>>3291767Here are the two different ways I've heard it said, and an argument for/against each one.
>BOH-kuhAlthough an exact Japanese pronunciation (boh-keh, with no stress on either syllable) is pronounceable by an English mouth, it's not natural to end a word on the lax "eh" sound, so the schwa "uh" sound is substituted. There aren't as many words that end in this sound in American English as in British English, but there are some, as in the ends of words like orca, tortilla or female names that end in -a, like Laura. Stress is added to the first syllable of bokeh to prevent the second vowel in the word from becoming tense (as below). The result is reasonably natural to the English lexicon, reasonably faithful to the host language of Japanese and reasonably intuitive from the spelling.
>boh-KAYBy process of rhyming analogy with French-sounding words like bouquet, this pronunciation sounds not only like natural English, but like it fits right in with other English words primarily used in the domain of art and art commentary. The result is very natural-sounding to the English lexicon, but not very faithful to the host language and the least intuitive from the spelling, which is the biggest problem. The common spelling of bokeh with an -h at the end of the word implies a lax, not tense, vowel, so adopting boh-KAY as the pronunciation will always result in a divide between people who've only seen the word in writing and people who belong to the clique of elite photographers who use the word in speech enough to have picked up on the high class way to pronounce the word.
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