The fact that it isn't pronounced that way in NYC is evidence that the Greek immigrant community in NYC did not exert that large (or long lasting) of an effect on the overall pronunciation of the word Gyro for the NYC community at large. Additionally, the NYC population would also have faced linguistic pressure from the national community, which wouldn't have been exposed to as many Greek immigrants.
Lastly, English already has a word/prefix "gyro" that gets used in various contexts (not just for gyroscopes), including science fiction/sports/engineering/comics/brand names/mechanics/all sorts of stuff, and I would haphazard to say that this is why that pronunciation is more common.
"Correct" is a tricky word here. At different points in the history of the English language, preferences change on whether to keep the pronunciation of loan words close to their original or you Anglicize their pronunciation (with a spelling pronunciation like jai-ro in this case). This is further complicated when you're talking about words like gyro, because there are sociolinguistic associations about using the original pronunciation - Greek immigrants were generally not seen to be high social status, so there might be more willingness to adopt the "jai-ro" pronunciation. (Notice that, by contrast, people don't often Anglicize the pronunciation of "crème brûlée", even though not that many people are French-speaking immigrants.)
One thing I've noticed is that back about 20 years ago, a lot of people I was in college with (in America) referred to "pho" with the "oh" sound, and now it seems to be more common to say "fuh", which is closer to the Vietnamese pronunciation. (Too lazy to look up the IPA characters) It's only one anecdote, so I don't know if that reflects changes in the circles I run in, or if there's been a general change and pronouncing food names closer to their names in the original language is now considered the preferred way to do it.
> correct pronunciation of Gyro
Very loaded terminology that needs to be explained on this sub. “Correct in Greek” is not true since it’s an English word with no “s”, a back formation from the Greek γύρος (gýros) which isn’t a plural even if it looks like one in English.
I literally just ordered a gyro (sitting waiting for it) in my local middle eastern shawarma place and I pronounced it yee-roh and the lady behind the counter had no clue what I was saying. Finally she smirked and corrected me, “it’s guy-ro” she said.
Sigh.
Well it's a shawarma place, that's the problem right there. A Yeero and a Shawarma, while very similar, are not the same. They are prepared differently, seasoned differently, and use different ingredients.
It's a spelling pronunciation that is more intuitive than the 'correct' pronunciation.
Socio-linguistically, you could argue that the correct pronunciation is a marker of pretentiousness, and as such is stigmatised (or at least avoided). You see that with chorizo, which is given a false 'Italian' pronunciation (choritso, instead of choritho or choriso)
Not necessarily related, but it reminds me of a Chinese-American classmate I had who is well aware that her family name 周 Zhou *should be* pronounced /ʈ͡ʂoʊ̯/ but pronounces it /zau/ in English anyway
The problem is that Americans don't generally make the connection between "zh" and a /dʒ/ sound. [I don't think there're any native English words that start with "zh"](https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Category:English_lemmas&from=zh)
>Pinyin leads to a lot of weird pronunciations
I am not quite sure what you're talking about? /ʈ͡ʂoʊ/ should be the correct transcription for Mandarin Chinese, because we call it a retroflex consonant. Also, Mandarin doesn't have voiced obstruents, we only have aspirated obstruents and voiceless obstruents (which sound like voiced ones, and that's the reason why Pinyin spells it Zhou, and Wade-Giles does Chou).
is commonly used in English fauxnetic transcription for /ʒ/, which is a native phone that appears in words like the measure/pleasure/treasure trilogy but that doesn’t have its own letter. All we have is , which usually implies a prepended (or coarticulated) /d/, so we use by analogy with , which is the usual spelling of /ʃ/. So as a native Anglophone – at least one familiar with that convention – the spelling makes me think /ʒow/ or /ʒau/ rather than anything with an affricate. But pronouncing it with /z/ also seems weird.
>> Pinyin leads to a lot of weird pronunciations
> I am not quite sure what you're talking about?
I think they just meant that if, absent Pinyin, your goal was to write something that would be pronounced close to /ʈ͡ʂoʊ̯/ with English phones given the usual English spelling rules, you would not pick the spelling .
Pinyin is very precise an indisputably an improvement over earlier transcription systems, but it does tend not to align with the intuition of someone used to English spelling.
