Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
All wrong, it's a Spanish word and Seamus is closest or nails it, depending on how you pronounce the phonetic writing.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/tr...rrilla-warfare

Listen to the two examples here, I prefer the Latin American one.
Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
I'm not one to ask about phonetic writing/spelling, for Germans it would be "Gerrija" or "Gerriya", but then again when I actually speak, I always struggle with the very pronounced "r" in Spanish myself because where I come from, we hardly pronounce any r...
The guy in my link pronounces it very well though, it's just whatever you write, different people will say it in a different way depending on their native language and accent I guess. I found a German youtuber who just said "gorilla" (same in German and English) and sold that as the correct pronunciation, but that's just wrong.
The double "L" in Spanish is always pronounced like a "y" or "j" in English and German. So Mallorca is pronounced "Mayorca" and guerrilla is like "geriya" (the "u" after the g is silent and only serves to make the g a hard sound instead of a soft one) and so on.
As soon as a word is borrowed from one language to another it starts to assimilate in spelling, morphology, pronunciation and meaning. It may go all the way in all aspects or only in one of them. Since the word in question is an English word, it is useless to refer to Spanish any more. So IN ENGLISH guerilla and gorilla are homophones thus pronounced identically.