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MMD > Archives > June 1998 > 1998.06.26 > 11Prev  Next


Pronunciation of "Hooghuys"
By Peter Neilson

I'm really going out on a limb here, as I am not even a speaker of
Dutch, let alone the Belgian dialect.

It's actually a compound word:  hoog "high" + huis "house".  Spelling
was different in the past; huis was once spelt huys.  The two parts are
pronounced separately.  Hoog sounds sort of like ho in "Ho, ho, ho" but
it ends with a slight gargling sound that's the voiced version of the
German "ch".

Huis is a little weird, to the English ear, because the "u" is rather
like the German u-umlaut, and although the "i" is a short vowel, it's
more like the vowel sound in "beet" than "bit".  The two vowels are
pronounced as a single diphthong sound that we might write "hue-ees",
just as the English "house" is "ha-oos" (or in Canada, "hae-oos").

Is dat niet zo?

Peter Neilson
Sanford NC



(Message sent Fri, 26 Jun 1998 04:29:51 -0400 , from time zone -0400.)

Key Words in Subject:  Hooghuys, Pronunciation

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