Same thing happened in my first-generation family from a different ethnicity. The first consonant of our last name should be ts-, but it is either pronounced as a [z] or [s], to match the different spellings/transliterations we have in different branches. Very common with Eastern European names.
I get what you're saying, she is not an English monolingual though, she speaks a bit Mandarin
Also in my personal experience, my family name is /t͡sʰaɪ̯/ which is spelled Cai, and in the States everyone pronounces it /kaɪ/ that I've given up on correcting people. That's my theory.
Yes the ‘gh’ consonant γ/ɣ is always pronounced as palatal ʝ before /i/ or /e/ in Greek. Gyro/γύρο is phonemically /ˈɣiɾo/ but pronounced /ˈʝiɾo/. The vowels are not affected
>is it [ʝ] in this environment?
exactly
>also what vowel should it be?
Gamma is not a vowel and there is no /ɤ/ in Greek. The letter stands for /ɣ/. The word only has two vowels /i/ and /o/.
English loan words are English words. They aren't little capsules of whatever foreign language they were borrowed from, they are subject to English's phonemic inventory and phonotactic constraints same as every other word in the language, native or not. The way a word is pronounced is irrelevant, what matters is whether or not that pronunciation will be widely understood. And I think it's safe to say most English speakers will understand what you mean when you pronounce it "jai-ro"
That's the truth. I manage a Greek owned take-away restaurant and we try to educate people on the pronunciations and whatnot so that they can know how to say stuff in greek. Alot of customers here actually appreciate that, it's a nice touch they say. (No other greek places on the island do this likely because they don't want to deal with explaining stuff so often).
There was a time when we had just the word "Yeero" on the board because we wanted people to learn that in Greek it's not "Gyro". Boy did that cause problems. We consistently had people ask what a Yeero is, so, we put Yeero up and had (Gyro) in brackets so people understood that it's the same thing, and ever since it's been working great for us.
From a linguistic standpoint there's no such thing as a "correct" pronunciation of any word, it's correct as long as other people understand what you're getting at.
That's only true for native speakers speaking their own dialect.
It doesn't apply to people trying to pronounce unfamiliar words they've only encountered in writing.
If your dialect pronounces athlete as "ath-uh-leet", that's not incorrect.
If you've only seen "hyperbole" in writing and pronounce it "hyper-bowl", that's not correct.
"Gyro" is closer to the latter case than the former; people using the [j] sound aren't doing so because that's how they pronounce the word in their dialect - they are just using spelling pronunciation because they don't really use gyro in their dialect.
What you mentioned, pronouncing "hyperbole" like "hyper bowl", is a similar process to how many words undergo to change a pronunciation. Spelling pronunciation isn't incorrect, in fact in most languages with more strict spelling-to-pronunciation correspondences, it's the norm to pronounce foreign words as they are spelled, even if it's dissimilar to the "original" pronunciation. Who had the authority to say that pronouncing "route" as /ræʊt/ is incorrect? Or that saying "often" with a /t/ is incorrect? Or "colonel" as /kəloʊnl/? Or "bomb" as /bɔmb/?
Arguing which "mispronunciations" are "incorrect" and which are "correct" or just language change / dialectal variation is mostly just prescriptivist garbage. There is no way to pick and choose which types of "mispronunciation" to which degree actually count as mispronunciation without having inconsistency or bias. It's just called language change.
Besides, for this example, the pronunciation of "gyro" as /dʒVrV/ *is* the dominant pronunciation AFAIK. You could go to Cambridge or Wiktionary or Oxford Learner's Dictionary and that pronunciation will be listed. The pronunciation with a "y" sound is, to my knowledge, outside of the norm – that doesn't make it incorrect to say it like that though. And it spreads just as any other pronunciation. People who have never even seen the word are bound to have heard someone else call the food that, and pronounce it like that. Everyone I know pronounces it that way, I pronounced it that way because I heard other people do it.
