I have to agree with Shan on the yay/eh front. Eh is more clipped... I clicked Fwa-yay, because I do pronounce the last syllable like a French 'er' but my first syllable is much more like FO(Y) than FWA. I actually think that the most accurate way to describe how I pronounce it would be FOY-yey. :)
I guess I was not fully successful in conveying the pronunciation I was trying to represent. I strongly suspect that all three of us pronounce it the same way, i.e., roughly to rhyme with 'Oyez, oyez!' I didn't want people to think that somehow there had to be a really audible 'y' consonant at the beginning of the second syllable, I guess. Ah well.
How often do you think people on your friendslist say "Oyez, oyez," anyway? I honestly can't even remember the last time I heard the phrase. Probably in some awful period film.
When I first moved to the U.S. and heard people saying "foy-urr," I thought they were all ignorant philistines who had no idea how to pronounce the word. It took me years to come to terms with the fact that that's a legitimate pronunciation where I lived. Actually, maybe I haven't completely come to terms with it -- it still makes me twitch when I hear it.
Well, not very often. But there isn't another English full rhyme for 'foyer', for the very reason that such terms shift towards the '-urr' form pretty quickly.
I clicked "FOY-er" because that's what I actually say/think when I hear the word. Although, "foy-YAY" is the way that I have been told it should be pronounced, so that's what I think of as the "correct" pronunciation.
FOY-er is a very, very common pronunciation, and is a regular way that one would anglicize the French word. It's only 'wrong' in the sense that it's not how it's pronounced in French.
You know, I'm not 100% convinced that the French do stress the second syllable. My French dictionary is curiously silent on the subject of stress, but I don't recall hearing it pronounced that way.
French stress is a little complicated, because stress can change depending on the context of the word. When a word occurs on its own (or just with a definite or indefinite article), it is stressed on the final syllable.
I don't think I've ever heard it pronounced in isolation; I think I'd also assumed that our teacher was stressing the final syllables in vocab lessons to keep us awake. At least that explains the stress-free renderings of all words in the dictionary, though (and reassures me I haven't just been saying it wrong all these years).
There was a classic Saturday Night Live sketch (back from the early 90s, before it began its inexorable downhill slide) in which a French teacher used grossly exaggerated last-syllable stress in his lessons. It ends with the French teacher on vacation in France, over-correcting the stress of a native Frenchman, who pounds him to a pulp.
I used to pronounce foyer to rhyme with laywer, but have since Canadianized my pronunciation to something closer to your second option ("FOY-eh"), which certainly doesn't rhyme with oyez, which (in courtroom English, which got it from Old French) is homophonous with oh yes.
Not in popular culture or period movies, it isn't. As someone mentioned below, town criers regularly say "OY-eh! OY-eh!". I wasn't even aware that it was commonly used in legal contexts until you mentioned it, although having now checked, of course you are correct.
Hmm, mine definitely rhymes with Oyez as it is pronounced by Town Criers (like we had when I was growing up in Markham) and the court officials in the Ontario SCA groups I've belonged to!!
Yes, there is a difference between the way it is pronounced in some legal settings and the way it is pronounced in popular culture, by town criers, in period movies, etc.
You pronounce 'FWA' the same as you pronounce 'FOY'? For me, the first rhymes with 'qua' and the second with 'toy'. I can see how the two are related to one another phonetically, but they're quite distinct to my ear.
Oh! That makes total sense now. See, when I read "FOY" my brain translated it into French, thus making your post confusing to me. And then I got hung up on the last syllable, and thus reading comprehension was set back a whole decade. ;)
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