ZHO. We have some growing in our garden, should you ever find yourself near Davis. (Fruit's ripe late October in these latitudes...)

I read it in English exactly as "фейхоа", because I've never hitherto encountered the word in English, but it's not uncommon in Ukraine as a flavor of carbonated beverage.

I bought some feijoa sparkling wine at a farmer's market it New Zealand, and the makers who sold it (and also grow the fruit for other uses) said "joe". They have all kinds of kooky pronunciations down there, of course.

The j = /y/ reading might be coming from German, although I have no idea why people might think this word came from German.

YouTube is full of New Zealanders pronouncing it.

So it is, and they apparently say FAY-joe-ə, which is plausible.

The j = /y/ reading might be coming from German, although I have no idea why people might think this word came from German.

Exactly. I thought of German j, but why German? It doesn't look even a little German, and the fruit is not from anywhere near Germany.

If it's a genus name it has to be pronounced with 'ho', as a Latin word. Though as you're not a botanist, you don't have to follow botanical traditions.

I use Portuguese "zh," because I learned the Portuguese for a bean feed (uma feijoada) before I saw the name of the fruit, and didn't know the fruit was named for a naturalist called Mr. Bean.

(For years I thought calling beans "flageolets," the name of a kind of wind instrument, was a witty allusion to their being the musical fruit; this fond belief was shattered when I found out it's from "phaseolus," same as "feijoa" and "frijòl.")

"If it's a genus name it has to be pronounced with 'ho', as a Latin word"

But surely, to the extent it exists in Latin, j = y? That'swhere I assumed that pronunciation came from. Why would j be pronounced h in any other European language besides Spanish (and some Basque dialects)?

Heh. Decades ago, some agriculturalist decided they were an ideal fruit for New Zealand, and they now grow in abundance here. Suburban children play games throwing them at each other when they are in season because feijoa trees are so prolific that even one produces vastly more fruit than one family wants to eat.

The Brazilian origins are long-forgotten, and we pronounce it fee-joe-uh, maybe stressing the second syllable a bit more than the first.

The fruits are egg-shaped and pleasantly tart, like a more acidic guava. Usual approach is to cut them in half and scoop out the innards with a spoon - the rind is not very nice.

ATILF claims that the two French 'flageolets' have different origins, one, the instrument, from *flabeolum & the other from phaselus. And that the former influenced the form of the latter.

I think it's safe to say that I didn't notice that when I read The Inner Circle. I vaguely recall there being some snide remark about Moses and why it took him forty years to lead the Hebrews out of the desert, but I couldn't find it again when I wanted it.

Denisovich was my introduction to Solzenitsyn, and I've read Cancer Ward, too (with a break of some 18 months halfway through ...).

Hebrew: fe-JO-ya
(We grow it in our yard. It's yummy.)

JO like the English name Joe?

I'm a Kiwi who loathes feijoas, despite having a very productive tree in my back yard which grows some of the biggest specimens my feijoa-loving famikly and friends have ever seen. I also don't know IPA, so I'm going to have to wing it. The most common pronunciation I hear here in Hawke's Bay, a prime horticultural area on the North Island's East Coast is FEE-joe-a. It is possoble that some Kiwis say FAY-joe-a, but my money is on that being a Zild FEE being heard as FAY to outlanders.

I won't touch them as fruit, but a friend makes a real nice chutney out of them.

A personal experience of mine may shed some light on the whole j=y thing.

My last name is Ahuja (pronounced /ə.hu.dʒa/), but people who encounter my last name for the first time will sometimes pronounce it /ə.hu.ya/. They have the impression that it is a Spanish surname (it's actually Indian) and think that they are producing a so-called "spanish j". In fact what they are doing is producing the phoneme /dʒ/ as if they were a native spanish speaker, as native spanish speakers tend to pronounce /dʒ/ as /y/.

My guess is that the realization of the j as /y/ in feijoa is the result of the misoconceived notion of the "spanish j".

Are these Americans, wallyworld14? I think Americans often know Spanish "j" is approximately /h/, so I'd expect if anything that they'd apply that knowledge to non-Spanish words, as in the "feijoa" pronunciation LH found, or George H.W. Bush's pronunciation of "Sarajevo" as "Sarahevo" (which I vaguely remember but can't find with Google and so might've dreamed).

They are Americans indeed. Remember that languagehat's observation of the j=/y/ thing is coming from an American dictionary.

I'm from Santa Barbara, California, where people generally make an effort to pronounce Spanish words close to how a native speaker would say them. And we have feijoas in the supermarket. But I can't think of anyone ever pronouncing it any other way than fe-JO-a or fe-JO-ya or occasionally fe-JOY-a, though that last one probably results from people not paying attention to how the word is spelled. It really does seem like everyone should say fe-HO-a, given how most people pronounce the Spanish y here, but I've never heard it.

This is yet another example of the difficulty in interpreting orthographic in foreign words - particularly for English speakers, but now it seems for Russians as well.

Not speaking Portuguese the name feijoada rang a bell with me, and of course it's a dish: meaty chunks and manioch sprinkles that is offered everywhere in Brazil, the j pronounced. It's their 'national dish', whatever that means, according to Wiki. (I don't think having a national dish can be a good indicator of good food : what, for instance, are the national dishes of India, France, Italy and China? I don't know, there are none.)

