You’d think that if someone were going to make a whole movie about piranhas, they’d at least bother to find out how to pronounce the name of the damn fish.
"Austro" as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, "Athenian" as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
I watched the video and thought his pronunciation was correct. I was surprised to hear an audio sample that has it as “pi-rahn-yah”. Perhaps the trailer’s version is the more common and hence correct?
Well, seeing as how the characters in the movie all seem to be American rather than Portuguese, I think that, regardless of what is “correct,” the pronunciation given is more accurate.
Well, I’m American, and I grew up always hearing “pi-rahn-ya.” The first time I ever heard “pi-rahn-a” was in the Monty Python sketch about the Piranha Brothers, so I assumed it was a British thing. Then in recent years I suddenly started hearing “pi-rahn-a” everywhere. Some kind of collective amnesia?
(Maybe it’s the same virus that earlier on made Americans unaccountably shift from pronouncing “falcon” the traditional way (“al” as in “Wal-Mart” — the universal pronunciation in 1940s media) to the new way (“al” as in “alcove” — the universal pronunciation since the 1980s).
There is no exclusive way of pronouncing it. But to me, the ‘y’ noise would have to come from somewhere, and a silent ‘h’ does not produce a ‘y’ noise. This site has audio of it both ways.
In Portuguese, ‘nh’ represents the French/Italian ‘gn’ sound and Spanish ñ sound, which English approximates with ‘ny.’
I’ve actually only ever heard just ‘n,’ FWIW.
Nha nha. (Sorry.)
Besides the mispronunciation of Piranha, what surprises me is that they still make these bad remakes of old horror movies (well, bad horror movies in general, not just bad remakes). I guess they make enough revenue to justify filming them (it seems that these types of movies make on average around $30 million over their budgets).
The remake-of-bad-horror-movie phenomenon seems to have accelerated the last few years.
The remaking of old movies and an absence of creative ideas both seem more prominent as well.