pronunciation - Why is baba ghanouj pronounced with a final "sh" sound?


Baba ghanouj is a delicious Middle Eastern dip made from roast eggplant and garlic. I've found the name spelled a multitude of different ways on the internet, but there are two peculiar things about its pronunciation:



  1. The name is always spelled with "j" as the final consonant

  2. I've always heard the name pronounced with a final "sh" sound [ʃ]


How did this peculiar situation arise? The word is obviously borrowed, though I don't know the source language, yet it seems like any reasonable transliteration would use a symbol other than "j" for [ʃ].



Answer



The name "baba ghanouj" is Arabic, and is written differently depending on how you convert the Arabic script into English. Sometimes it is written with an "sh" instead of a "j".


The final consonant in "baba ghanouj" is ج ; in Arabic, this is usually pronounced [dʒ] (as in the English "j" sound) or [ʒ] (like "Jacques"). (In Egypt, this even gets a [g] pronunciation.) So, the "j" spelling of "baba ghanouj" reflects a certain standard transliteration of Arabic spelling. For some reason, the [dʒ] or [ʒ] was devoiced (a.k.a. neutralized) into [ʃ]. However, this is not normal in the common Arabic dialects that I am familiar with, so I seriously doubt that Arabic has anything to do with the cause.


In any case, final consonant devoicing occurs in a number of languages as a broad and general process, and occurs in many more languages in one-off instances from time to time. So, either the word originally came into English via another language that neutralized the final consonant, or we neutralized the final consonant ourselves. The most likely candidate to take an Arabic word, neutralize the final consonant and then pass it on to English? Turkish. (This is my educated guess.)


Short version: for some reason, the sound became devoiced, but the spelling with a "j" reflects Arabic spelling.


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