How is ‘jacaranda’ pronounced?<\/p>\n
To answer this question, LAist’s Kevin Tidmarsh put on his linguist hat and traced the word back to its origins in South America.<\/p>\n
Love them or hate them, jacarandas are back in bloom.<\/p>\n
One question that might come to mind as you\u2019re pointing out how pretty they are, or complaining about the flowers falling all over your lawn \u2014 am I even saying that tree\u2019s name right?<\/p>\n
To answer this question, I put on my linguist hat and traced the word back to its origins.<\/p>\n
Keep up with LAist.<\/p>\n
If you’re enjoying this article, you’ll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less. <\/p>\n
The English pronunciation<\/p>\n
You likely already know this one, or can guess it \u2014 \u201cjack-uh-RAN-duh.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is the pronunciation in most English dictionaries, but many Spanish speakers bristle at the hard \u201cj\u201d sound. Overall, it\u2019s not super close to the original pronunciation, but it turns out that people saying the word with a hard \u201cj\u201d sound are onto something. More on that soon.<\/p>\n
The Spanish pronunciations<\/p>\n
Yes, that\u2019s pronunciations in the plural.<\/p>\n
If you grew up seeing Mexico City\u2019s iconic jacarandas<\/a> in bloom, you likely pronounce it \u201chah-cah-RAHN-dah\u201d (that\u2019s written out with English phonetics). That\u2019s how it\u2019s said in Mexico and Central America.<\/p>\n You can hear this pronunciation loud and clear in the song \u201cWhat Else Can I Do\u201d from the movie Encanto.<\/p>\n But the tree is native to South America, specifically Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Brazil. And for those who grew up seeing the equally iconic floral displays<\/a> in Buenos Aires, there\u2019s a subtle but important difference. In South American Spanish, the word is spelled jacarand\u00e1, so it\u2019s pronounced with emphasis on the last syllable: \u201chah-cah-rahn-DAH.\u201d<\/p>\n But where does the word come from?<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the twist: jacaranda might register as a Spanish word to many, but it isn\u2019t \u2014 at least not originally. It comes to English via Portuguese and Old Tupi, a language that used to be a lingua franca for much of colonial Brazil. The word, which refers to a number of different trees<\/a>, is in the historical record as early as 1614<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Tupi word was originally recorded as yacaranda or \u00eeacaranda \u2014 unfortunately, there are no recordings of how this was pronounced back then. Then, it turned into jacarand\u00e1 in Portuguese. In Portuguese, the letter \u201cj\u201d is pronounced like \u201czh,\u201d not like the English letter \u201ch.\u201d<\/p>\n In Brazil, jacaranda is pronounced something like \u201czhah-cah-run-DAH.\u201d You can hear my best attempt at saying it, after a year\u2019s worth of college-level Portuguese classes, in the audio clip above.<\/p>\n However you say jacaranda \u2014 \u201cjack-uh-RAN-duh,\u201d \u201chah-cah-RAHN-dah,\u201d \u201chah-cah-rahn-DAH,\u201d \u201czhah-cah-run-DAH\u201d \u2014 have at it. Just make sure not to park under one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How is ‘jacaranda’ pronounced? To answer this question, LAist’s Kevin Tidmarsh put on his linguist hat and traced…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271941,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[809,117989,48,52,51,47,50,49,117990,6610],"class_list":{"0":"post-271940","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-english","9":"tag-jacaranda","10":"tag-la","11":"tag-la-headlines","12":"tag-la-news","13":"tag-los-angeles","14":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","15":"tag-los-angeles-news","16":"tag-pronunciation","17":"tag-spanish"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271940\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}