Nom de Plume Is Fake French. Here's Why That's Fascinating.
Here's something that will haunt you mid-Scrabble: ask yourself how you pronounce "bruschetta." Then ask your opponent. Then watch the relationship change. Taylor 'Language' Jones made a video called Dear Hank Green, here's the science of Bruschetta that's under fifteen minutes and covers exactly the thing word nerds argue about without knowing the technical term for it: how speakers decide which version of a borrowed word to actually say out loud.
The Choice Nobody Admits They're Making
Every borrowed word puts you in a small social negotiation. Go full native pronunciation and someone rolls their eyes. Go full English and someone who spent a semester abroad will correct you publicly. Jones covers how this choice works, and the short version is: it's not random. Speakers are actively signaling something with every borrowed word they say.
The science tracks what sounds get kept, what gets swapped out, and whose pronunciation wins. Understanding this makes you better at word games because it explains why certain letter combinations exist at all.
Nom de Plume: The Fake French Test Case
Here's a gift. "Nom de plume" sounds French. Feels French. Gets used in very French-feeling contexts. It is, per Jones, a fake-French phrase. It was constructed for English, not borrowed from actual French usage.
This is the kind of thing that changes how you look at borrowing entirely. Not all foreign-looking words come from where they look like they come from. Some words are constructed to sound foreign, because the foreignness does a job that plain English can't do as well. "Pen name" and "nom de plume" mean the same thing. They don't feel the same. That gap is doing work.
Beijing: You Were Already Right
/beɪˈʒɪŋ/. "Beizhing." That's the standard English pronunciation of Beijing. Not "Bay-JING." The "zh" sound in the middle came from French, borrowed because English didn't have its own symbol for that sound and French did. Someone made that call, it stuck, and now that's what English does with Beijing.
Wong Kar-wai, for reference, is "Wong GAH-wei" to Cantonese speakers. You're welcome.
The Wolof Rabbit Hole
This is the part that will stay with you. The luxury clothing line Xuly Bët (also styled as XULY.Bët Funkin' Fashion Factory) has a name from Wolof, a language spoken in Senegal. In Arame Fal's Dictionnaire wolof-français, "xulli" is defined as "écarquiller les yeux, faire les gros yeux" and "bët" is defined as "oeil." Eye. The name means "to open your eyes wide." The correct Wolof pronunciation is /ˈxulli bət/, where that opening "x" is a sound English doesn't have a clean letter for.
What happens to that pronunciation in English? The "x" gets negotiated away. The word travels, picks up an accent, becomes something that can fit in an English speaker's mouth. Jones also mentions "bgadim" as an actual Hebrew word in this context: languages have sounds, combinations, structures that don't map cleanly onto each other. Every borrowed word is a small negotiation between two different systems.
Why Word Game Players Should Care
Pronunciation sounds like it has nothing to do with Scrabble or Wordle. It has everything to do with them. When a word arrives from another language, the spelling often reflects the source language's sound system, not English's. That's why "zh" appears in transliterations. That's why borrowed words can have letter combinations that look illegal but are perfectly valid. That's why knowing a word's origin gives you an edge: it tells you what the letters are actually doing.
Words are travelers. They pick up accents along the way. The ones that look strangest often have the most interesting stories. And now you have one ready for your next argument about bruschetta.
Source: Languagehat