Campaign for real English

springer211

antrobus wrote: »

It's definitely from the Italian seguire, too follow. In fact segue is the 3rd person singular present of seguire. And that 'g' is most certainly hard in Italian because there's only one of them. In Italian it's the 'gg' that's softened as in parmiggiano.

you got the verb seguire right, but the bit about the letter g is totally wrong, whoever told you that was having you on.
The full name of the cheese is parmigiano reggiano, and both g's are soft, because it's not the number of g's that determines the pronunciation, but the letter that follows.
gi is soft, gu is hard.

SomeJoeNamedBob

The problem here is trying to apply English pronunciation "rules" to an Italian word. It is indeed correctly pronounced "segway" as in the daft scooter and deliberate homophone of "segue".

UK dictionaries advise it be pronounced "seg-wei", the Italians favour "seh-gweh" and attempts to Anglicise it as "seg-yoo" or "seeg" are incorrect. It's just a piece of musical notation that advises a smooth transition to the next section, not unlike for example rallentando which advises slowing the tempo.

geerex

OP - were they talking about Segways?

Errata

margaretclare wrote: »

I learned English grammar a little bit more than 50 years ago but I have never heard of this word.

Probably because it has nothing to do with grammar.