like Balkan which is not originally an English word but its orthography is based on English when it was introduced to the English language.
Note that if any digraph appears in such words, their phonological rules do not apply.

Thames /temz/

'th' is a digraph but the pronunciation rules of the digraph 'th' does not apply.

Esther /ˈɛstɚ/

Balkan /ˈbɔːlkən/

'lk' is a digraph but it is not pronounced /k/.

Salmiakki /ˈsɑlmiɑkːi/

'lm' is a digraph but it is not pronounced /m/.

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