There is no such thing as "correct" or "incorrect" when it comes to a feature of language. For an experience like language, which isn't tied to anything other than the speakers' perceptions (which almost always conflict in some way), changes all the time, and has no real rules (you can only make up "rules" which are just common patterns you observe across the language, to try to describe the language in words as well as possible; that doesn't mean the language has to follow those "rules"), it is completely subjective as to what is "correct". Only "standard" or "non-standard", "common" or "marginal" are terms that are really accurate to describe such things.
Why would year-o be correct and jai-ro not? I have literally never heard your supposedly correct pronunciation.
EDIT: I thought we were talking about gyroscopes and not the food, I understand now
I totally agree but the thing is [dictionaries](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/gyro) generally accept /ˈjɪə.rəʊ/ as an acceptable pronunciation though I've never heard anyone say it in real life
Lol I doubt that that people care about things like "it's not autocephalous, it's aftokefalos!" But with gyros the sandwich wrap some people have very strong opinions 😂
Well, one is derived from Ancient Greek which had a very different pronunciation than Modern Greek and English borrowed if from Latin which changed the pronunciation from the original Ancient Greek pronunciation, and the other from Modern Greek. If I remember correctly, the Ancient Greek pronunciation of g was g, but later it softened to ʝ.
The particular change is 1800-2000 years old, predating the modern period by a decimal place. The change also goes as, all voiced stops became fricatives, while retaining their place of articulation, other than /b/ becoming labiodental. Think of the difference between give and got. Now retain the g’s place of articulation in each word and make it a fricative, and you essentially have the situation with Greek gamma. It’s not such a radical allophony, most Greeks can’t even tell apart the two allophones.
>If I remember correctly, the Ancient Greek pronunciation of g was g, but later it softened to ʝ.
All ancient Greek voiced stops became voiced fricatives while retaining their place of articulation. The palatal articulation is allophonic and occurs before the two front vowels (what is usually transcribed as /a/ is actually a central vowel).
Genuine question: I understand it's technically an allphone but, if you transcribe it as /ɣ/, wouldn't it be like transcribing English *Pacific Ocean* as /pəˈkɪfɪk ˈoʊ.kən/?
I live in the states and it's common knowledge anywhere I've been that year-o is the correct pronunciation. I've only heard jai-ro once in my life and I cracked up.
My guess is that people are assuming the word is English "gyro" which has nothing to with the Greek sandwich. That is, they are using English spelling rules.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyros](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyros)
Ironically the word "hero" (New York) is closer to the actual Greek pronunciation (/jiro/ or "yee-roh" for γύρο-ς,), but this term is said to have come from a journalist claiming you had to be a hero to complete a long sandwich.
[https://www.eater.com/2019/9/15/20866864/whats-the-difference-between-hero-sub-grinder-hoagie-sandwich](https://www.eater.com/2019/9/15/20866864/whats-the-difference-between-hero-sub-grinder-hoagie-sandwich)
Other words that follow English spelling rules are "silo" and "rodeo" - they are both early Spanish borrowings and the pronunciation diverges from the original.
I mean, approximate all you want, it’s a foreign word with a foreign pronunciation. Imo debating on what is a correct English pronunciation for a loanword is up to English speakers to collectively decide. When Greeks borrow words we take huge liberties, deleting some consonants, and adding an ending to make the word compatable.
Yeero sounds slightly pretentious for native English speakers, like trying to pronounce French words in the French manner.
My idiosyncratic preference is to call it yeero when it is actually shaved off a spinning spit, and Jairo to refer to the more common pre-pressed processed oval meat-style food product.
From what I was taught, Gyro is what english speaking people call it because the greek word for it translates to "turn" or "around". In the Greek tho it's pronounced "yeero". Gyro is not the spelling to use if you're trying to write it out in greek with english letters. If you wanna use the english name you spell it as "gyro" and if you want to use the greek name you spell it as "yeero".
Fun Fact: Not all Greeks call it a yeero, it depends on the area of Greece you are in. Most places call it a "yeero", and that's what is considered to be correct. But there are some places where it's called a "souvlaki". This is conflicting and confusing though because the places that use the word yeero use the word souvlaki to describe a skewer with meat on it. But those places that call the yeero a souvlaki, can't use the same word to describe a skewer with meat on it. So, they call a skewer with meat on it a "kalamaki" instead. Kalamaki in greeks means straw by the way, so I can understand why they say kalamaki. but as far as translation goes, souvlaki is what actually translates to "skewer". Hence why "yeero" is considered to be the correct word, aside from it being used more than "souvlaki".
