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You Say Fun-jee, I Say Fun-guy
So the mushroom show (Spore to Spoon - don't you love that?) isn't until Wednesday and already I've messed up the pronunciation of fungi. Tossed both "fun-gee" and "fun-guy" out at the end of today's program. By 10:01 I was googling. Apparently, it's a hot topic in the fungi world.
No definitive answer but a lot of fun on this thread. A sample:
I prefer fun-guy. And when we're eating mushrooms for dinner, "There's a fungus amoung us"
Some latent pronunciation hostility here. Check out the responses to this:
Whats so bad about pronouncing things the way you want? If people still know what your talking about there shouldn't be a problem. In fact I mispronounce things on purpose just to anger people.
Hmm. Pure politeness, but an apparent international disagreement here. It could just be a U.S./U.K. thing. Another pronunciation site comes up with FUN-jai.
WikiAnswers tries to make it simple:
Q: How do you pronounce fungi?
A: It's actually pretty close to "fun guy."
Finally I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary (which I accessed online via the Multnomah County Library database site). However, even that "definitive record of the English language" doesn't entirely clear things up. I haven't figured out how to reproduce the diacritical marks on this blog, but the OED first lists the plural of fungus as fungi, pronounced close to "fun-guy." But it's not the only option! From the OED:
Pl. fungi, funguses.
Ack.
