Can someone explain the sounds all the diacritics make.

[linguoboy]

Also note that in Japanese this word is a normal word for splashing something on something else. For example bukkake udon, a food that involves pouring a sauce over the noodles just before serving.

That'd be a great example for my book, of borrowings with a narrowed meaning-- except, well, no. Fortunately I have other examples, like sake.

Not to mention "menage".

[Particles the Greek]

All of those are examples of unstressed vowel reduction. They all have some version of [e] in the languages they come from, but in English /e/ is always long (i.e. it has to take primary or secondary stress) so it doesn't work well in these words; we convert it to /i/ since this can be shortened and unstressed.

Still not sure I buy this. Simile, recipe have the same stress pattern as resumé, exposé, dossier, macramé. Adobe, coyote have the pattern of al dente, andante. Nike, acme have the pattern of forte, padre, hombre, latte, essay, melee. So I don't see that English speakers have a great problem with final unstressed /e/. (I'll grant you it may be marked as foreign, as some speakers 'correct' the final /e/ to /i/.)

Analogy is often overlooked as a factor in various linguistic phenomena. Linguists love rules and tend to overestimate how much speakers use them.

Plus, it's perfectly normal for ME /e:/ to become /i:/, including at the end of the word-- e.g. contree country. Many of the earliest non-silent e's are Greek, and Greek borrowings are generally subject to the GVS.

Does this explain the common pronunciation of "lingerie" with /e/ or /ei/ on the end, when it should be /i/?

[finlay]

Yeah, but the opposite – we analogise that French words often end with /ei/ and thus this word should too. I remember going skiing with a group from my university in Val Thorens, and this kind of thing was all over the place – for example, the resort itself was pronounced /torãs/ by a French girl I was talking to, but all the English speakers said /toren/ or /təˈrɛn/ (however you want to write it), presumably because they "know" that a final s in French "shouldn't" be pronounced (but missing the rule about en being pronounced /ã/). Or there was a lift called "Moutières" (/mutjɛr/), which was corrected to "Moutier" (/muːti.eɪ/) because people thought that /ɛr/ wouldn't exist in French.

It also explains why people say /ɒn/ for the first syllable of lingerie – we can't tell the difference between all of French's nasal vowels.

[linguoboy]

It also explains why people say /ɒn/ for the first syllable of lingerie – we can't tell the difference between all of French's nasal vowels.

In the US at least I think there's also an element of [æ] being considered too "Englishy" for foreign words. Our tendency is always to hypercorrect to /ɑ/. The British English pronunciations of taco and Chianti simply grate on us, even though (excepting for accents with NCVS) the stressed vowel is closer to the native sound.

Two particularly egregious coda-deleting hypercorrections are *Berliot for Berlioz and coup de grace pronounced as if *coup de gras. But regional French names can trip up almost anyone. Neither me nor my partner was sure how to pronounced Gigondas until we finally checked the Larousse.

[Salmoneus]

I only just found out how to pronounce Arpitan placenames and why they look so bizarre. [Hint: it's genius!]

[linguoboy]

don't forget the acute to mark that a word-final e isn't silent (and doesn't ~lengthen the preceding vowel), which is regular enough that it sometimes gets analogized to loanwords where the original spelling didn't have it

Spotted in the wild today (i.e. coworker e-mail): "Namasté".