Thursday, November 12, 2009

Pizza.

When I'm talking in Korean, and if I need to use a foreign word, generally, I try to pronounce it the way Koreans pronounce it. MacDonald becomes meckdonaldu and butter becomes buttoh.
However, some words get pronounced closer to their English pronunciation, sometimes without my awareness.

One of those words is pizza. Koreans write it 피자 which could be roughly transcribed as peejah. Apparently, they pronounce it like that, too, but I didn't notice it, and pronounced it 핏짜, intensifying the second consonant (like "cha"). Somebody pointed it out to me once and I was surprised.

Maybe to me, it was like pronouncing 자장면 (black bean noodles, written "Jahjarngmyon") 짜장면 (common pronunciation, "Chahjarngmyon"). Who knows.

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