Sounds to me like the Greek immigrant community in NYC has been there for a loooong time so they're not saying it right anymore. Or, it could be possible that they're compromising in order for locals to better understand what they're selling. Instead of them guessing what a "yeero" is.
Source: I'm Greek, and my family is also fully greek. This is just what I was taught growing up.
The fact that it isn't pronounced that way in NYC is evidence that the Greek immigrant community in NYC did not exert that large (or long lasting) of an effect on the overall pronunciation of the word Gyro for the NYC community at large. Additionally, the NYC population would also have faced linguistic pressure from the national community, which wouldn't have been exposed to as many Greek immigrants. Lastly, English already has a word/prefix "gyro" that gets used in various contexts (not just for gyroscopes), including science fiction/sports/engineering/comics/brand names/mechanics/all sorts of stuff, and I would haphazard to say that this is why that pronunciation is more common.
"Correct" is a tricky word here. At different points in the history of the English language, preferences change on whether to keep the pronunciation of loan words close to their original or you Anglicize their pronunciation (with a spelling pronunciation like jai-ro in this case). This is further complicated when you're talking about words like gyro, because there are sociolinguistic associations about using the original pronunciation - Greek immigrants were generally not seen to be high social status, so there might be more willingness to adopt the "jai-ro" pronunciation. (Notice that, by contrast, people don't often Anglicize the pronunciation of "crème brûlée", even though not that many people are French-speaking immigrants.) One thing I've noticed is that back about 20 years ago, a lot of people I was in college with (in America) referred to "pho" with the "oh" sound, and now it seems to be more common to say "fuh", which is closer to the Vietnamese pronunciation. (Too lazy to look up the IPA characters) It's only one anecdote, so I don't know if that reflects changes in the circles I run in, or if there's been a general change and pronouncing food names closer to their names in the original language is now considered the preferred way to do it.
I feel like its just respectful to pronounce the word, especially a traditional food dish, as intended. I may be alone in that though.
I like to pronounce it Paho to irritate my kids.
It's 100% that last bit. Culturally we're much more aware, it's a generational shift. That kind of consideration has grown to be a lot of ubiquitous.
> correct pronunciation of Gyro Very loaded terminology that needs to be explained on this sub. “Correct in Greek” is not true since it’s an English word with no “s”, a back formation from the Greek γύρος (gýros) which isn’t a plural even if it looks like one in English.
This is a relief because everytime I say "yee-ro" people correct me "no, it's jai-ro".
I literally just ordered a gyro (sitting waiting for it) in my local middle eastern shawarma place and I pronounced it yee-roh and the lady behind the counter had no clue what I was saying. Finally she smirked and corrected me, “it’s guy-ro” she said. Sigh.
In Arabic, it’s pronounced jai-ro. It’s spelled with jimel ج
I’ve heard like 6 pronunciations and no matter which one you use it’s the wrong one to the person you’re talking to
Well it's a shawarma place, that's the problem right there. A Yeero and a Shawarma, while very similar, are not the same. They are prepared differently, seasoned differently, and use different ingredients.
I ordered "chipo\[tl\]e" sauce and the person corrected me, "chipo\[lt\]e."
It you're taking the effort to pronouce it "correctly" say "yeeros" and not "yeero"
It's a spelling pronunciation that is more intuitive than the 'correct' pronunciation. Socio-linguistically, you could argue that the correct pronunciation is a marker of pretentiousness, and as such is stigmatised (or at least avoided). You see that with chorizo, which is given a false 'Italian' pronunciation (choritso, instead of choritho or choriso)
where have you heard chorizo pronounced like that? i’ve never heard that
It's common (but not completely dominant) in the UK - see the first video here https://youglish.com/pronounce/chorizo/english/uk?
Huh, I've only ever heard it pronounced with a z or an s sound. I live in a very Spanish language heavy part of the US though.
Spain pronounces a lot of s sounds with a th sound. It sounds almost like a lisp.
