Bound for the abattoir

[Bassim]

This is a sentence from my short story. I am not sure if I have written it correctly, and I am wondering if someone would look at it and correct my mistakes.

At the crossing, buses and tanks had been waiting for them, together with the soldiers who stared at them with the mixture of scorn and interest, as if they were cattle bound for the abattoir.

 

[emsr2d2]

The only thing I would change would be to say "with a mixture", not "the mixture".

 

[SoothingDave]

I first heard the word "abattoir" in a Monty Python sketch. In AmE, we simply say "slaughterhouse."

 

[emsr2d2]

And I'd never heard the word "slaughterhouse" until I watched Footloose and they talked about the book Slaughterhouse 5. They're still abattoirs in BrE.

 

[SoothingDave]

It's always interesting which Frenchy words and pronunciations you use versus American use. For example, we will say "filet mignon" like a Frenchman (more or less) but I have heard Brits talk of "filet" steaks, where "filet" sounds like "fill it."

But then you use a word like "abattoir" which I assume has to be French.

 

[Rover_KE]

We Brits are talking about 'fillet' steaks, which do not pretend to be French.

fil•let/fɪˈleɪ/
n.

1. a boneless cut or slice of meat or fish, such as the beef tenderloin:

(Random House Learners' Dictionary of American English)

 

[SoothingDave]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fillet_(cut)

Yep. Fill it or fill A. Still is derived from the French. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. I just find it interesting how American and British use differs.

A fillet (or filet) (UK /ˈfɪlɪt/, US /fɨˈleɪ/; from the French word filet /filɛ/) is a cut or slice of boneless meat or fish.

 

[emsr2d2]

There is little consistency in how BrE speakers pronounce foreign words.

One of my bugbears is people who pronounce "nougat" as "nugget". Firstly, it's a French word and should be pronounced "noo-gah" and "nugget" is a completely different word with a completely different meaning.

Then there's "bruschetta", a classic Italian starter. For some reason, the majority of BrE speakers seem to think it's "broo-shetter" as if the "sch" is from the German. However, it's an Italian word and should be "broo-sketter".

There are probably few BrE speakers who actually pronounce "abattoir" in the way it's pronounced in French but it's not far off, just an Anglicised version.

 

[José Manuel Rosón Bravo]

[Not a teacher]

For those non-English natives (I am one of them) interested in its pronunciation: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/abattoir

 

[MikeNewYork]

In my profession, on the large animal side, "abattoir" is used with some frequency. In the Midwest, we pronounced it AB (short a) uh twahr. An Ngram suggest the word is alive in Both BrE and AmE.

Ngram 1

Ngram 2

 

[emsr2d2]

It was, in my youth, a word that had been taken into English and pronounced in the English way, 'nugget'. People like you introduced the French pronunciation in the early 1960s, and that version happens to have won out.

Are you seriously advocating that words that came to us from the French should be pronounced as the French pronounce them today? If so, and I assume that what's good for the French is good for all other words that modern English took from other languages, then we are going to have to look at the pronunciations of 90+% of the words listed in our dictionaries and change to the 'correct' pronunciations. Let's start with 'France' and 'Paris'. I'll leave the next half million to you.

Perhaps I should have been clearer. No, of course I'm not suggesting that every word that came to us via a different language should be pronounced as it is/was by native speakers of those languages. However, most words have combinations of letters which appear "natural" in written English. "France" and "Paris" are examples of those as are probably the half million others that you mentioned. To take my Italian word as an example, "bruschetta" does not involve a standard 'English' combination of letters and is probably very clearly recognisable to most native English speakers as a "foreign" word. As such, yes, I do think an effort should be made to retain the original pronunciation or, at the very least, not change it to a pronunciation which makes it sound as if it's from a completely different foreign country.

At an Italian restaurant in the UK last year, my dad (a fluent Italian speaker) and I (sadly, not so fluent!) had an interesting conversation with the owner about the word "bruschetta". He told my dad that he is the only customer to pronounce the word correctly and that he found it completely inexplicable that all his other customers insist on the "broo-shetter" pronunciation. He conceded that most of his customers probably don't know how Italian pronunciation works so wouldn't realise that "ch" in that word should be a hard "c" but he opined that if the Brits were pronouncing it as they read it, they should be saying "bruss-chetta" (which they don't). In addition, he had discovered that a couple of members of his staff (Italians) had started to use the "sh" pronunciation because, they said, when they pronounced it correctly, many customers didn't understand which item on the menu they were referring to. He had taken both members of staff to task and told them they must pronounce it as it is in Italy.

I'm taking no blame for the pronunciation of "nougat" - I wasn't even around in the early 60s! ;-)

Going back to the original word, "abattoir" - I'm slightly surprised that neither AmE nor BrE has yet created a brand new, sanitised word to obscure what actually happens in them. The only alternative I've heard in BrE is "animal processing plant" but even that doesn't hide the realities of the tasks carried out within. Given how many other workplaces and jobs have had their titles changed to make them sound "sexier", I'm surprised at this.

 

[MikeNewYork]

I pronounce the final syllable of "nougat" as "ut", different from "nugget".

 

[SoothingDave]

For me, it's like "NEW-git." It never occurred to me to pronounce it in some French way.