How do you pronounce or spell fossa? A weasel like animal of Madagascar. Wow I voted for the wrong thing again!! I meant foosa.
It the Fooooosah it's the Foooosah - I use the 'Madagascar' phrasing as it's obviously gramatically correct :O)
It maybe to you lot up in Geordie land... (NE England to those non UK readers). To a more refined Lancastrian accent (NW England) - such as mine for example then it is of course a Fo-sa. Or at a push trying to sound a bit posh you could pronounce it Fah-sa. And if you don't like any of them just call it a 'very big mongoose'.
If we go according to the pronunciation rules of Malagasy, then we drop the final vowel and all S's become sh. This leaves us with two possibilities for a correct pronunciation either fush (or foosh) or fo(h)sh. The latter pronunciation is one I however have never heard. That said, all of the pronunciations (except the last) are widely used and well known.
I might have confused people with this one. I wasn't asking how to spell it because I didn't know, I was wondering how people spelled it or pronounced it themselves.
I used to say foo-sah, but after I started the "Troubling Pronunciation" thread in the Zoo Cafe, jbnsbn99 told me of the Malagasy ways of pronunciation. Now I know it is either called fush or foosh, which, although it's completely different from what I know, I will eventually have to get used to if I want to call it the "proper" name. But, as of now, I still use foo-sah... Now a puzzling question has come up: If we Americanize (or Englishize for those non-Americans ) a word from another language, is this our proper way of saying it? So foosh is most likely the way Malagasy people say it, so is that what we English-speakers should use as well?
Think we need to go with the English names since this is an English speaking thread. You wouldn't argue that we should pronounce tiger as tigre because that is how the French say it. Different countries have different pronunciations for different animals. To me, as long as everyone knows what you are talking about does it really matter (I'm sure the fossa won't go and hide in it's exhbit because you made an error in pronouncing it's name).
Problem is, as pointed out in the pronunciation thread, UK English is pronounced very different the US English or Australian or South African or Canadian or... You are also making a false dichotomy with your tiger/tigre analogy. The tiger is a universally known animal with words for it in most of the well known languages. Something like Fossa is a word that only exists in 1 language and all other languages have had to borrow that word.
No but some snotty zoochatter will be recounting the incident on the "Things that annoy me in zoos" thread.
We may have borrowed it but the word tiger was obviously borrowed from somewhere and changed as it was borrowed, becoming tigre. As I mentioned earlier, does it really matter how it is pronounced, as long as everyone knows what is being talked about?