People in the San Francisco Bay Area, going to burrito joints as they do, have a pretty good grasp of Spanish pronunciation, but the local town of Vallejo is still pronounced va-LEI-yo. No phonologist I, but I wonder if both cases might have something to do with the vowel in front of the consonant; seems that e or ei, combined with some general confusion about foreign j's, in American pronunciation might slide more easily into the /y/ sound.

my money is on that being a Zild FEE being heard as FAY to outlanders.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what happened. I don't encounter the Kiwi accent often enough to have a good sense of the phonemes.

... as native spanish speakers tend to pronounce /dʒ/ as /y/.

Except when they pronounce /y/ as /dʒ/! It's veering a little off-topic, but I have to share this.

I used to do research on ethnolinguistic identification of names for a living.. and one of the weirdest things I cam across where all these names that looked like perfectly normal American female J-names, except they all started with Y, as in Yennifer, Yeanette, Yocelyn, etc., and they occurred with Latin American last names..

Turns out that in some dialects of Latin American Spanish, orthographic 'y' has come to be pronounced /dʒ/. It must've been a while back, too, since the woman who bought my old house 2 years ago was named Yennifer.. and I'd say she was 30±5 years old. (You can hear an example of /dʒ/ for 'y' fairly clearly in pop singer Marc Anthony's popular song "Dimelo", which you can find and listen to through Google video. At about a minute in, he says, in the chorus, "por tu amor estoy muriendo yo"—"for your love am dying I", with /dʒo/ for "yo".)

It's the age-old problem of borrowing words.. do you try to preserve the spelling or the pronunciation? You can usually only have one.

Yennifers in Latin America have found an interesting compromise.

So, careening out of control back toward the original topic... feijoa as /fedʒoə/ still makes no sense.. oh well.

There's a lot of regional variation. An Argentinian once corrected my pronunciation of a name, but his correction was only valid for Argentinian Spanish.

Here's a fun google: national dish of.

Vallejo is pronounced as it is because the phoneme h never precedes and unaccented vowel in English. (Everybody pronounces the h in "vehicular," but only police officers pronounce it in "vehicle.") So the y in the Vallejo pronunciation is just a glide.
I always pronounced feijoa (I have a tree in my back yard; handsome plant, takes gracefully to pruning) FEI-zhwa, probably having feijoada in mind. I'm now going to pretend I always pronounced it fei-ZHO-a.

Thanks, Charles - after four years of driving my vehicle through Vallejo I finally have a rationale for the damn place.

There's a lot of regional variation. An Argentinian once corrected my pronunciation of a name, but his correction was only valid for Argentinian Spanish.

What was the name: Emerson?

Crown, it was probably Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. You know those Argentines pronounce "ll" funny.

Trey, [dʒ] (better: [dʲ], but neither Anglophones nor Hispanophones hear the difference) is an allophone of /y/ in most of the Spanish-speaking world. Cf. the Spanish Wikipedia article on Tajikistan and on the Arabic Alphabet, especially the transcription of jiim.

KCinDC, it's жanfairpwжgwyngyжgogerychwyrndrobwжжantysiliogogogoch among the older generation and шanfairpwшgwyngyшgogerychwyrndrobwшшantysiliogogogoch for the whippersnappers, I think.

Anent Wallyworld and Trey's comments above, I knew an Argentinian who wrote about her visit to "Wayington".

I didn't find any national dishes I'm dying to try. Maybe Korea.

@ Trey
"Yennifers in Latin America have found an interesting compromise."

We had a young Chilena "Jennifer" stay with us for nearly 6 months, and she pronounced it with an English "J", as did her family back in Valdivia. She would actually correct people who attempted a "Spanish" pronunciation, whether "h" or "y".

"what, for instance, are the national dishes of India, France, Italy and China?"

Curry
Fries
Spaghetti
Chow mein.

Gosh, don't you know _anything_?

All my friends pronounce it with a J like in John, but that's because they're professional Scrabble players and mispronounce words intentionally to help them remember how they're spelled.

Charles Perry says "the phoneme h never precedes an unaccented vowel in English". Does he ever drink Rioja? How does he pronounce that?

I suspect with a secondary stress on the final syllable (-hah). If there were no stress at all, it would be ree-OH-ə.

What about the J in Majorca? Pronounced like a Y, jou know.

Not really. The traditional spelling, Majorca, is traditionally pronounced as it's spelled, with English j; the Spanish spelling, Mallorca, is pronounced with y. Now, there are doubtless people who are used to the Spanish pronunciation and therefore use it even for the traditional English spelling, but that seems like a borderline case.

"Does he ever drink Rioja? How does he pronounce that?"

Hah ha. Why, RioXXXXa, of course. Just to sound like he's actually been in Spain.

I'm from the Bay Area, and we never called feijoas (on a bush) anything other than guavas. Easier to pronounce, maybe.

Mallorca is pronounced as Y in Spanish but it is not exactly a Spanish toponym, it is a Catalan toponym from the Balear Islands, where it is pronounced as ZH.
As a name with Portuguese origin, and not Spanish, feijoa should be pronounced as ZH.