![]() The phrase is also used figuratively, sometimes with the same misspelling: Other, smaller engines may fire on route to refine the craft's trajectory or pull the craft into orbit around a target object. On route in their mobile home, the students watch the news channel relay information to the public about the government's handling of the situation This is widely considered a misspelling, but it does show up in edited text: Which explains why in English we may sometimes see en route written in English as on route. The closest equivalent to this vowel in English would be the one in words such as honk or don. In French, the final N in en is not pronounced but the preceding vowel is pronounced in a nasal manner, similar to the way vowels are pronounced in English before the consonants N and M. The difference, of course, is the French nasalized vowel. But pronouncing en route as \on root\ is pretty much on the mark. Think of the way that maître d' is pronounced, for example: no French person without a knowledge of English would ever understand it. We really do change some sounds when we borrow terms from other languages. Unlike some other French borrowings, en route is pretty easy to say in English without much adjustment of phonotactics, or the conventional set of sounds used by a native speaker of a language. We stopped to eat en route to the museum.Īnd sometimes it can be used adjectivally, as in “ en route delays.” Pronunciation of En Route I finished my homework en route to school. Take en route, meaning “on or along the way.” It’s been in use in English since at least the mid-18th century, and so has had time to settle in and get comfortable. The history of English is full of left turns. Some French phrases, however, are more thoroughly lexicalized into English and are used in everyday speech and writing-so much so that their spelling sometimes betrays the fact that writers have assumed that they are made up of English words rather than French ones. Most of these still retain a foreign color, adding an intentional je ne sais quoi to sentences that otherwise might seem ordinary. ![]() There are far fewer two- or three-word compounds that have become part of English vocabulary, and they typically are both spelled and pronounced in the French manner: En route is a phrase borrowed from French that means “on the way” or “along the way.” Because its pronunciation in English is very similar to “on route,” en route is sometimes misspelled as on route.Įnglish has borrowed countless words from the French language over the centuries, many of them thoroughly anglicized by time and usage (like language and usage), but others, more recent arrivals, keep their French spellings and approximate pronunciations, like cuisine and garage and motif.
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