> Elderly volunteers (or "mulchees") are provided
with generous payments for their families before being rendered down and recombined with other
chemicals into a range of substitutes for common foodstuffs, including hash browns (Grandmash™),
bananas (Nanas™) and butter (Fauxghee™).
So one meaning is Faux Ghee (faux as in fake, Ghee as in a type of clarified butter, originating from South Asia) which follows the naming conventions of real substitute foods like Faux Turkey.
And the second meaning is "Fogey" as in an old person.
> Fauxghee sounds like "fogey" which refers to an older person
It actually doesn't, at least the way "ghee" is pronounced in the native languages where the word originates from. English doesn't quite have the strongly voiced "g" sound, so western people pronounce it incorrectly as "gee".
I’m not sure which it’s supposed to be, per this reading. Is it similar to the “g” as used in “great” or as in “refrigerator” or as in “cough” (or a different sound which I didn’t think of)? This particular American read it initially as in “great”, for what it’s worth. From other comments it sounds like that’s intended if it’s supposed to sound like “fogey”.
Off the top of my head, the only American English sound I can think of that'd come close would be the Americanized pronunciation of "Ghent," as demonstrated in this random YouTube video I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meuBUq3K3XY
So take the "Gh" sound from "Ghent" in that video, and then tack on a long e — and there's your ghee.
So I believe you. But I also don't hear any sound that's different from what I'd use to say "get". It reminds me of people who say "melk" instead of "milk" and can't hear the difference. Thanks for the examples.
I just looked up a youtube video of the pronunciation in Hindi and g is pronounced basically the same way as I say it in northeast Ohio, which is generally pretty close to standard American english.
Then I looked up the ipa standard pronunciations for both from wiktionary:
enPR: gē, IPA(key): /ɡiː/
(South Asia) IPA(key): [ɡʱiː]
The difference is right there in those IPA renderings. The superscript h means the g should be aspirated (like the k typically is in 'key' in English; also 'spin' vs 'pin'). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant
You might not hear the difference as the English language does not assign meaning to that difference. But if I pronounce 'key' or 'pin' without aspiration, you may feel that I speak with an accent or even mishear it as 'bin':
> Pronouncing them as unaspirated in these positions, as is done by many Indian English speakers, may make them get confused with the corresponding voiced stop by other English-speakers.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant#Allophonic
This has nothing to do with those words rhyming: your examples rhyme because they all end with -in, but we are concerned with the sound in front of that.
Also, the point in this subthread is not how you should pronounce the word in English. The point is that English speakers (or most other people in the world for that matter) cannot pronounce the word the way it's pronounced in the regions where ghee and its name is originally from.
Trying to sum it up: different languages have different sounds and you may not be able to hear and/or pronounce the differences. Your sibling comment mentions the English lice-rice distinction which is difficult to some Japanese/Chinese natives. Is saying 'lice' when you mean 'rice' just a different accent?
Going further, people don't observe these details of how they speak their own language and thus cannot reflect or explain to others. Quoting Wikipedia again:
> Native speakers of a given language perceive one phoneme in the language as a single distinctive sound and are "both unaware of and even shocked by" the allophone variations that are used to pronounce single phonemes.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone
Yes, I am sure that westerners are saying ghee wrong. The sounds they make when they say "ghee" maps to a completely different (non-existent) word in Indian languages
It's the exact same way Indians mispronounce many English words when they map it to some equivalent native sounds.
I read the Wikipedia article, listened to some of the sounds and I still don't get it. I don't hear or "feel" a difference between the "p" in "pin" and "spin", except in "spin" the "p" sound is sort of "concatenated" to the "s" sound with no transition. In the "[tân] / [tʰân]" Chinese example, to me the "unaspirated t" is indistinguishable from a "d" sound.
Maybe English speakers are "blind" to the aspirated / unaspirated distinction, similar to how Japanese speakers tend to struggle with English's L/R distinction?
Like I said, you might not hear the difference as the English language does not assign meaning to that difference.
A physical experiment you can try from the Wikipedia article:
> to feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say spin [spɪn] and then pin [pʰɪn]. One should either feel a puff of air or see a flicker of the candle flame with pin that one does not get with spin.
this is similar to many immigrants learning the Danish language, there are at least 22 vowel sounds (but probably more like 40 when you count regional pronunciations) and 9 vowel letters, but it can be different to hear the difference or associate them with the right vowel letter.
>I just looked up a youtube video of the pronunciation in Hindi and g is pronounced basically the same way as I say it in northeast Ohio, which is generally pretty close to standard American english.
If you think that, your ear is simply not hearing the difference because the sound does not exist in your language.
The Wiktionary is in fact listing two different pronunciations of the word. The one mentioned under South Asia is the correct one.
Correct as an English word, incorrect as a Hindi etc. word, right? When a language borrows a foreign word, it doesn't bring any new sounds (or letters) with it but adapts the word to the language instead.
It is like goat but more voiced, with a hint of h. In Indian languages there are four different g-like sounds (two that are somewhat like g as in goat and two that somewhat like g as in George).
