10mo ago

Can you say shibboleth

307 comments

Got called out once for pronouncing epitome as Epi-tome.
That one stung more than Camus as Cah-mus instead of Cah-moo. At least thats just the French fucking with us.
- It can happen with common words too! Like I didn’t know I was pronouncing Thai food wrong till that John Oliver episode
  
  How were you pronouncing it?
- Uh, thanks for the heads up. I’ve been pronouncing epitome both correctly and incorrectly my entire adult life because for some reason I thought they were two different words.
- If anyone's wondering and since it's not clarified here..
  Epitome is pronounced like this: ||UK|US| |phonetic|/ɪˈpɪt.ə.mi/|/ɪˈpɪt̬.ə.mi/| |non-phonetic|epittomee|epiddomee|
  
  I've been an avid reader since I was 6/7 and I hate reading dictionary listings with phonetic spellings as ironically they only make it harder for me to know how to pronounce a word. I'm also a native speaker.
  
  epiddomee
  I know Americans pronounce Ts as Ds, but reading it explicitly written down is like being poked in the eye
- It took seeing videos of Elden Ring lore before it clicked with me that "cuckoo" is "coo-coo" and not "cuck-oh," like, the chickens in Zelda.
  
  It's more like "cook-ooh", the two syllables aren't the same sound. It's basically just the sound that actual cuckoos make.
- If it's any consolation, I pronounced it the same way for years.
- What the shit is a camus.
  
  It's like a hippopotamoo, but somewhat more existential and obsessed with arcana like boulders and mountains for exercise to discover happiness in life.
- Para-dig-em checking in. The bulb that lit up when I connected the sound with the word was pretty bright, but made me feel awfully dim. It changed my whole paradigm.
- And they're gonna fuck with you even further....
  Albert Camus [alˈbɛːʁ kaˈmy]

Reading a new English word as a foreigner is super frustrating because you never know how to pronounce that.
Yes sure unanimous is not 'un-animous', it's 'you-nanimous'. Makes total sense.
Don't even get me started on the dozen different ways to pronounce 'ough'.
- English is tough, but it can be understood through thorough thought, though.
  I'm learning Swedish slowly, and I was raised in the US south, so I am constantly corrected on pronunciation lol.
  
  Have you learned the Swedish word "gift" yet?
- With words starting with "un" you can figure out pronunciation by removing the "un" and see if the rest of the word is it's own word which means the opposite. "animous" is not a word so you would use the long "u" sound in "unanimous". Same for uniform or university. But not unironic or unintentional.
  
  Through that logic I'd always figured unanimous stems from "without animosity" and the word animous just got lost to time, which would make un-animous the more sensible pronunciation. But it seems that while they do share a common etymology, it's not "un" as in negation, but rather "un" from "unus" meaning one, with both sharing "animus" meaning mind.
  I also found out that animous used to exist as a synonym for animus at one point.
  
  is its* own word
  
  Yes that may be the reason why that difference exists.
  The usefulness of that tip is limited when encountering new words for the first time though.
  If I don't know unanimous, chances are I don't know if animous exists either.
  Edit: Also there is understand, which starts with un- although there is no 'derstand'.
  
  Most radiology teachers want to be unionized.
  Explanation: That’s both union-ized, for part of a union, or un-ionized, for not ionized
  That said, that’s a really good way to describe the difference. If you’re a native speaker, you’ve got really good insight (your native language has a lot of blind spots, where you know what is right, but not why), and if you’re not, then your English is really good!
- At least you can make an educated guess. I'm learning Chinese and if you don't know a word there, you're SOL. You can't know what it means or even guess how to pronounce it.
- Yeah fuck English. Can we all just use Esperanto instead. Like not even kidding, I love the idea of Esperanto since it avoids situations like the one you described.
- Yeah, have you met French?
  
  Mais oui.
  Once you understand the rules, I find French pronunciation generally more reliable than English.
- Like how the hell are you supposed to know how to pronounce "preface". It's obviously pre-face and it's before everything else so the prefix pre makes so much sense. No one ever uses that word in spoken conversation either.
  
