Hmm ... there are English pronunciations of foreign words that are considered correct in English, even though they differ from the way the words are pronounced in their original language. In other words, the mispronunciations have become the standard, and the correct pronunciation is considered "wrong" in English. This might have been one of those cases.
If your theory was true, the phonetic pronunciation wouldn't have been there.
I'm intrigued now. :) Was it Turandot?
That's one where the pronunciation is controversial, according to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turandot#Origin_and_pronunciat...
I said I'm a native italian speaker. -_-'
You want to trick me with a french word? As if an italian would be unable to tell a word in italian from one in a different language?
Turandot is an opera by Puccini; the word is of Persian origin, and the Wikipedia article I linked extensively discusses how Puccini intended for the title to be pronounced in Italian.
Cf. https://medicine-opera.com/2008/12/turandot-without-the-t/
But never mind.
I then opened a random page of Britannica, about an opera. And the phonetic pronunciation of the Italian name was incorrect (I'm a native Italian speaker) and it was how a brit might pronounce it.
In Wikipedia I would have fixed it. In Britannica the error is probably still there.
I presume that since I found an error in the first page I looked at, there probably are many other errors.