Hi there. Anyone know the proper way to pronounce 'Cazalet', as in the Cazalet Chronicles by British writer Elizabeth Jane Howard? Thanks.

If it's a French word/name, I would pronounce like kazahleh.

As if it were an English name.

Pronoucing a Norman surname as if it were French is DEEPLY unEnglish.

if British, it should be caz-a-lett.

It's Norman, but cigalechanta has got the English pronunciation perfect

Just like what happens with Beaulieu and Beauchamp, which made asking for directions interesting.

even if one were going to pronounce it as in French, the last syllable wouldn't be "leh"

Christina: Can you expand on that?

Thanks very much. I suspected it wasn't pronounced kazahleh - I kept walking about pronouncing Belvoir as the French would when an Englishman informed me that it was in fact 'Beaver'. Thought I better check.

RE Belvoir:
Thank Christ that the Earl Spencer capitulated to popular pressure and decreed that Althorp will be pronounced...uhh... Althorp... not "Altripp"

BTW in Washington DC, (Fort) Belvoir is pronounced "Bell-vwarr", not Beaver.

Of course, as a devotee of L. Diana Manners/ Cooper, I early learned the "correct" ie British pronunciation of Belvoir.

Only Elizabeth Jane Howard can tell the "proper" pronounciaton.

If it wasn't from those books, Christina would have it right, if it was to be anything like French the t is silent, sounding exactly as it sounds in painters' names Monet, Manet, or as in the phrase s'il vous plaît.

But it's not French, the blurb for the very first of Howards Cazalet books sez:

"The English family at home. For two unforgettable summers the Cazalet family gathered together, safe from the advancing storm clouds of war. In the heart of the Sussex countryside these were still sunlit days of children's games, Iavish family meals and picnics on the beach. The three generations of Cazalets are all lovingly portrayed and the fascinating tangle of their lives recreates a vanished historical world. [end quote]

So if it is a three-generation English family, we would have to know how the pater familias wants the name pronounced, and since it is a fictional family, the next-best source would be the author.

Has anybody got an inside track to Ms Howard? Until then our quibbles are moot...

While the British have made up their own pronunciations for many foreign words (not only French, but I've heard some REALLY mangled Spanish - Konkwistadoor) Americans try to keep closer to the original pronunciation in some cases.

Except of course for English names (Greenwitch instead of Grenich, Wor-cest-er instead of Wooster) except for locals from the NE.

How was it pronounced in the PBS Masterpiece Theater production?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/.../whos_who.html

> Christina would have it right, if it was to be anything like French the t is silent,

Dalai, Christina didn't say that. Like Tedgale asked, I'm curious to know her version. She said it would not end like leh.

p.s. by writing kahzahleh, I meant to say it should end like, as you said, Monet, etc. (If I wrote kazale, anglophone people would tend to pronounce something like keizeili, right?)

kappa 1 - you're right, I misread her 180 degree - it sez "shouldn't"

Yes, Christina's got it wrong, it would indeed be something that - in English - could be spelled like ---eh, a straight open non-bent (not a diphtong) e sound like the vowel sound in stem or bent or tent or bet (but silent ending t).

But only the author knows, is she telling? Or how was it pronounced in that tv show somebody mentioned?

Isn't there a moderately hot non-French actor called Cazalet -- he starred in The Count of Monte Cristo, a film to which I was once subjected on a transatlantic flight?

We cd ask him how he pronounces his name.....

BTW, from that book blurb cited above ("hot summer days.. endless picnics...three generations of a family&quot that book or those books sound like truly girly book-crap.

Have we, collectively, been induced to fret over pronunciations connected with a mess of nancy tosh-lit????

Oh no, I checked and that actor is named CAviezel. No use to use whatever.

ANd I suppose the great French actress Maria Casares ("Les Enfants du Paradis&quot is no use to us either.

'nancy tosh-lit'? Whoa! Sounds like
Catherine Cookson territory. The
Encyclopedia Britannica talks of
Howard's 'deft characterization of
alienated people and her sensitivity
to the nuances of family.' Not
quite 'girly book crap'! Don't
think Kingsley Amis' ego would have
allowed him to marry her if she had
been a schlock hack.

Girly book-crap! You have to wonder about the size of certain body parts of certain
'critics' if that is the most fearful thing they have to face.

Kingsley Amis married her but his drinking-damaged performance couldn't keep her - she had affairs with Cecil Day-Lewis and Laurie Lee and eventually left him. Not that commendable since she was friends with both wives. But she wrote her best work after she dumped Amis - isn't that the way it always is.

No, there isn't anyone knows the pronunciation. It is one of those unanswerable mysteries of life: Why are we here? What happens to us after we die? How do they get the ships into those little bottles? Why do I always order pasta with red sauce when I'm wearing a white shirt?