Erbal essences

My least favourite word for pronunciation by Americans - "herbal". Why do Americans go all French about this word and say " 'erbal"? It came home to me when watching an advert for the new Herbal Essences variant called - wait for it - "Hello Hydration". All these perky people prancing around saying "HELLLO Hydreeeeetion - new by Errrrbal Essahn-says". Yee haa ... (apparently when Americans hear the rest of the world saying herb with a hard "h" they think it sounds ignorant, so there you go...)

Having said that, Americans are very good about pronouncing foreign words (particularly Spanish ones of course, tortilla, fajita etc), but equally they will pronounce croissants in the French way, and a fillet of beef will be a "fillay". You would not get what you asked for in McDonalds without pronouncing it fillay-of-fish! Most Australians would never do this in case they sounded pretentious. I have not heard an American say the word buffet though. Generally most English people will pronounce it the French boo-fay way, whereas Aussies go for the buff-ay. Not sure about Americans - I will watch out for that one...

However I did a bit of research, which indicates that I may be the odd one out, see http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-her1.htm where it states that the English stole the word herb from the French, and changed the pronounciation. However, this does not explain the American link - I am guessing the Puritans did not bring over "erb" with them, so was it from the French conquerors that the pronounciation stuck? I did also hear an interesting story recently about the derivation of the name of the English horn, which according to the book was due to a mispronounciation of "horn angle" in French (meaning horn with an angle as opposed to English horn). Aah, the English language, what a wonderful thing it is...