Well it’s because it’s using sounds that don’t exist in English, specifically in that word: am, o, u, gn. There are indications above in this thread on how to pronounce the am part (like the em in temps), same for the u.
Actually the “am” sound in Chambolle is key in French and can be spelled in so many ways. The bolded part in the following words is pronounced exactly the same:
Chambolle
Champ
Champs
Temps
Content
Contents
Attend
Attends
Avant
Mens
Penser
Lancer
…
But of course it doesn’t really help either because the same group of letters in another word might be pronounced completely differently (chameau, comptent, lanière…)
Guillaume - thank you for pointing out that the same sound can come from different letters. My mother was my first French teacher and that’s one thing that I never got until much later in my life - you just learned how certain words were said and that was that. For an American, it’s one thing that makes French so difficult.
Reminds Me of this old one :
Bernard Shaw once proposed the spelling ghoti for “fish”, with the [gh] from “laugh”, the [o] from “women” and the [ti] from “nation”.
Putting aside the question of the first syllable, which would need true phonetic signs rather than near English equivalents, the last three syllables are mu (put your lips together and blow) see nyee and not zig nee.
There’s a ton of wine pronunciation guides online. Here are a few of the better ones.
Also, there are a couple of apps designed for wine pronunciation, but for what’s available right now, you are better off looking on the web.
Ian, that is surprising to me. You mean “ay” like in “say” or “lay”? Well then no, not at all. The two “e” in Ghemme should be pronounced exactly the same. And “Ghe” at the beginning should be pronounced like in “get” (without the t of course).
Well, one should pronounce all three vowels fully, which I think is what you mean, but the stress should be on the second syllable.
A similar word which has the stress on the first syllable is “tavolo” - if you know how that sound, Barolo should not be pronounced in a similar way.
I told this joke in Italian on holiday this year, and it made the person I said it to chuckle. I changed the punchline, as I’m sure you appreciate it is sadly also transferable closer to me.
First, I am a stickler for proper pronunciation in most cases. There are some things, however, that just sound so pretentious and affected when said correctly by an English speaker during the course of a conversation in English, that, despite being technically correct, should be avoided, I think.
Second, the question of where the accent falls in multi-syllabic words can be a tricky one, since not all languages are as heavily stressed as others. English is particularly insistent about the stressed syllable(s), so we English speakers want to insist words in other languages should behave the same. It’s hard for us to get our heads out of the music, if you will, of our own language and into the music of another - in some ways even more difficult than making the French “u” sound or the guttural “r” or the German “ch.”
That’s right. It’s like Gaja (guy-yah). In Piemontese dialect, the J after an A is like an I. Other examples are the vineyard Rabaja (rah-by-yah) and egg-heavy Piemontese fettucini, tajarin (tie-ya-rin). In these, I think the I forms a dipthong with the A that’s close to tie or guy in English.
I can’t think of an example of a J after any other vowel, but I’m no esperto di dialetto. Oliver McCrum knows a fair deal of Piemontese, so he would be the one to ask for more examples.
There really isn’t accenting in multisyllabic French words, as far as I understand. That is one of the important keys to learning how to pronounce French words.
Dennis - The G is not sounded. (Hopefully you don’t pronounce a hard G in Champagne.) Instead it alters the consonant after it. Something similar happens in Italian with a G before an N, so there is not audible G in tagliarini – it’s pronounced tah-lyi-a-ri-ni. (If you’ve been saying tag-lee-ah-ri-ni your whole life, I hope this won’t come as too much of a shock. You have lots of company.)
Other consonants in French are also altered by what preceeds them: E.g., vieille, which is (VERY roughly) pronounced sort of vee-ay-yah.
Shazam! I didn’t know how to spell it phonetically in American English. Didn’t even think of the word “lasagna”. U da man Whore-hay. (oh yes I did go there!).
The good thing is that it’s pretty much the same in English, it can be downright impossible to guess how to pronounce a word just based on its spelling, so we’re equals in this sense!
This is very important and leads to a lot of misunderstandings. Put the stress where it doesn’t belong and suddenly natives won’t understand the word any more. BUT in French there’s basically no stress, at least not at the syllable level but rather at the word or even sentence level.
However, some languages, such as French and Mandarin, are sometimes analyzed as lacking lexical stress entirely.
French words are sometimes said to be stressed on the final syllable, but this can be attributed to the prosodic stress that is placed on the final syllable (or, if that is a schwa, the next-to-final syllable) of any string of words in that language, and hence also on the last syllable of a word analyzed in isolation.
The schwa happens e.g. in Morey-Saint-Denis, where the ‘e’ in the last word is very rarely pronounced, so it sounds like “dnee”.
But I can understand that it’s tough when your native language makes ample use of stress (English, Italian…) to try to speak in an apparent monotone.
Another issue is that most vowels in French are a lot shorter than in English, so it often sounds like Sham-BOWWWWWWWL Moose-y-GNEEEEEEE to our ears because of the extra, unwelcome stress on vowels. It’s usually a good idea to try to clip the vowels a bit.
![[basic-smile.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/83717c74df9b0ce202453063bc4f11baf0ee6b8a.gif "smile"){kind=small}
I told this joke in Italian on holiday this year, and it made the person I said it to chuckle. I changed the punchline, as I’m sure you appreciate it is sadly also transferable closer to me.![[wink.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/04707e6a7bbb03e0153e349d8a9270d30e1e9525.gif "wink"){kind=small}
Didn’t even think of the word “lasagna”. U da man Whore-hay. (oh yes I did go there!).