The Pronunciation of Django

This is a pretty ridiculous claim in my mind.<p>You start with the premise that the "Dj" in Django sounds like the "J" in James or Jason or jangle or nearly every other English word with this pronunciation. Now, based on linguistic history and French pronunciation norms, you claim it is more appropriate to conclude that all of these other words have implied "D's" than to conclude that Django has a silent "D".<p>You might be right that the pronunciation of James with a phonetic /dʒ/ sound is a historical oddity, but it doesn't make your conclusions any more valid. If the J in James and the J in Japan and the J in jerk and the Dj in Django all sound like /dʒ/ the conclusion should be that the D is silent in English, not that the French are more correct than we are.

In English, the grapheme "d" very commonly represents the sound /d/. Likewise, the grapheme "j" in English very commonly represents the sound /dʒ/.<p>Additionally /dʒ/ is a single distinct sound. There is no /d/ sound in /dʒ/. It's an unfortunate issue that IPA notation might make it appear as though /dʒ/ is the concatenation (borrowing a programming term) of /d/ and /ʒ/ when it is most certainly not. The author's assertion might make sense if affricates such as dʒ represented multiple sounds, but I am not aware of any linguists that subscribe to such an idea.<p>So when we say "the D is silent" in the word Django to other English speakers, we are implying that there is no /d/ sound at the start of the word, and that would be correct. The author's argument does not make any sense here.

This article may be of interest to you; "Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage" by David Foster Wallace: <a href="http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html" rel="nofollow">http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html</a>. The relevant argument is that general consensus and what people actually use constitutes how words should be used/pronounced, as opposed to referencing laws.

As a linguistics student, I don't like this argument. Orthographic &#60;j&#62; in English represents the affricate /dʒ/, which is unambiguously a phoneme in English. &#60;J&#62; by itself (generally) represents /dʒ/, so the &#60;d&#62; doesn't contribute any additional phonetic content to the word, so you could, in fact, call it a "silent" &#60;d&#62;. French has a phoneme /ʒ/, written &#60;j&#62;, but, lacking the affricate /dʒ/, has to represent that sound as a sequence of a /d/ and a /ʒ/, hence, &#60;dj&#62;. But when we're talking about an Anglicized name written and pronounced by English-speakers why should what French does be of any relevance?

The letters "j" in English and "dj" in French represent the same sound†, what Wikipedia calls the "voiced palato-velolar affricate" [0]. That's /dʒ/ in IPA.<p>In English orthography, yes, the "D" in "Django"is silent, at least in the sense that if you remove it from the French spelling you'll get the phonetic English spelling.<p>† — as well as "dzh" ["дж"] in Russian, etc.<p>0. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-alveolar_affricate" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-alveolar_affricat...</a>

This is in reference to Tarantino's recently-released movie "Django Unchained": <a href="http://news.moviefone.com/2012/06/06/django-unchained-trailer-quentin-tarantino_n_1575805.html" rel="nofollow">http://news.moviefone.com/2012/06/06/django-unchained-traile...</a><p>Only Django devs are likely to care about this, as air-traffic controllers howling at the inanity of the Top Gun fly-by (or, closer to home, every 3D representation of hacking in movies ever).

Is this a deliberately confusing explanation?<p>"... this falsehood perpetuated on the big screen in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained where the eponymous character spells his name, adding 'the D is silent'."<p>...<p>"The D is not silent, it's very much pronounced."<p>...<p>"... Tarantino's film teaches the correct pronunciation ... it is incorrect to say 'the D is silent'."<p>...<p>"But in French, /dʒ/ can be written 'dj' because the 'j' alone is just /ʒ/."<p>OK, if the "d" is not silent, don't you mean that /dʒ/ <i>must</i> be written "dj"?<p>Why not just say that, in English, "j" as in "James" has the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, so it always sounds a little like a "d", but in French it doesn't?

Now that's a confusing explanation! Most Python programmers I've met have pronounced it "duh-jango", and I thought this article was going to defend that pronunciation. But it actually says that pronunciation is wrong, and the D is, from an English speaker's perspective, silent. But because J is pronounced differently in French, saying that the D is silent is, although it leads English speakers to pronounce the name correctly, technically semantically incorrect.<p>...Did I get that right?

What do you mean "James" doesn't start with "j" sound? James, Justin, Jam, Jerry, Jello, just, joy, jog, jib.... those all sound like the same J to me.

Given all the confusion here, I've added what is hopefully a simpler and more introductory explanation:<p>Django is pronounced with an initial sound that, in English is often written "j". This might lead one to think of the "D" as silent with the "j" being pronounced the way it is in English.<p>However, that doesn't explain why the "D" is there in the first place.<p>A more insightful way to think of it is to remember it's a French spelling. Think of the "j" as being pronounced as in French. Now put a "d" sound in front of it. When the "d" sound and "j" sound merge, you get something called an affricate. This particular affricate is the same sound used in English to pronounce just "j".<p>So a French "dj" is like an English "j". The "d" isn't silent, though, because the French "j" is not the same as the English "j".

OK, but I'm still going to pronounce it duh-jango. Sorry - it's ingrained.

After five paragraphs and still no audio of the correct pronunciation?

So English "j" not French sounding "j".