Niche is pronounced "Neesh" ... Here's why

Exactly my point. Neesh is a long "e" sound, not a long "i" sound.

Not that this is my battle, but listen to the pronunciation here: Niche | Define Niche at Dictionary.com

THIS HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH MAKING MONEY.

Yes it is a rule of English; but don't forget that most of these rules have exceptions. For lord knows what reason English has been so overcomplicated.

Hate to say it but there are exceptions to rules in English.
Neesh is the French pronunciation. Hooked on phonics is not the best and only resource for rules of Engllish - perhaps you should invest in a book on historical linguistics and a general linguistics 101 textbook.

You can pronounce it correctly either as it is pronounced in French or you can translate it to the English pronunciation - which has a hard CH rather than a soft one, which changes the action of the vowel.

HEY, I DO know some french. And the way I pronounce/say things is DIFFERENT in the US, france, Denmark, and Germany. OK, I haven't actually BEEN to france yet, but I HAVE been to germany and Denmark. I did speak a LITTLE with a french kid, in french, in switzerland. He seemed to understand me fine. I ALSO told a frenchman on a flight about a book that I was reading that happened to be french, and he actually complemented me on my french pronunciation. So I guess I do ok. If I were in england, I would speak something closer to a british dialect. I OBVIOUSLY know how some feel about niche, and would pronounce it accordingly. HECK, I might even use the "an otel". Some british people claim it is correct, because they drop the H. Then again, the french don't pronounce the H THERE either! You know, the original sound of a LOT of loan words changes over time.

If you want to be SUCH a purist, then *******YOU ARE PRONOUNCING THE WORD KNIVES WRONG*******"! To start with, it is a LOAN WORD from DANISH! They pronounce the K! The I sounds like EE! And the singular is KNIVE (K-N-EE-V-uh)! The plural is KNIVER (K-N-EE-V-er(soft r)).

I will tell you something though. If you start saying the word "knife" the RIGHT way now, people may misunderstand, believe you to be a foreigner, or just think you are NUTS! The SAME is true of the average american in the US with "niche". You want to change that? GOOD! You can make BILLIONS by doing this! I'll tell you how!

1. Get the 2 or 3 hundred million people that don't know about these words to understand, and change. OH, and there might b a couple hundred more million about as well, convince THEM also!
2. NOW, you have done what no one person in all of history has managed to do, and you could go into advertising or something and make a BUNDLE! I don't even think LATIN happened that fast, or that thoroughly. HECK, Danish may pronounce a d like a th or an l, as well as a kind of d, and they have NEW characters! German has diphthongs and new characters. French can change all over and has new characters. And their vowels are different from english. And english has the th sound, for TH, which the others may imply from the writing, but DON'T have. That is certainly not complete, but shows that one of the biggest changes in history was even incomplete. And don't forget the asians, greeks, etc... that didn't change. Even the calendar, numbers, etc... are not fully and universally changed.

PLEASE come back and tell us how you got your message all over the planet and even convinced the stuck in their ways and forgetful octogenarians!

You better do it QUICKLY though! Until you do it, it is best NOT to use the current pronunciation(It would encourage backsliding! ) BUT, until you do, the french one will have a lower response rate.

HEY, if you can do THAT, I have a few messages I would like to get out that could start world peace one. We KNOW nobody has been successful in doing THAT for AT LEAST a few thousand years.

Did you know that there is ACTUALLY a guy that tried to start a WORLD LANGUAGE!?!?!? He KNEW that some people would just IGNORE him if he used an EXISTING language, so he had to create one essentially from scratch. OH, he has LOTS of success! The name of the language, to a spanish speaking person, might sound kind of like "waiting". They are STILL waiting for it to become a REAL world language. One guy even wrote a translation dictionary to translate a word in ANY language to any OTHER language. The effort to do that increases EXPONENTIALLY UNLESS....UNLESS....UNLESS... You have a canonical conversion. The way that guy did it? He used this new language. So he had a dictionary to go to/from it in german and french and, VIOLA, he AUTOMATICALLY had a german to/from french dictionary. Add an english one, and all 16 combinations are available. Add arabic, and you have 25 combinations, dutch, and you get 36. Well, you get the idea.

115 countries, and as many as maybe 2 million now speak it. Esperanto - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia If each teaches just about 3000 more people, it will have really met its goal. What do you expect? It has only been around for about 124 years!

They COULD have picked French. Personally, I dislike the way things change, and some pronunciation, and the french may dislike the abuse their language will take. Some say the same about english, and the french would like to avoid it. And you KNOW how people would feel about german! The asian and arabic languages are out for several reasons, not the least of which is the alphabet. We can kick greek out for the same reason. HEY, DANISH ALREADY has a lot of the beauty that esperanto was supposed to have, like no declension, and a simple grammar. And just in DENMARK there are over 5 million that understand it. Pull in related members and affiliated countries, that either know the language or could easily learn it in like a day, and there may be ten times as many! Just taking natives I KNOW about, I figure there are about 20 million. That is 10 times as many as might know esparanto NOW.

But NO, everyone will be saying WHY THEM? They won't even listen to things like "Well they only have about 30 characters in their alphabet, and can easily use only 26. Computers can easily handle it, and sort it in widely understood ways" or "Well, their grammar doesn't change based on your sex, and is very easy to learn" or "Well, it isn't as hard to speak as some" or "Well, it doesn't require pitch to be understood" or "Well, it already exists, so we have over 5 million native speakers, and over 20 million that can easily understand it from the get go".

