Thoughts about the US pronunciation of "margarine"

[Mark44]

A thought came to me the other night about why "margarine" is pronounced in the US as if it were spelled "marjarine"; that is, with a soft g. The history of this substance goes back to the discovery in 1813 by French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul of what he called margaric acid with a hard 'g' as in "gift." In 1869, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès invented margarine, which he patented as oleomargarine. These gentlemen, being French would have pronounced "margarine" and "oleomargarine" with a hard 'g'.

The reason for my puzzlement is that in English, many words that are derived from French or other Romance languages, the letter 'g' followed by the vowels 'a', 'o', or 'u' has the hard sound. E.g., "garden," "gourmet," and "gusto." Words in which a 'g' is followed by the vowels 'e', 'i', or 'y' have the soft sound. E.g., "gentle," "girasole," and "gyrate." So why do we pronounce "margarine" with soft 'g'?

Per this source, https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/36040/why-is-margarine-pronounced-with-a-soft-g (see the checked answer), we in the US pronounce this word as "marGarine" up until about the 1950s, at which time the pronunciation shifted to "marJarine."

As far as I know, there are no other French- or Latin-derived words in English in which 'g' followed by 'a' has the soft sound. The word "gaol" (pronounced the same as "jail") comes from Medieval Latin "gabiola" but somehow the initial 'g' shifted from a hard 'g' sound to the soft 'g' sound.

 

[Mark44]

Related to the above, and something I've written about before, are the hard vs. soft sounds for both 'g' and 'c' relative to the Romance languages. Generally speaking, whether it's French or Spanish or Italian and likely Portuguese and Romansh (one of the four main languages of Switzerland), 'e' or 'i' after a 'c' or 'g' forces the consonant to have the soft sound. French and Portuguese even go so far as to switch to ç (c with cedilla) in words such as "soupçon" (a little bit) or "curaçao" (heart -- compare to corazon in Spanish).

 

[dextercioby]

Thanks for coming with this interesting this topic. This is an exception to the rule, which only exemplifies the fact that linguistics is a social science in which its professionals simply record the most common pronunciation between educated people a certain moment in time and transcribe it with IPA in a dictionary, cementing for further generations the rule to follow to pronounce a word. Most likely, when this shift of /g/ to /ğ/ (sorry, no IPA symbols available) was perceived, nobody from the linguist community asked questions to the speakers, so that all we have now 100 years later is a small set of plausible suppositions. I am not a professional linguist (phonetician or phonologist), but for the sake of this text I made you read, I can utter my explanation: the occurence of /ğ/ for /g/ was so that <tangerine> and <margarine> would rhyme for a poem or a song.

Remember that asking the "why" in social sciences is different than asking the "why" in natural or exact sciences. Wanna feel frustrated, always ask "why" for exceptions.

ADDED: it appears that the norm for British pronunciation is also with the postalveolar sound /ğ/ instead of the velar /g/; sources: ldoceonline.com and wiktionary.

 

[Bandersnatch]

Here's my tuppence. An informed guess, or a plausibility argument at best. I've had some training back in the day, but not enough to be sure whether any of the following gels together.

The shift would be an example of palatalisation. It occurs when the phonemic neighbourhood is relatively more fronted. I.e. people don't want to move their tongues too much while they speak, so if they can get away with uttering something clustered closer together they will.
We have here a word borrowed from French, where the main difference between the languages in the context of the neighbourhood of 'g' is the pronunciation of 'r'. In French the place of articulation is in the back, while in English it's front of centre.
So we'd have a reason for the g to stay velar in the original, and be palatalised as it was assimilated into English.
Another thing I'd note here is that the word was introduced around the time when the standard British English was becoming non-rhotic, so in some speakers the suggested reason for the change would be disappearing - and British English today retains both pronunciations as correct (after OED).

 

[tech99]

I remember that 75 years ago in the UK, maybe following the frequent use of margarine during WW2 due to shortages of butter, the word was frequently shortened to Marj, and you could not do this with the hard g.

 

[renormalize]

I remember that 75 years ago in the UK, maybe following the frequent use of margarine during WW2 due to shortages of butter, the word was frequently shortened to Marj, and you could not do this with the hard g.

What's wrong with saying "Marg" with a hard "g", like the first syllable of "Margaret"?

 

[PeroK]

However you pronounce it, there ought to be a tariff on it!

 

[jbriggs444]

What's wrong with saying "Marg" with a hard "g", like the first syllable of "Margaret"?

I've normally heard that shortened to Marge.

 

[renormalize]

I've normally heard that shortened to Marge.

True!
But my point is simply that "marg" with a hard "g" is perfectly pronounceable, and indeed it's an informal term for a "margarita" drink: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/marg
So "marg" with a hard "g" could equally well have arisen in the UK as a nickname for "margarine", but according to @tech99 it didn't.

 

[Klystron]

Another likely influence on margarine pronunciation may be the popularity and subsequent proliferation of cooking shows in English speaking countries, first on radio then television. Show sponsors, later ubiquitous TV 'commercials', shared common pronunciations among wide audiences. The pronunciation of 'oleomargarine' could have originated from a regional accent then spread and became standardized via radio and TV.

This thread reminded me of watching early TV cooking shows broadcast in SF Bay Area mid 1950s, years before Julia Childs "French Chef" cooking show began on PBS. While family members referred to 'oleo', televised chefs spoke of 'margarine', often comparing it to butter.