Paella

[aadroma]

Carl and I were watching Top Chef, and British King of Food Douchery Toby Young was a guest judge. Towards the end the least successful dishes were being reviewed, and Padma says, "... and what about the pah ey yah?"

Toby, full of himself, countered, "... why does everyone insist on calling it that?? It's a pa ehl luh -- just as you don't say

Comments

[zurcherart]

Wha?

[aadroma]

Apparently Toby Young believes "paella" is pronounced with the dull e in "end" and the "ll" being a regular English l (as in labia or lollipop). Everywhere else I've been it's been pronounced as it is in Spanish.

[gullinbursti]

Some Spanish grammars I've read suggest that some Castillian speakers pronounce ll as in million. My experience with peninsular Spanish is limited to Cachorro so I don't know if that's accurate or not -- obviously it doesn't happen in American Spanish.

[aadroma]

It's pretty rare in Spanish, too -- it's almost always, in my experience, homophonous with Spanish y. Sometimes there's hints of an English j in there, but certainly nothing resembling an l.

[paterson_si]

Have you ever heard an American choir tormenting Latin? :)

[aadroma]

Hebrew too. Native Israelis find it hard to understand American "Hebrew" :: laugh ::

[paterson_si]

Oh I can believe you. :)

[aadroma]

I'm sure you can't wait until I come to Ljubljana and start butchering Slovene ^o^

[scream4noreason]

I'm so sick of food wankers on tv. It seems also to be now the sole domain of the hetero male. When did this start? Straight men now have to be experts on things like coffee and wine and cooking like it was invented yesterday.

[muckefuck]

They speak it all the time. Such Catalan-speaking monoglots as still exist are found in remote rural areas, not the metropolis.

[dedos]

It's not that they can't speak Spanish. But at least with the ones I interacted with, they avoid it when at all possible.

[muckefuck]

This is such a change from what it used to be! When I first went to Barcelona in the early 90s it's was nearly impossible to get anyone to speak Catalan to me. Generally they would hear my accent and switch to English.

[muckefuck]

Actually, Raj, British English speakers do say the "t" in "fillet". "Mignon" is, however, "MEEN-yahn" rather than "MIG-non".

[aadroma]

I give my Aussie friend hell because he says "fil-let". I didn't even know what he was talking about for a couple of minutes, and I finally said, "... /fil:ej/??"

That DOES seem bass-ackwards to me -- why keep half of the name in a French approximant pronunciation?

[muckefuck]

Basically, because fillet isn't felt to be a French word any more. It's actually been in the language for over six hundred years.

It's similar to the way everyone I know pronounces steak frites with the English pronunciation of "steak" instead of the French even though this is a French dish.

[aadroma]

"Fil-let minyan" is a new one to me -- even the Aussies use the French-ish variant. I suppose the Brits are consistent 9_9

I've never had nor even heard of steak frites, BTW.