Is it:
A) Grog-nard
B) Gron-yard (sort of French-ish)  

Or something else.

I've seen the term around the web so often that I'm curious.

D) fat-beerd

EDIT: (But seriously, I assume that the French pronunciation is B, and that most gamers in the so-called OSR would employ A for the sense in which it's meant in the current context.)

ask a silly question,.....

gvaughn1 wrote:Is it:
A) Grog-nard
B) Gron-yard (sort of French-ish)  

Or something else.

I've seen the term around the web so often that I'm curious.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grognard

As for pronunciation, the former if you're English, even though the word is derived from French.  In French you would pronounce as the latter, omitting the final 'd'.

And grognard does not mean "old soldier" as written on wiktionnary
The old guard is not old soldier, but it was the most experimented soldiers who were incorporated in this army section. The name grognard come from the fact that they always grumbled about their condition of life... In french "to grumble (to groan) = grogner" ==> grogner==> grognard (someone who "grogne")

lokiwookie wrote:Grognard is a french word, and not "derived from french"

No it's not the best use of the term "derived," but according to Wikipedia:
"Derivation may occur without any change of form, for example telephone (noun) and to telephone. This is known as conversion or zero derivation. Some linguists consider that when a word's syntactic category is changed without any change of form, a null morpheme is being affixed."

Although I'm not sure if borrowing words between languages counts. Perhaps the English pronunciation "grog-nard" is enough of a change.

p.s. The smiley face is a public domain symbol that was never trademarked by its American inventor. French IP law has it all wrong.

You are thieves!  

I know, I am joking, we have a lot of english word in our "french" language that people considers as french too. To borrow a word from unother language is a very frequent mechanism.

In Russian language there is a lot of words with french origins as well. And I remember few months ago, speaking with russian girls who were totally sure that words like "manège" are totally russian and absolutely not derived from french. But the meaning is now different from french meaning, so Russian language incorporated them as actual Russian words.
Like in France, we use "Bistrot" to designate some kind of pub. Actually, bistro means "quick" in Russian and when Russians occupated Paris after the Napoleonic great retreat, they went in pub and said "bistro, bistro" to get their drinks quickly. The word was then used in Paris, and then in all France. Nowadays, most of us don't know from where this word is derivated.

lokiwookie wrote:You are thieves!  

True enough.  The term "borrowing" is a bit of a misnomer, as we never give the words back...hopefully Greek and Latin will never come to break English's legs.

Isnt French the most static (ie dying) language in the world?

Whereas English is the most active?  

Adapt or die!

Cheers,
Malc