OK, so I ramble. My point is that NONE of these things caught on, and were even met with RESISTANCE!

Steve

Point to me a thread that's actually explained the gramatical semantics of the word "Niche". If one exists here I apologize for double posting.

Nobody has a problem unless one is creating the problem.

You learn something new everyday! I didn't know we said THAT word differently from the British. I STILL remember kids in school wondering why it sounded like gahrahj". I don't think they EVER got an answer but, obviously, it is a loan word from french.

Steve

OH, I might SOUND angry and defensive. The truth is that if I were the only one here, I would say "Thanks, that is old news, I already changed! Do you have any MORE news?". NO anger! NO defense. Just appreciation. But what we have here is one person that figures his way is THE right way trying to tell a group of 15,000(IF you're lucky), to change how THEY say it to an audience of 330 million or so.

The anger is that it has been discussed SO much before, and you don't seem to get it. The defense is that the market may even REBEL!

Will you now call up all the people in india and tell them to speak/write sanscrit? And tell them that hindi is a copout! Will you call up the people in iraq/iran and tell them they should speak PERSIAN? NOT arabic or even farsi, but PERSIAN!? And what should the people in great britain speak? Languages change unfortunately. And most languages have dialects. More and more shows on TV at some point have some character saying "Can you say that in American?". I have actually seen British<->American dictionaries! MOST of the language IS the same! And I think most americans can understand most brits, etc... But there ARE a lot of words that are different. OK, **I** think it is only a few hundred, but some of those dictionaries seem to indicate otherwise. If you ask an American for a lift, they may agree to drive you somewhere. A brit might tell you to go to an elevator.

Steve

That must be why, when we were little kids talking in church, my Mum would always say "shursh!" :rolleyes:


It depends on who you are speaking to...if they are wearing a "Phileep-pateek" watch, say "neesh" - if they have a practical Casio, say "nitch"...

This is all beginning to remind me of The Knights who say "Neesh"!!! - "bring me a shrubbery!!!" (nothing fancy, just a little variegated one...easy to tend to...)

Perhaps it's you who should chill. You're the only one I see getting upset. Perhaps being a wombat doesn't suit you very well.

The Merriam Webster Dictionary says the correct pronunciation is NITCH. Click the link below to listen.

Merriam-Webster Pronunciation

ˈnēsh or ˈnish are acknowledged secondary pronunciations. All three pronunciations are acceptable, but NITCH is preferred.

Up in my neck o' the woods, we pronounce garage with a hard g at the end. We also put the accent on the second syllable.

Ok...you caught me! <- (eekie -face)

btw - what gave me away?
Was it the "winkie-face"?
or the "smiley-face"?

But if it makes anyone feel better, we pronounce quiche correctly! 8-)

Steve

Kurt,

Wow. Talk about timing. We just got a report on a thread in the Mobile Marketing forum.

Some idiot just posted that 10-year old Paypal pyramid spam!

The more things change, the more people stay the same...


Paul

Not exactly...that was Freud's schtick.

More like... the 'pronunciation of niche is dead'...

I don't know if it means the same thing in America but in South Africa, it means something completely different.

Female writers from the 1800's were fond of that name for some of their characters.

John Cleland wrote a book in the 1700's about a young girl who becomes a prostitute. The book was banned, not because of the name but because of the subject.

I have often wondered why the name came to mean what it does nowadays. Perhaps it had something to do with Cleland's book.

And you can google the name of his book. I am still not typing it :p

Di

P.S. Speaking of pronuniciation, I bet only the german speaking folk in here would be able to pronouce my surname correctly

You're all wrong.

Ya gotta say it Southern, like I do.

Nee-yutch.

Two syllables, said in an adorable Southern drawl. :p

Oh...oh my lord. You are about to have a giant can of worms opened. Just search the term. Or, go to memebase.com.

[QUOTE=Paul Myers;5181589]Cache is pronounced 'kash.'/QUOTE]

But most INDIANS pronounce it kashee! It IS funny! I would have suspected that they would pronounce it like the American Cake(because you have a k sound and ache), or shake(same reason, but you know how C can be), etc.... But they say kashee. 8-/

Oh well, I listened to a course once, and the guy came out with an interesting way to write the word fish. I forget EXACTLY how he spelled it, but the first two letters were gh. That sounds just WRONG, WEIRD, and DUMB, until you think of words like tough(tuf).

Steve

ROFL, yea, just had to post my bit, makes sense to me (lol), but I don't consider it a debate so much, just oddities of ...who put it best....how our language evolves (or something like that, I'm no English major). Plus the 'e' on cliche is supposed to have one of those symbols over it, like an apostrophe over the letter (not sure what that's called or how to type it).

To make even more sense (hehe), why isn't it "kay-sh" (I'm sure there are some kind of rules, just adding on). I think I started saying 'cashay' when I was young and just getting into computers, most people I knew didn't have a clue about computers or the word 'cache' (much less other language skills), so I pronounced it as best I knew and it stuck with me until I heard it pronounced differently by several others as I grew up. Finally I made a conscious effort to change how I pronounced it. Unfortunately, some of the people I said the word to now pronounce it incorrectly as I did.

Anyway, just wanted to add my thoughts, newbie trying to get involved in a few threads. Hey maybe I will make a concious effort to pronounce it 'neesh', or maybe take into account who I'm talking with and change my pronunciation based on that, like some others have referred to.