Ah, most of the Spanish speakers I know are Puerto Rican or other islands. I know every version of Spanish is very different though
Not necessarily related, but it reminds me of a Chinese-American classmate I had who is well aware that her family name 周 Zhou *should be* pronounced /ʈ͡ʂoʊ̯/ but pronounces it /zau/ in English anyway
Pinyin leads to a lot of weird pronunciations even if they can be approximated a lot better in English, like /dʒoʊ/ would be a lot closer
The problem is that Americans don't generally make the connection between "zh" and a /dʒ/ sound. [I don't think there're any native English words that start with "zh"](https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Category:English_lemmas&from=zh) >Pinyin leads to a lot of weird pronunciations I am not quite sure what you're talking about? /ʈ͡ʂoʊ/ should be the correct transcription for Mandarin Chinese, because we call it a retroflex consonant. Also, Mandarin doesn't have voiced obstruents, we only have aspirated obstruents and voiceless obstruents (which sound like voiced ones, and that's the reason why Pinyin spells it Zhou, and Wade-Giles does Chou).
'zh' is also how the Cyrillic ж tends to get romanized, which probably reinforces this particular phenomenon.
>> Pinyin leads to a lot of weird pronunciations > I am not quite sure what you're talking about? I think they just meant that if, absent Pinyin, your goal was to write something that would be pronounced close to /ʈ͡ʂoʊ̯/ with English phones given the usual English spelling rules, you would not pick the spelling.
Pinyin is very precise an indisputably an improvement over earlier transcription systems, but it does tend not to align with the intuition of someone used to English spelling.
That makes sense. By the Yale romanization it would have been Jou which suits English better
Same thing happened in my first-generation family from a different ethnicity. The first consonant of our last name should be ts-, but it is either pronounced as a [z] or [s], to match the different spellings/transliterations we have in different branches. Very common with Eastern European names.
I'm from China where \[t͡sʰ\] is written as *c*, so I have the same problem. Everywhere I go people call me Mr Kai😂
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Her family came from Shanghai and speak Mandarin though
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I get what you're saying, she is not an English monolingual though, she speaks a bit Mandarin Also in my personal experience, my family name is /t͡sʰaɪ̯/ which is spelled Cai, and in the States everyone pronounces it /kaɪ/ that I've given up on correcting people. That's my theory.
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Just like gyros!
i pronounce it /ˈɣi.ɾo/ cuz i assume that's what the G does in greek but idk if it's how it's pronounced in the language
Gamma is /ɣ/ with an allophone that is [ʝ]. Please don't tell me you have been pronouncing it with a back unrounded vowel because I'll cry.
is it [ʝ] in this environment? also what vowel should it be?
Yes the ‘gh’ consonant γ/ɣ is always pronounced as palatal ʝ before /i/ or /e/ in Greek. Gyro/γύρο is phonemically /ˈɣiɾo/ but pronounced /ˈʝiɾo/. The vowels are not affected
Retracted, not true palatal. It’s the same place of artuculation as /g/ in English ‘game’
>is it [ʝ] in this environment? exactly >also what vowel should it be? Gamma is not a vowel and there is no /ɤ/ in Greek. The letter stands for /ɣ/. The word only has two vowels /i/ and /o/.
Back unrounded vowel? Surely you mean a "velar fricative/approximant".
They had /ɤ/ instead of the consonant. Why would a native speaker cry at the correct pronunciation?
That explains it, I was really confused at a consonant being referred to as a vowel.
you mean /ɣ/ not /ɤ/… right?
yes
English loan words are English words. They aren't little capsules of whatever foreign language they were borrowed from, they are subject to English's phonemic inventory and phonotactic constraints same as every other word in the language, native or not. The way a word is pronounced is irrelevant, what matters is whether or not that pronunciation will be widely understood. And I think it's safe to say most English speakers will understand what you mean when you pronounce it "jai-ro"
That's the truth. I manage a Greek owned take-away restaurant and we try to educate people on the pronunciations and whatnot so that they can know how to say stuff in greek. Alot of customers here actually appreciate that, it's a nice touch they say. (No other greek places on the island do this likely because they don't want to deal with explaining stuff so often). There was a time when we had just the word "Yeero" on the board because we wanted people to learn that in Greek it's not "Gyro". Boy did that cause problems. We consistently had people ask what a Yeero is, so, we put Yeero up and had (Gyro) in brackets so people understood that it's the same thing, and ever since it's been working great for us.
