A Bologna Pony

A couple years ago I saw a post on tumblr that wondered why the words "pony" and "bologna" rhyme.  Specifically, they asked, "why the fuck do bologna and pony rhyme."

Firstly, bologna is an Italian word, coming from the Italian city of Bologna (Source), while pony traveled from Latin pullanus (young of an animal) to Middle French poulenet (little foal) to Scottish powny.  (Source)  They're from different language families, which have different spelling and phonemic systems, so there's no reason for them to rhyme.

Italian is a Romance language, and English is a Germanic language.  Latin and Middle French had huge influences on the development of the English language as it is today, which explains how pony jumped from Middle French in the Gallic Romance family to Scots and English in the West Germanic family.  (Check out this cool Indo-European languages map)

But secondly, and perhaps most importantly, North Americans pronounce bologna wrong, which happens with so many words that we borrow from other languages.

Behold, the Italian pronunciation of bologna:

So you see, rather than being pronounced [bʌloni] which does rhyme with pony [poni], it's actually pronounced [bʌloŋə].

The [ŋ] sound is a nasal palatal/velar sound, meaning your tongue touches the hard part of the roof of your mouth (the palate) and/or the soft part of the roof of your mouth (the velum).  It is hard for Americans to pronounce the sound when it's followed by a vowel.  In American English [ŋ] is typically only found at the end of -ng words, such as rang or singing.

Therefore, the American English pronunciation is really just a bastardization of the Italian pronunciation.  And because of that, there is actually another spelling of bologna: baloney.

Baloney is a spelling that fits more with the American English phonemic system of spelling.  It looks like it rhymes with pony, like how we expect a word that sounds like [bʌloni] to be spelled.  This spelling of bologna emerged around the 1920s and is primarily used to describe something that's ridiculous rather than to describe a kind of meat.  It's not a common spelling, but it is out there.  (Source)

So what do you think?  Is this all a load of baloney?