  Except book editors I guess
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ69ny57pR0
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOd3lwluQIw

Fucking English, dumb language held together by tape and desperation.
Most languages don't need spelling lessons.
- Some of them need extensive drawing lessons.
  
  +15 social credit and 1 catwife
  
  At least then you know how to draw!
- Nah, more like has stupid rules because of loan words. Just English them or make up your own lmfao. It's almost 7/8 of the reasons for anything that makes you go, why?
  
  Nah, more like has stupid rules because of loan words.
  All languages loan words. Many languages don't have a problem mapping spelling to pronunciation.
- Yeah, well how many of those language took us to the moon comrade?
  
  A lot of them
  
  German?
  
  This must be Poe's Law, right? You can't be serious?
  
  This site is the epi-tome of people thinking they're smarter than everyone else, meaning they miss obvious jokes because they'd rather correct the person making the joke.

I pronounced hyperbole as it is spelled "hyper bowl" for decades and nobody corrected me! It wasn't until I finally saw someone say it in a TV show that I realized the error of my ways. Now I stumble over the word every time I try to say it because I have decades of habit to overcome. Sometimes when I think I might need to say it, I start mouthing it ahead of time so that I get it right on the first try. There are at least a dozen other words like this for me, and I'm sure dozens more that I'm not even aware of.
Edit: for those of you who have never heard it pronounced, hyperbole is pronounced "high-per-buh-lee".
- Same here. Hyper bowl. Until i heard it on TV.
  I just want to suggest that your pronunciation at the end of your message is not quite right still.
  Wouldn't it be closer to say "hi-per-ber-lee"? Or am i still getting it wrong?
  
  Someone else replied and gave a better phonetic spelling of it. I updated mine too. "Hy-per-buh-lee".
  What's funny is the first time I heard it, I knew immediately what it was, but I wasn't sure if that was the correct pronunciation, or if the speaker was being all high-born fancy-pants, so I had to ask my wife. English isn't even her first language and she knows everything about it. She's 10x better at speaking and writing English than I am. I do have other talents though! I think...
- Hy-per-buh-lee
  
  Yours makes more phonetic sense! I will update mine.
- This one is particularly annoying because of Hyperbolic, which is pronounced Hy-per-bol-ic. Which just makes Hy-per-bole seem more valid...
  
  There are a lot of those prefixes that shift stress and/or pronunciation when going from nouns to adjectives or verbs, like supermarket vs superfluous. It's just especially annoying when they use spelling uncommon to other English words, such as Quixote vs quixotic (the x is silent in the first and voiced in the 2nd).
- Generally it kind of retains the features of the pronunciation of the language it was borrowed from. In this case Greek, which generally pronounces every vowel in a word. Similar to Aphrodite (which one would expect to be pronounced Afro-dight).
  I know that doesn't help much unless you have already built a guide in your head about how words of a certain language are pronounced and can guess what language that word originates from. You might need to consult a dictionary to find out what language it was borrowed from, at which point you'll also see the pronunciation.
- wow! I made the same mistake till now! I just started speaking English again after a decade. all of my pronunciations are wacky 😁
- What does not exactly help in some people's case, is that other Euro languages have adjusted Greek etc. words more to their own needs and actually do the "bowl" thing (even omit the e on the end, like in Dutch). I mean, I think that is what keeps me back.
- I'm the same vein, epitome.
  
  I still pronounce that wrong in my head when I read it.
- I thought Harry Potter's friend was pronounced her-mee-ohn for the first three books.
- The Hyperb Owl, the less known relative of the Superb Owl.

I was 17 when my friend pointed out to me that epitome is pronounced epi-tome-ey
Rather than how I was saying it Epi-Tome.
- Congrats, I was first corrected while meeting new people in college 😔
  I even had it in a song I wrote and the whole thing was ruined because it didn't rhyme anymore. Also it was ruined by my songwriting skills.
- Same here, but I knew the correct pronunciation of the word when spoken, I just didn't know they were the same damn word. When it finally clicked in my head, I about slapped myself.
  
