katzeregi:

astercontrol:

“fuchsia” is a word that feels like it is stuck very uncomfortably in the middle of a transition it can’t complete

• name of a color
• comes from the name of a plant which has flowers in that color
• like many plants, it is named after a person
• the person’s surname was Fuchs (a German name meaning “Fox”)
• (the closest most English speakers get to pronouncing that name is something like “fooks” but in German the ch is pronounced in the back of the throat like a cat hiss)
• a reasonable anglicized approximation of the name “fuchsia,” as close as most English speakers would bother to get, would be something like “fookseea”
• however, it has never gotten there. English speakers persistently pronounce it “fyoosha,” as if the ch and the s were in opposite places in the word, like fucking lexically-mandated dyslexia
• but the spelling of the word has not been adapted to reflect this pronunciation. if I type “fuschia” it still gets redlined by any spellchecker anywhere
• poor word is trapped in this horrible liminal limbo between languages
• pronunciation warped but the spelling still held back from adapting to fit it
• like a miserable kid still forced to wear clothes it grew out of years ago
• probably symbolic of a whole lot of things in America and the English language but I’m too tired to think about any of it now

The German word “Fuchs” is indeed pronounced “fooks”. The “ch” letter combination has many pronounciations, and while it is true, that it can have the cat hissing sound, in this case it’s a simple k sound.

Thanks for the additional info! I’ve gotten a few comments saying this. I wonder if it’s a regional dialect thing? Since I’ve always thought that my Austrian relatives say it more as a guttural than a k, in words like Fuchs, and I’ve always been in the habit of pronouncing it as a guttural in those words when I’ve spoken with them.

But on the other hand… even though I did speak German and English as my first languages from childhood, I admit I got lots more English practice, and my German was mostly with non-native speakers (my parents, related to those Austrian relatives but also raised speaking primarily English)

So… my tendency to hear the guttural instead of the K in some native speech could just be that weird psychological/linguistic thing where you tend to hear a sound the way you’re used to it being pronounced, and it takes an effort to hear the difference between that and the other pronunciations.

(If you try saying Fuchs with the ch in the back of the throat, it does kinda come up against a fuzzy border between cat-hiss and K, varying depending on how fast you say the word. it’s actually a bit difficult for me to draw the line on where that border is. Fascinating.)

(guess I can kinda see why so many English speakers take the lazy route on that word. Ha.)