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America is at least as guilty of mispronouncing non-english words it's just natural drift.

As to fillet and valet, they joined english before the contemporary french pronunciation, and are much closer to the middle-french.

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I'm always amused by some mispronunciations that stray farther away from the original than necessary.

My favorite is probably crepe, which Americans pronounce like an almost diphthong-y craype (or crape like grape I guess) when crep (like step) would do just fine and be closer to the original.

But as a native French and basically-native American speaker, I also couldn't really care less about it, or about things like Americans pronouncing the t in croissant, or French people being unable to say the.

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The plural is what gets me though crepes (just sounds weird as krehps vs krayps).
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I kinda get it, but you can say step and stehps, not stayps, so why not krehps?

I say it the American way when I speak English anyway because that's just how it is. :)

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I’ve always said that one key difference between British English and American English is that a British speaker will intentionally mispronounce a foreign word, while an American will attempt to pronounce it correctly but get it wrong anyway.
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>America is at least as guilty of mispronouncing non-english words it's just natural drift.

See also: Cairo, IL or Versailles, KY...

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Is the Illinois one the same pronunciation as "KAY-ro", Georgia?
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Notre Dame, IN
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Or Wilkes-Barre, PA
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Or Montpelier, VT!
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Delhi, Ca -> Del-High

Fontainebleau State Park -> Fountain Blue State Park

These were two off the ones that really stood out from my travels.

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Or Pueblo, Salida and Buena Vista CO
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Birmingham, AL
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Calais, ME
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Apparently, workers on the Gemini space program pronounced it "Jeh-mih-nee" back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini#Pronunciation
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Those are the standard British pronunciations, if you meant 'I have heard' as though it might be a niche or occasional occurrence. ('fill-ay' et al. are AmE pronunciations.)

It's not always that way though, consider 'niche': it's AmE that decided it's 'nitch'!

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"Valet" and "cadet" is an interesting pair: they rhyme in French (/va.lɛ/ and /ka.dɛ/), but rhyming them in English would be ... unusual.

If there were just French words pronounced in a French way and English words which came from French and are now pronounced in an English way that would be bad enough but in fact we have a whole spectrum of bastardisation.

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Interestingly in British english valet would rhyme with cadet if you were referring to a servant and not to someone who will park your car.
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Yep. And try "lieutenant" or "herb" on for size. (Edit: I guess "herb" is a bit of a complex one... originally from Latin's "herba" where the H was pronounced, but from UK it came most immediately from French's "herbe" with no H sound. So UK did somehow shortcut back to a more original sound.)
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As a Brit, my understanding of the American pronunciation was from Italian immigrants in the US.
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Oybs
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It's a national past time for us Brits to annoy the French. Kind of how two cousins who don't like each other would behave at a family gathering
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So this isn't the British being deliberate obtuse, foreigners pronounce English words wrong all the time and we don't accuse them of doing it on purpose. They do it because that's how they would pronounce those words in their language.

Fillet/valet are mis-pronounced because of mallet, pallet, etc. Renaissance? Nail, snail, tail, etc.

It really is that simple, we're just pronouncing them as if they were an English word.

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