Dictionary.com's Word of the Day today is frondescence, meaning "leafage; foliage." That made me smile.
How do you pronounce foliage?
I go the "Faux Lee Edge" route, but I've heard it pronounced with the softer "g" (the second one in garage) which sounds more "Foal Yehsch". The second one seems more awkward yet more correct at the same time. Is there a single proper way to say the word or are both correct?
Phonetically, it's "foe lee udge" (like "judge" without the J), although, when you're speaking quickly, in some accents it comes out as "foe lee adge" (like "badge" without the B). The stress is on "FOE." The J is correctly hard.
This reminds me of a recent undertaking I took to learn more about diacritics. As a writer my stylistic preference is to avoid irregular punctuation if I can help it. I hate fake-language stuff that's full of apostrophes, hyphens, and accents. Sometimes, however, I have to use accent marks. For instance, in my book I have a location called Lake Galé, which is two syllables, stress on the second, and has nothing to do with the English word "gale." My only alternative was to change the spelling, such as "Galay." I chose to go with the unconventional spelling and an accent mark because--and I hope you will forgive me for doing this in a prosaic rather than poetic environment--it
looked more elegant with the faux-gale spelling. More defensibly, though, it also gives the (informed) reader a slightly different instruction for oral pronunciation. "Galay" is an extended, slower vocalization. "Galé" is crisp and sharper. It lends itself, because of the difficulty of the consonance between K and G, to the silencing of the K in "lake" and a reduction of the vocalization on G. So "Lake Galé" becomes as a single word, with a gap in the middle. It looks elegant on the page and it sounds elegant when spoken aloud. A lazy author would simply have put an apostrophe there in the gap, and would have created a gibberish instruction--because English doesn't use the apostrophe to give those kinds of pronunciation instructions.
Anyhow...when researching the contemporary English instructions that come with the grave accent--I needed to know if this was the correct way to elongate a short E sound--I made a surprising discovery! For all these years I have used accute accents for words that have an irregular pronunciation at the ending, such as the adjective "learnéd," which is two syllables, when I should have been using a grave accent, "learnèd." O, irony! Now I have learned to be more learnèd.
English rules for accent marks continue to be inconsistent and irregular, so even though, going by convention, a grave would be better than an accute for my earlier Lake Galé example--i.e., Lake Galè--English has an exceptional convention of using the accute to process loan words with pronunciation deviations in this very form. So "Lake Galé" is correct.
This is why I don't spend much energy creating fake languages in my writing. I translate everything viable into English. English is complicated enough! and beautiful for it.
