Duquesne pronounciation?
 

Staying at Duquesne Eiffel. Can anybody tell me how to say the hotel name?
Is it Doo kwez nee?
Is it Du Kane?
Thanks

Do you know how to say the French "u?"
If not, say eeeeeand purse your lips while you're doing it.

So It's Du- KEN, no "s" sound, no "ay" sound.

Merci

Duquesne is pronounced /dykɛn/. The <i>u</i> in the Du part is pronounced like &ldquo;ee&rdquo; but with the lips rounded. The second syllable is pronounced &ldquo;ken.&rdquo;

While you are about it, how about Eiffel?
Like a French speaker that is.
I somehow like Due Keznee
Or Du KEN Ayeful or Awful as the case may be. I never stayed there, but doubt if it is awful.

Eiffel is pronounced /ɛfɛl/; it sounds just like the letters FL in English.

http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/index.html
Usually I trust this website for ordinary words but Alain the French voice didn't pronounce it properly (surely not in his repertory)
If you write duqueine or duqu&ecirc;ne you'll hear it like it should be said. :-)

We stayed at Hotel Muguet last summer and asked the owner how to say Muguet. We were pronouncing it Mew jay. She gave us about a 10 minute lesson piercing her lips and saying MOOOooo gay. We would repeat (obviously wrong) and she would again say no, no MOOOOOO Gay. It is some type of flower.

This is bordering on the never-ending on whether there are different pronunciations for PEN and PIN, ken and kin, etc.

I would write it as Dyu-KEHN, though neither transliteration really captures it.

If you have the kind of &quot;country&quot; (Southern?) accent that results in pronouncing &quot;anywhere&quot; as &quot;InnyWare&quot;, then you might as well say DooKANE as shooting for DyuKEHN and ending up with &quot;Dook-KINN&quot;.

Oh... and yes... Eiffel =&gt; &quot;Eff-ELL&quot;

Best wishes,

Rex

Ronda, muguet is lily of the valley ((W))

&gt;If you have the kind of &quot;country&quot; (Southern?) accent that results in pronouncing &quot;anywhere&quot; as &quot;InnyWare&quot;, ..&lt;

Hey Rex,

Down heah, that's &quot;Innee way ah&quot;.

&quot;Raintree&quot; is &quot;Rhine trey&quot;. :)

((I))

Yes, ira... Georgia has its own curiously Bostonian variation on Nashville/Texas/Kentucky/Mississippi/hillbilly/&quot;suthrin&quot; speech, with that &quot;heah&quot; and &quot;theyah&quot;.

Reminds me of a Boston expression variation I heard about a year ago, of &quot;you can't get there from here&quot;...

...my wife and I were told, with reference to trying to reach a hotel near Boston Logan airport (from Cambridge) - - &quot;well, if I was going theyah, I wouldn't stott heah&quot;...

;)

Actually there are different pronunciations for <i>ken</i> and <i>kin</i>, <i>pen</i> and <i>pin</i>, etc., in all standard versions of English. The differences are phonemic and omnipresent, and so they are preserved in virtually all pronunciations, even when the pronunciations of the phonemes involved vary.

You can pronounce it &ldquo;doo-ken&rdquo; and the locals should be able to understand it. &ldquo;Dyoo-ken&rdquo; should be avoided. If you can pronounce &ldquo;ee&rdquo; with your lips rounded (very easy to do, but not a sound that's used in English) for the first vowel, that's even better.

The way I was taught to say the &quot;u&quot; in &quot;du&quot; (French) or &quot;&uuml;&quot; (German) was to say &quot;eee&quot; and then push your lips forward as if to give a maiden aunt a peck on the cheek. Or if you know the joke about the wide-mouthed frog, then you've probably already got it.

Write the name down on a piece of paper; hand it to the taxi driver or to whomever.

Feel good about yourself.
When you arrive at the hotel, ask them how THEY pronounce it.

They'll be delighted you took the time to try to learn it rather than going in and looking like some sort of clown with your lips contorted.

Be wary of asking just any local for advice on French. Many of them don't know much more about French than the average American knows about English (that is to say, they hardly know anything at all). Their advice can be egregiously off the mark.

&ldquo;Contorting&rdquo; your lips is normal in French, which has six rounded vowels, half of them fronted. English has four rounded vowels, and all of them are back vowels (which is why English speakers find the front rounded vowels of French counterintuitive).