alt Hacker News> The idea is I believe from French: maïs, Noël, etc.
Apropos of nothing, except that it will allow me to vent a bit, it also changes the rule for the pronunciation of the last consonant of French words.
Normally the lack of a trailing "e" would mean the last consonant is not-sounded but the diaeresis changes it: maïs/"my-isz", Noël/"noh-ell", etc.
And yes Moët (the champagne) is pronounced "moh-ett" in France and by French speakers.
It's incredibly annoying having someone subtly but in a slightly superior manner "correct" your pronunciation by repeating the mispronunciation right after you've pronounced it correctly - "sure, I'll order some some MOHAY". Outside I'm smiling and nodding pretending not to notice, inside I'm screaming "IT'S MOH-fcking-ETT MTHERF*KER - MOH-ETT."
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> And yes Moët (the champagne) is pronounced "moh-ett" in France and by French speakers.
https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Mo%C3%ABt
> Moët \mɔ.ɛ\
> Nom de famille.
For the champagne, we see this heading the French wikipedia page:
> Moët & Chandon (prononciation /moɛt‿e ʃɑ̃ˈdɔ̃/) est une maison de Champagne fondée en 1743
But that doesn't imply that there is a /t/ pronounced in "Moët" when not followed by a vowel; that's just normal French liaison. The explicit liaison marker in the phonetic spelling strongly implies that there isn't a /t/ in citation pronunciation.
This is all wiki information though - do you have a better source?
> it also changes the rule for the pronunciation of the last consonant of French words.
This was a very well explained distinction, with the exception of you using "Noël" as one of the examples, since "Noel" would still have a sounded "L". It would be weird to a French speaker but would most likely end up being pronounced somewhat like the English "null".
> And yes Moët (the champagne) is pronounced "moh-ett" in France and by French speakers.
My favorite Moët mispronunciation is one that it took me several months to understand: Russians pronounce it as if it was spelled in Cyrillic, so they say "mah- yacht".
There is a famous MORGENSHTERN song which I only understood was about champagne when I saw the music video for the first time.