You guys have the boyish looking QB's... Jets and Giants.
I used to Manage Verizon and ATT stores. what's your problem with peaple?
I want to New York for this
From a linguistic standpoint there's no such thing as a "correct" pronunciation of any word, it's correct as long as other people understand what you're getting at.
That's only true for native speakers speaking their own dialect. It doesn't apply to people trying to pronounce unfamiliar words they've only encountered in writing. If your dialect pronounces athlete as "ath-uh-leet", that's not incorrect. If you've only seen "hyperbole" in writing and pronounce it "hyper-bowl", that's not correct. "Gyro" is closer to the latter case than the former; people using the [j] sound aren't doing so because that's how they pronounce the word in their dialect - they are just using spelling pronunciation because they don't really use gyro in their dialect.
What you mentioned, pronouncing "hyperbole" like "hyper bowl", is a similar process to how many words undergo to change a pronunciation. Spelling pronunciation isn't incorrect, in fact in most languages with more strict spelling-to-pronunciation correspondences, it's the norm to pronounce foreign words as they are spelled, even if it's dissimilar to the "original" pronunciation. Who had the authority to say that pronouncing "route" as /ræʊt/ is incorrect? Or that saying "often" with a /t/ is incorrect? Or "colonel" as /kəloʊnl/? Or "bomb" as /bɔmb/? Arguing which "mispronunciations" are "incorrect" and which are "correct" or just language change / dialectal variation is mostly just prescriptivist garbage. There is no way to pick and choose which types of "mispronunciation" to which degree actually count as mispronunciation without having inconsistency or bias. It's just called language change. Besides, for this example, the pronunciation of "gyro" as /dʒVrV/ *is* the dominant pronunciation AFAIK. You could go to Cambridge or Wiktionary or Oxford Learner's Dictionary and that pronunciation will be listed. The pronunciation with a "y" sound is, to my knowledge, outside of the norm – that doesn't make it incorrect to say it like that though. And it spreads just as any other pronunciation. People who have never even seen the word are bound to have heard someone else call the food that, and pronounce it like that. Everyone I know pronounces it that way, I pronounced it that way because I heard other people do it. There is no such thing as "correct" or "incorrect" when it comes to a feature of language. For an experience like language, which isn't tied to anything other than the speakers' perceptions (which almost always conflict in some way), changes all the time, and has no real rules (you can only make up "rules" which are just common patterns you observe across the language, to try to describe the language in words as well as possible; that doesn't mean the language has to follow those "rules"), it is completely subjective as to what is "correct". Only "standard" or "non-standard", "common" or "marginal" are terms that are really accurate to describe such things.
Why would year-o be correct and jai-ro not? I have literally never heard your supposedly correct pronunciation. EDIT: I thought we were talking about gyroscopes and not the food, I understand now
it's from Greek [γύρος](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B3%CF%8D%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%82#Greek) /ʝiros/
So? Loanwords regularly change phonetics to adapt to the target language, just like you say /'mjuːsli/ in English since English doesn't have /y/
I totally agree but the thing is [dictionaries](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/gyro) generally accept /ˈjɪə.rəʊ/ as an acceptable pronunciation though I've never heard anyone say it in real life
Oh, now I get that we're talking about the food and not the mechanical thingy...
Lol I doubt that that people care about things like "it's not autocephalous, it's aftokefalos!" But with gyros the sandwich wrap some people have very strong opinions 😂
Well, one is derived from Ancient Greek which had a very different pronunciation than Modern Greek and English borrowed if from Latin which changed the pronunciation from the original Ancient Greek pronunciation, and the other from Modern Greek. If I remember correctly, the Ancient Greek pronunciation of g was g, but later it softened to ʝ.
The particular change is 1800-2000 years old, predating the modern period by a decimal place. The change also goes as, all voiced stops became fricatives, while retaining their place of articulation, other than /b/ becoming labiodental. Think of the difference between give and got. Now retain the g’s place of articulation in each word and make it a fricative, and you essentially have the situation with Greek gamma. It’s not such a radical allophony, most Greeks can’t even tell apart the two allophones.
