jackironsides

The problem with having all of this ballet vocab I learnt 1) thirty years ago, and 2) almost exclusively aurally is that I keep going to Duck Duck Go to check spellings whenever I write about it (I would not have spelt développé correctly with two p’s given my druthers, let's just say that). I'm reasonably confident that there's usually an acute accent over the final e in things, but otherwise, are there extra accents? Is it spelt like I'm guessing? fuck if I know.

Anyway, I was looking up sauté to see if it was spelt the same way as the cooking technique, bc the way it's pronounced in a ballet context (SOH-tay) is very different to the way I'd heard people pronounce saute/sauté in English when talking about cooking (SAW-tay).

All of this is introduction to say that I'm gonna fistfight LearntoDance.com, for writing some wild pronunciations for ballet vocab. Some of them I would just argue with the emphasis, bc I've only ever heard fondu as [FON-du], not [fawn-DEW] (dew has a y sound in it in non-American English which is not there in the fondu, so I feel weird using it to describe that sound, and it's not a long vowel sound, so 'doo' doesn't work either), and plié as [PLEE-ay] rather than [plee-AY]. I can almost understand writing sur as 'sewr', bc that's not an easy sound to approximate for English speakers without maybe using actual IPA, but pointes is not 'pwent' are you kidding me. 'pwuhnt' would be better, but that n isn't a consonant like it is in English. (But again, hard to easily explain without breaking out IPA, so we'll let that go.)

But développé is not [dayv-law-PAY], it's [deh-veh-loh-PAY]. FOUR SYLLABLES, NOT THREE.

And pirouette being written as [peer-WET]??? PEER WET??? PEER WET??????? That's supposed to be a three-syllable word, oh my fucking god

Although the fun thing about that 'peer wet' description is that it shows how 'w' is a semi-vowel. They've used the w to represent the unaccented 'ou' sound. I would argue that it's wrong, but i understand where they're getting it from.

peer wet jfc it's a good thing I'm not still 15 and in ballet classes or this would become a meme with me and my friends, istg

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And with the tide of battle turned (pun intended), that’s the end of episode 34.

 

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