  Same here for "pique".
  
  Dude, that's how I was with dachshund. I heard it spoken and assumed it was spelled something like "doxen", and then in my head I pronounced dachshund as "dash-hund"
  
  Gabriel Wyner talks about this phenomenon in the first chapter or two of Fluent Forever. Can't remember what he called it but rest assured that you are not alone in experiencing this :)
- I went to a restaurant called Penelope's... I thought it was pene-lopes. 🤦
  
  Ha, I remember reading Greek mythology when I was young and getting thrown off by Persephone. Seemed like it should rhyme with telephone...
- I'm having an anaphylactic shock, give me the Epi-Tome™! 😄
  Don't mean to make fun of you, just thought of a coincidentally similar sounding word
- Epitome was one of mine too. Also inventory, i thought emphasis was on the vent syllable not the in syllable
  
  I used to do that, too. inVENTory
- This unlocked the epitomous memory of me and my mom in the car and the radio show host trying to bust out his best vocab with epi-TOme. She bust out laughing. I feel like something similar is coming back 'round to me, just found out it's epitomic. Not even sure how to pronounce
- I know that, but I intentionally pronounce it epi-tome because it sounds better emphasized, it really bothers my mom
- That one used to trip me up. It still "feels" wrong to me even today.

I'm almost 50 and recently learned I've been pronouncing two words wrong.
"Template" as 'tem' + 'plate' (like a dish) instead of 'tem' + 'plet' (like 'let')
"Opacity" saying the middle 'a' like 'hay' instead of like 'math'.
That one I was SURE I was right when my wife told me, so I asked my Google home mini: "Hey Google, how do you pronounce the word 'opacity'?" (Pronouncing it my way), and to prove that Google has a mean sense of humor, (and I swear this is true) responded with "Guacamole". My wife has not let me live that down.
- At least for template I think both pronunciations are correct. Or at least I feel like I hear temPLATE as often as I hear tempLET.
- Template is sometimes pronounced template.
- 'Tem' + 'plate' is the British pronunciation.
  
  Today I learned I'm British apparently.
  
  It's listed as the first pronunciation in Merriam Webster, which is an American dictionary
- Holy opacimole!
  
  Siri, set guacamole to 50%. Hmmm, that's better. Now zoom in on that reflection. Enhance. Add some oignons. Theeeere we are. Our murderer, ladies and gentlemen
- I'm not changing how I say either of those words.
- Wait until you find out that primer, as in a small tutorial or short teaching material, is pronounced with a short i sound like is found in "fin," "mix," and "fringe."
  Primmer.
  That one really boiled my noodle recently.
  
  that's an american thing, i don't think it's standard in UK english to pronounce "primer" as in an introductory text differently from "primer" as in a substance used to prime explosives or prime materials for painting
- That's okay. I know how to pronounce famine yet whenever i want to pronounce it it comes out as fa-Mayn. It really adds to my illusion of intelligence 🙄

Shiboleet is a useful word
- It is about 15 years ago now but I had to call my ISP for something. Part of the support guys scrips was to ask me if I had an apple or windows machine. I responded that it was a Linux box. To which he told me he wasn't sure if "their" Internet was compatible with Linux.
  
  I recently moved to a fairly rural area in the midst of them setting up fiber throughout the area. For some reason, the ISP is something like halfway across the country from me. I asked them to setup port forwarding; the first few tech support people I talked to didn't even know what that is. Eventually they relayed the question to an engineer who was familiar with the concept but still had a lot of irrelevant questions, many of which were about the operating system I used. It was ... Frustrating.
  I did finally get port forwarding, but it took literally a month and a half, figuratively a million calls, and ten to twenty of their staff over at least three departments. I'm happy now, though.
  Edit: sorry about the initially irrelevant and probably boring post. I accidentally pressed post prematurely.
  
