The pronunciation of loanwords

It. has borrowed a lot of foreign words and the trend is expanding, in particular as regards English. The way in which these words are pronounced by most Italians is largely unpredictable. Here are a few very general notes.

a) Some words were borrowed via written texts and got to be spoken as if they were It. words: for example, "tunnel, watt, corner" and quite a few more.

b) Others were borrowed via French and are pronounced more or less like the French do - for example "bluff" rhyming with French "boeuf". However, as that vowel is hard to pronounce especially for southerners, the pronunciation [bleff] not only exists but has produced the verb "bleffare". "Club" used to be one of these words but now it is part of the next group, (c).

c) This group of borrowings is quite large and expanding. It includes those words that are pronounced using the It. sounds that most resemble the original ones, for example [biutikéiz] for "beauty case", [compiùter] for "computer", or [naitklab] for "night-club".

In process (c), non-existent "pronunciation rules" are sometimes applied. Frequent mistakes are:

- pronouncing "Murphy, burnout" etc. with "u" like in "hurry, curry, but...": "la legge di [marfi]" (Murphy's Law);

- pronouncing "mouse, house"... with final [z] as in "rose" instead of [s];

- using the It. name of letters in words like "pay-TV, X-files", i.e. [peitivù, iksfails]; a curious case is "K-way" (a kind of waterproof jacket) called [kiwei], where [ki] is neither the Eng. nor the It. name of the letter "k".

There are frequent mistakes in placing the stress correctly in saying such loanwords as "control, report, management, Bolivar"...

Besides, all sorts of things have happened and are happening every day. For example, the Spanish word "mural" has been borrowed in its pl. form "murales" that is freqently used as a sng. word: "un murales".