America is at least as guilty of mispronouncing non-english words it's just natural drift.

As to fillet and valet, they joined english before the contemporary french pronunciation, and are much closer to the middle-french.

I'm always amused by some mispronunciations that stray farther away from the original than necessary.

My favorite is probably crepe, which Americans pronounce like an almost diphthong-y craype (or crape like grape I guess) when crep (like step) would do just fine and be closer to the original.

But as a native French and basically-native American speaker, I also couldn't really care less about it, or about things like Americans pronouncing the t in croissant, or French people being unable to say the.

>America is at least as guilty of mispronouncing non-english words it's just natural drift.

See also: Cairo, IL or Versailles, KY...

I’ve always said that one key difference between British English and American English is that a British speaker will intentionally mispronounce a foreign word, while an American will attempt to pronounce it correctly but get it wrong anyway.

Apparently, workers on the Gemini space program pronounced it "Jeh-mih-nee" back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini#Pronunciation