  As someone who WORKED for a rural dial-up ISP. We ran our whole data center ON Debian... because we were poor 😭
- You my dear sir or madam are a GOD for introducing me to that particular day's panel.

I thought 'segue' was pronounced 'seg' and 'Segway' was 'Segway'. I blame the mall cop transportation.
- I'd blame the guy who thought pronouncing "vague" as /veɪɡ/ (or better who decided to write /veɪɡ/ as vague.).
  
  we didn't have the vegwayest idea how that would work out in the future
  
  Vague is french, segue is italian, hence different pronunciation, the french equivalent would probably be suite.
  
  It's pronounced pretty much the same in French, except with a soft 'a' and French uses a lot of silent letters, so that's probably why.
  
  /veɪɡ/
  As somebody that doesn't speak English natively... WTF?! I would never imagine this pronunciation. If you are going to corrupt the way it's spoken, why not go and change the writing too?
- I am just now learning from this comment that it is not pronounced seg and that what I thought were two different words (segue and segway) actually are not different words.
  I feel lied to.
- For years I thought segue was pronounced "seg-you"
- TIFL

Segue - Seg? Segyoo? No, it's Segway.
- segooey

Unless they have a father with a PhD in English who acts like an English teacher with them their whole childhood.
I loved my dad, but boy did it suck when I showed him some piece of creative writing I wrote and he got out the red pen.
- So did you pass?
  
  He could always find something.
  But also, if I ever pronounced something incorrectly or used improper grammar, I would be swiftly corrected. It's really hard not to do the same with my own kid.

It is even more funny if the reading isn't in your native language. I can write in English at a C1-C2 level but I am at the B level when speaking as I have no clue how to pronounce most of my regular vocabulary that I use when writing.
- They didn't teach pronunciation when you learned to read English? That's one of the very first parts of instruction when teaching it to native speakers. That's also how instruction went when I learned Spanish. Granted, those are both Latin based languages, so I have no idea how it would work for something like Chinese to English.
  
  We learned some general pronunciation rules but that was just for the vocabulary we had to learn for the lessons. The problem is that there are so many exceptions to the rules of pronunciation in English that you have to guess with like every third word if you didn't hear it before somehow. I mean, look at this
  
  Probably depends on how much formal education you had and how much is from reading books and stuff on the Internet. The Problem with English pronunciation is, that it's completely arbitrary, depending from which language the word is originally. I don't know about Spanish but in French you can usually derive a words pronunciation from it's spelling and vice versa.
  
  They do teach pronunciation in ESL courses, but there is so much nuance to any language that I think most people need some degree of exposure to native speakers to be able to pick up on all of the subtlety that they have had the benefit of hearing from birth. I took years of Spanish myself but my verbal skills never developed nearly as far as my ability to read and write because I didn't take the opportunity to put them into practice.
- Same, and I thought I could improve by learning the phonetic association with groups of letters. English has 11000 different such associations...

My pet theory is that spoken English and written English are two different languages that kinda translate between them.
In spoken English, "I read books." doesn't have ambiguous tense.
- You're not exactly wrong. Spoken english was shaped by mostly the use of common people while writing was exclusively the domain of the clergy and nobility for a very long time.
  
  Noah Webster didn't go far enuf

Hyperbole
"Hyper-bole"
So I thought :(
- Some of these words are just setting people up for failure!

i still can't pronounce thesaurus correctly
- I think this is pretty useful in general: https://www.vocabulary.com/resources/ipa-pronunciation/
  For thesaurus specifically https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thesaurus
  But whatever pronounce how you like and just pretend to have an accent lol
- Thu-sore-us is where i go there. The-soar-us also works pretty well.

