• hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 days ago

      Edit: thank you for kind people providing info, unfortunately I got 2 different answers 🤣

      • Notyou@sopuli.xyz
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        6 days ago

        At least you know how to spell it. Unlike me trying to type whore derves and shark cutery.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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        6 days ago

        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.