Thursday, June 25, 2020

How do you say doge?

There's a meme that started many years ago featuring a Shiba Inus dog spelled doge. Now, I had always pronounced that in the way that rhymes with vogue, but recently my grand-daughter Olivia said it was pronounced dohj.

Well, it turns out there is quite the debate over how it should be pronounced. Here's part of an article about it:

"If you ask Google, all you’ll get is the pronunciation of the word that means 'chief magistrate of Venice'. In the case of that historical term, it’s dohj.

Others claim that [it] is pronounced like ‘dodge’, with a soft G but a short O. Others claim that the G is hard, since the word is derived from dog, and so say the word rhymes with vogue. After some research, I found partisans, for example, of doggie, dog-eh, and dough-geh.

Jesse Sheidlower, the president of the American Dialect Society, [said], "I have no idea at all." Adrian Chen, author of Gawker’s article on doge, [said] it like vogue, "mainly because it sounded funniest." He added, "I imagine a dog, if it could speak, would pronounce dog with an overemphasized vowel rather than somehow intuiting the cutesy doggie, or totally mangling it into dohj."

Perhaps it’s best to let the Internet decide. If another pronunciation proves more common in the poll perhaps I could be persuaded.

The results of the poll are as of 6 Dec 2013, at which point it was closed.

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