how to pronounce words properly
ok so it turns out i do have a few bugbears and here's one of them: pronunciation.
i'm am whatever the opposite of a prescriptivist is so i'm not particularly interested in laying down a bunch of rules about how to say stuff. but what i will do is note a trending meta i don't like which is this weird insistence on pronouncing words the way they are pronounced in their source languages.
take for instance the anglicized word "pho". to any sane english speaker just following the conventions of the language they speak and this word is written in you would absolutely expect this to be pronounced "fow" rhyming with "low". but there is a certain kind of person who wants to pronounce it like "fuh" rhyming the vowel with "stuff".
this is maybe more close (i'm avoiding saying correct because there is no correct here; there is only convention) to the typical vietnamese pronunciation but did you nail the tone? because vietnamese is a tonal language! it's got six of those little bastards! so did you?
oops.
i realise this is just a sort of fashion that falls in and out of style. but if you tried to pronounce "bruschetta" in an italian accent at your local pizza place or whatever a lot of folks would place this affectation somewhere on a spectrum from eccentric to annoying.
what makes that any different? i dunno.
english speakers have a variety of sounds available in the language. we don't have (and sometimes can't even differentiate) the sounds in other languages. when we adopt words we typically adopt them using our sounds and our script. that's ok because words are meant to be useful. they don't need to have some kind of moral implication thrust upon them. and english for the love of god does not need more unusual pronunciations! We have enough already! tomb and bomb and comb don't rhyme? what the absolute crap? not to mention all this nonsense of adding silent letters into words like "island" because latin!
a lot of these pho restaurants also have pun based names that only make sense when pho rhymes with low (though there's an opportunity for some much more spicy puns with the other; who doesn't love "pho king"?) so maybe we can just give it a break already.
i assure you no vietnamese person cares. just eat your good soup.