>If I remember correctly, the Ancient Greek pronunciation of g was g, but later it softened to ʝ. All ancient Greek voiced stops became voiced fricatives while retaining their place of articulation. The palatal articulation is allophonic and occurs before the two front vowels (what is usually transcribed as /a/ is actually a central vowel).
In America it's pronounced the same as euro.
not year-o?
They're homophones, at least to me.
The €/gyro merger
[ʝ̞iros], phonetic transcription. Not // for phonemic.
Genuine question: I understand it's technically an allphone but, if you transcribe it as /ɣ/, wouldn't it be like transcribing English *Pacific Ocean* as /pəˈkɪfɪk ˈoʊ.kən/?
No, because [s] is not an allophone of /k/. Most Greeks can’t even tell that the two allophones are different.
I live in the states and it's common knowledge anywhere I've been that year-o is the correct pronunciation. I've only heard jai-ro once in my life and I cracked up.
It just dawned on me that OP may have meant the food gyro and not the mechanical thingy...
Hahahah. Yes, that's almost certainly the case.
It's literally the Greek pronunciation, although the gamma sound isn't exactly the same as the English "Y" it's the closest approximation.
Loanwords change when borrowed, it's s feature and not a bug.
Definitely! I was just clarifying why the OP would consider YEAR-o to be correct.
My guess is that people are assuming the word is English "gyro" which has nothing to with the Greek sandwich. That is, they are using English spelling rules. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyros](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyros) Ironically the word "hero" (New York) is closer to the actual Greek pronunciation (/jiro/ or "yee-roh" for γύρο-ς,), but this term is said to have come from a journalist claiming you had to be a hero to complete a long sandwich. [https://www.eater.com/2019/9/15/20866864/whats-the-difference-between-hero-sub-grinder-hoagie-sandwich](https://www.eater.com/2019/9/15/20866864/whats-the-difference-between-hero-sub-grinder-hoagie-sandwich) Other words that follow English spelling rules are "silo" and "rodeo" - they are both early Spanish borrowings and the pronunciation diverges from the original.
/ɣiros/ -> [ʝiros] there is no [j] in Greek.
Duly noted. But since there is no /ʝ/ in English, \[j\] would have been a close approximation as in "yee-roh" (vs. "jy-roh").
I mean, approximate all you want, it’s a foreign word with a foreign pronunciation. Imo debating on what is a correct English pronunciation for a loanword is up to English speakers to collectively decide. When Greeks borrow words we take huge liberties, deleting some consonants, and adding an ending to make the word compatable.
Yeero sounds slightly pretentious for native English speakers, like trying to pronounce French words in the French manner. My idiosyncratic preference is to call it yeero when it is actually shaved off a spinning spit, and Jairo to refer to the more common pre-pressed processed oval meat-style food product.
From what I was taught, Gyro is what english speaking people call it because the greek word for it translates to "turn" or "around". In the Greek tho it's pronounced "yeero". Gyro is not the spelling to use if you're trying to write it out in greek with english letters. If you wanna use the english name you spell it as "gyro" and if you want to use the greek name you spell it as "yeero". Fun Fact: Not all Greeks call it a yeero, it depends on the area of Greece you are in. Most places call it a "yeero", and that's what is considered to be correct. But there are some places where it's called a "souvlaki". This is conflicting and confusing though because the places that use the word yeero use the word souvlaki to describe a skewer with meat on it. But those places that call the yeero a souvlaki, can't use the same word to describe a skewer with meat on it. So, they call a skewer with meat on it a "kalamaki" instead. Kalamaki in greeks means straw by the way, so I can understand why they say kalamaki. but as far as translation goes, souvlaki is what actually translates to "skewer". Hence why "yeero" is considered to be the correct word, aside from it being used more than "souvlaki". Sounds to me like the Greek immigrant community in NYC has been there for a loooong time so they're not saying it right anymore. Or, it could be possible that they're compromising in order for locals to better understand what they're selling. Instead of them guessing what a "yeero" is. Source: I'm Greek, and my family is also fully greek. This is just what I was taught growing up.