Why is it Don Quixote (key-HO-te) but ‘quixotic’ isn’t pronounced key-HO-tic???
This has bugged me for ages, I don’t get why words developed from names or places or events are pronounced differently than the original thing that came first.
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Don Quixote was a Spanish novel. “Key-HO-te” is the Spanish pronunciation. Quixotic is an English word that references the novel but uses an anglicized pronunciation. Lots of languages do this with borrowed foreign words. Much of English is just French with an Anglo-Saxon pronunciation: e.g. “boeuf” -> “beef”.
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