French Frogs
In high school I had a lively and effective French teacher named Martha. Martha told us that her absolute favorite word in French was "grenouille", meaning "frog". She taught us carefully to pronounce it thus: gre-noy-ye, more or less. It was a marvelous word, weird and fun to say. Across the years I've said it to myself now and then just for the fun.
A few nights ago we watch the enjoyable Canadian film "Bon Cop Bad Cop", whose main characters are an English-speaking cop from Toronto, a French-speaking cop from Montreal, and the bilingual humor that can arise from the friction between the two.
At one point the French-speaking cop had a reason to refer to a frog. He used the word "grenouille", of course, only he pronounced it more like: gren-we-eh. Now, after I finally recognized what he was saying, it seemed a perfectly reasonable pronunciation, one that acknowledges the recognizable O-U-I sequence of vowels before the liquid Ls in the usual way.
The trouble was that this pronunciation is vastly different from what I was taught by Martha. Oh dear, now my very foundations of all that I've known for the past 35 years are horribly shaken. Could this reasonable pronunciation possibly be a regional variation or was Martha wrong?
It's all very troubling.