• circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 months ago

    That’s exactly the problem with prescriptive pronunciations – they tend to break down depending on how narrow the transcription, which means they’re arbitrary anyway.

    If it is truly based on the play, then it would have to be /go.'do/, like the French.

    /'go.do/ is indeed an anglicized pronunciation.

    Source: am a professional linguist.

    Edit: and we should not forget: all human language is ultimately arbitrary in terms of form, modulo limits of human articulation. This is often referred to as Saussure’s Principle of Arbitrariness. Which is to say: no one should get bent out of shape about how people pronounce things. If the information transfer was successful, nothing else really matters from a linguistic standpoint.

    • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      That’s partly what I myself tried to hint at with the question and the parenthetical remarks. Various forms have their own claims to “legitimacy”.

      And the whole issue somewhat surprised me, because I never even considered that there were these different pronunciations at all. I’m not a native English speaker, and I’ve always used a more French-like pronunciation of “Godot” that is used in my native language. I expected neither the inital stress nor the -ough diphthong in English, but a more French-like pronunciation. As much as I feel comfortable in English and use it every single day, some of these quirks in pronunciation can still catch me off-guard.