How do you pronounce Arri?

F

firehawk

Veteran
I'll go ahead and look dumb and ask. I hear it said two different ways a lot. Which pronunciation is right?
The board is slow anyway so it'll give us something to chime in and laugh
 
I'm with Liam. It's just a question about how you want to write it:

Ah-Ree or Aa-Ree.

You don't pronounce the 'h', but it should be a kind of long 'a'. The sound you make when the doctor say "say aaah". No Air or Ehh sound.
 
Paul F said:
It's spelled Favre. Brett Favre. I don't get it. How did that end up getting pronounced farv.
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There's a Swiss soccer coach named Lucien Favre. His pronunciation is Fahv-rey. As it should be.
 
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There's a city in Texas pronounced "h-U-stun" while a street in New York City named after the same person is pronounced "HOW-ston".

Throughout the SAmerican Southwest cowboys ride horse and bulls at an event called a "ROW-dee-oh" while a street in Los Angeles with a lot of fancy stores is referred to as "row-DAY-oh" Drive.

Should I stop calling it "PAH-riss" and only refer to it as "pah-REE" since that is how the natives pronounce it in French?

I know a LOT of people who work or have worked for ARRI. They pronounce it both ways. Even the Germans.
 
BTW, I was once shooting a doc at a certain institution of higher learning located in Cambridge, Mass. Our security escort told me to drive my vehicle onto campus and actually station it at the corner of the main quad. I looked at him and said, "Wait a sec., you want me to actually pahk mah cah in Hahvad yahd?"

True story. :-)
 
Paul F said:
It's spelled Favre. Brett Favre. I don't get it. How did that end up getting pronounced farv.
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I was wondering how a thread with such a simple question could have 19 replies, but now I see it has dovetailed into other things.

I took a linguistics class in college and found it fascinating. One of my favorite books is The Language Instinct, a book on linguistics.

Anyway, the thing about language is that throughout history it slowly changes, like a glacier. Letters slip and slide and change places; vowels warp; whole parts of a word are summarily dropped. All in the name of easier pronunciation.

My linguistincs professor explained how the word ain't was perfectly logical. First you start with am not and contract it to amn't, like can't. Well, letters are affected by the letters before and after them. The m and the n are both what linguists call nasal consonants. They're very similar, and after decades or centuries they coalesce. Amn't became An't. Again, letters are affected by letters around them, and vowels tend to lengthen before a nasal consonant. The n pulls on the a. Over time, it becomes ain't.

Originally there was no such thing as the silent e. All letters in English words were pronounced. Wife was pronounced "weefay." But like the French we started to just drop sounds at the ends of our words. Also in the Middle Ages was something in England called The Great Vowel Shift. Where the ee sound that most Europeans use for the letter i became higher up in the mouth: ahee, as in kite. The a, e, and o were once in English said just like they still are now in Spanish, like "la", "Fe", and "bo." But through the Great Vowel Shift they contracted over many years to the sounds in "fat", "set," and "got." It was a process too slow to be much noticeable at the time, just a regional quirk that spread. Steven Pinker relates it to how certain Californians now say "dihuuude."

As for Favre, it again is easier to say the r first, and so over time they just switched places.
 
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