Location Taken: Castle Hill National Historic Site, Newfoundland, Canada
Time Taken: July 2012
(The photo is of an old French fort, which was the closest thing to this topic I had.)
Every so often my brain gets stuck on odd things.
Like the French word “Je”, pronounced zhə in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It means “I”, so it’s a common word and is used in a few French phrases that are used in English, like “Je ne sais quoi“.
The thing is, does English pronounce “je” as zhə for any other word?
All the English words that start with J-E that I can think of use a harder sound on the je (the IPA uses “je” for the sound). That’s the sound you say when you say “Jenny” or “Jeopardy”. But it’s not the softer “zhə” of the French “Je”.
But, given the history of the English language, it actually seems a bit odd that we no longer use that sound. I mean, as the saying goes, English is what happened when French knights wanted to pick up Anglo-Saxon girls. The invasion of Great Britain by the Normans, a group of people from Normandy on the north coast of France, introduced a lot of French terms into the language the Anglo-Saxons who already lived there spoke.
I mean, that’s why we use different words for an animal and the meat that comes from it, like “cow” and “beef”. That’s actually very rare amongst languages. Saying “Can you give me a hunk of cow?” is perfectly normal in much of the world, but seems very odd to my English-attuned ears. It came from that same Norman invasion, really. The French word for cow meat is bœuf, which was heard as “beef” by the Anglo-Saxon servants they sent out for dinner. But since the Normans asked for the meat of the cow a lot more than they asked for the cow itself, the Anglo-Saxons kept on using their old word for the animals.
Ironically, French is another language that has a different word for the meat and the animal. Le bœuf and la vache for beef and cow respectably. Go figure.
Perhaps it’s just a case of us mispronouncing the words that sounded like “zhə” originally and hardening the j sound to match the way we said other words. Language shifts around nearly as much as people do, and for much the same reasons.
Still, my brain keeps coming back to the question and running all the J-E words I know through my head. It’s getting a bit repetitive…
