There are differing pronunciations because English speakers, particularly American English speakers, rarely use the proper French vowel phoneme in the first syllable, and the r in the first syllable often gets either totally dropped, or pronounced too strongly, as compared to the French pronunciation.
In French, ‘ou’ makes a vowel sound roughly in between ‘o’ and ‘u’, and the best my American brain and tongue can approximate it is basically ‘boo’, the sound a ghost makes, but in UK English, the ‘o’ is already closer to French’s ‘ou’… but not entirely.
A similar Americanization happened to Bourbon.
Bourbon is originally a French word, with the ‘ou’, but Americans usually just pronounce it bur - bun.
… The reason there is no consistent pronunciation is because bourgeoise is a loan word from French to English… and/or English itself is bastard mutt pidgin of a language, that has a ton of different dialects with different pronunciations of vowels.
EDIT: It seems most people responding with pronunciations are missing the difference between the ‘zh’ and the ‘sh’.
Its zh, or in IPA, ʒ
As in ‘vision’ or ‘decision’.
It is not sh, or in IPA, ʃ
As in ‘sheep’ or ‘shoulder’.
Zhang and Shang, Zhou and Shou are not pronounced the same, I’m using zh for ʒ because that is often done when in attempting to transliterate Chinese names and words into English.
There are differing pronunciations because English speakers, particularly American English speakers, rarely use the proper French vowel phoneme in the first syllable, and the r in the first syllable often gets either totally dropped, or pronounced too strongly, as compared to the French pronunciation.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/bourgeoisie
Roughly:
UK English: bozh - wah - zee / bo - zhwah - zee
US English: burzh - wah - zee / bur - zhwah -zee
https://www.howtopronounce.com/french/bourgeoisie
In French, ‘ou’ makes a vowel sound roughly in between ‘o’ and ‘u’, and the best my American brain and tongue can approximate it is basically ‘boo’, the sound a ghost makes, but in UK English, the ‘o’ is already closer to French’s ‘ou’… but not entirely.
A similar Americanization happened to Bourbon.
Bourbon is originally a French word, with the ‘ou’, but Americans usually just pronounce it bur - bun.
… The reason there is no consistent pronunciation is because bourgeoise is a loan word from French to English… and/or English itself is bastard mutt pidgin of a language, that has a ton of different dialects with different pronunciations of vowels.
EDIT: It seems most people responding with pronunciations are missing the difference between the ‘zh’ and the ‘sh’.
Its zh, or in IPA, ʒ
As in ‘vision’ or ‘decision’.
It is not sh, or in IPA, ʃ
As in ‘sheep’ or ‘shoulder’.
Zhang and Shang, Zhou and Shou are not pronounced the same, I’m using zh for ʒ because that is often done when in attempting to transliterate Chinese names and words into English.
🤓
Also thanks for the explanation, that’s a lot of info to digest!