Now that the Oscars are over, there’s one more thing to get out of the way

How to pronounce “Les Misérables.”

Last night John Travolta was made fun of for his pronunciation of Les Misérables, so I thought it was appropriate to get this thing out of the way after seeing many actors pronounce it differently, especially the cast of the newest film adaptation, who keep pronouncing it “Lay Misserab.”

As you can see John Travolta wasn’t that far from pronouncing it properly, at least by non-French speaking standards. I also found this on Yahoo! Answers:

Lay Mee-say-hrabl. The “hrabl” begins with the signature French sound like your about to hock a loogey you know, like you’re spitting. The end of that part is almost just like ending in a b sound but with an L sound after that like you’re going to say “blow” but you get cut off before the -ow. You’ve got to say Miserables much more put together and quicker than the way it looks sounded out, as real French speakers glue their syllables together tightly.

The only people in the world to contest that pronunciation are native French speakers. I’m honestly impressed by the douchiness behind not translating the title from French to English like it’s been done in other languages. This is especially true in America, after all many Americans hate having to pronounce words in another language as they should be, so they pronounce them as they want to, except when it comes to French, where they try to sound like they actually know the language, even though foreigners probably laugh behind their backs.