English pronunciation is very confusing for people learning the language. I am always sympathetic when I correct my students’ mispronunciation, telling them that English has rules of pronunciation that we follow most of the time, but that there are always exceptions. One of the main reasons is that we do not have an academy, as in France, which decides what words get into the dictionary. In English, if a word is used frequently, it gets in. We also adopt foreign words, along with the foreign pronunciation, and if that language uses the Latin alphabet, the foreign spelling as well.
I then tell them about Cognac. About a century ago, and Armenian distillery entered its brandy in a contest in France and won first place. The French conferred on the company the privilege of calling it Cognac, which was printed on the bottle labels phonetically in the Armenian alphabet. However, whenever they spoke about it in English, they pronounced it “kog-nak”, following English rules of pronunciation. I had to keep reminding them that we adopted the French word, French spelling and French pronunciation. I told them that no one would know what they were talking about; that we say “konyak”, the same as they do.
I explain to my students that since we have adopted so many foreign words, we need the dictionary or a dictionary app to tell us if the word is pronounced according to English rules, French rules, Italian rules, German rules, etc…