I somehow didn't realise that "retry" was literally "re-try" and not "ret-ree" until I was in my 20s
- I remember this one from video games as a kid. How are you with reedit? ;)
  A lot of those prefix words used to be hyphenated until people got used to them, even things like to-morrow way back in the day. Some of the stodgier publications (like the New Yorker) still use things like diaeresis (two dots about a letter) to mark words like coördination, whereas it's all but fallen out of use otherwise except possibly occasionally showing up in noël.

I am so with you. I'm not a native speaker. I learned most of my English from reading books - thousands of books, actually. So written English is absolutely no problem.
My pronounciation sucks, and my listening comprehension is horrible, on the other hand.

Is not shibboleth just phonetic?
- Shibboleth is pronounced just like it is spelled, but some languages do not have an "sh" phoneme. In the story, soldiers used the word shibboleth to identify foreigners trying to sneak into their territory. If they pronounced it "sibboleth," then the person was exposed as a foreigner.
  Modern Greek is one such language. I introduced my friend Sharon to some Greek relatives, and they called her "Saron" so we all started calling her "Sauron."
  
  How do they shush in greek?
- I think so, but now I'm worried I might be wrong.
- Depends on where you're from. Judges 12:5-6.
  Basically one group of ancient middle easterners had the sh sound in their dialect, and another group didn't. That first group used the word shibboleth as a way of testing which group someone was from. Nowadays, the word shibboleth just refers to that kind of test in general. Like someone from Massachusetts figuring out whether you're a local based on how you pronounce scallop, or someone from Kansas asking you to pronounce "Arkansas"
  Although I have no idea how local that pronunciation is. It might be Wichita exclusive for all I know
  
  Dayum, what are the options with scallop? Is that the a you can pronounce as in that, hot or must? Which is the right one?

if i see Irish or Welsh i'm basically not even trying, although they both sound great
- Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, Wales.

I still can't get my head around the fact Hegemony isn't pronounced like Ceremony, "Hedge-eh-moany".
I was horrified to find out it's "heg" like "leg" and "emony" like "lemony". Such an uncomfortable word to say, it still trips me up every time I say it.
- Gotta get a petition running to change that, I refuse to believe it isn't 'Hedge' - 'emony'. Honestly that's disgusting.
  
  I think US citizens say 'Hedge-emony' while the british say 'Hegeh-emony'. At least that's what google thinks lol.
- Sir it is "hej" not "heg"
- Wait, what? Thanks, I hate it
- TIL...

One of my best instances of this was when I pronounced “ricochet” as “rich-oh-chett” (rhymes with Boba Fett) as a kid. Never gonna live that one down.
- another french word.... tbh ricoh-tchett sounds cool
- It wasn't until I was about 20 when I realised I was saying militia wrong. I knew the correct pronunciation because it was always on the news. I just thought they were two different words.

I was really embarrassed the first time I watched Harry Potter.
- Why?
  
  Lotta folk though it was Her-me-own

You can tell someone grew up a rube because they say things like "You can tell someone grew up reading"

Shillelagh embodies this for me. None of my guesses were even close.
- Looks like Irish also has varying pronunciations with the same spelling, because the shillelagh -lagh sounds like lee, but in the name Shelagh (or Sheelagh) it's lah.
- Looks Irish or I guess Gaelic is the word in looking for? I'm guessing something weird like ji-gah-lo
  
  It is Irish yeah, it's shill-LAY-lee

I always enjoyed reading about Yosemight National Park
- Is it naaaht?!
- I won't, but José might

You can tell someone grew up reading amongst troglodytes this way.
No one only family read, I was forty years of age having a very Oscar from The Office discussion about ISIS and mispronounced “apostasy”. I still lie awake cringing over that sometimes.
- Mispronouncing a word is not a bad thing. It means you read it somewhere before
- Mispronouncing words isn’t really a big deal, just blame it on English being a tricky language (it is). Tbh no one would even remember such a thing, so I don’t recommend being sleepless about it :)
  
  You’re very kind.
  My colleague actually corrected me to the person I was speaking to: “He means “apostacy””. I died.
  
  Where I live something like 1 in 3 people can't pronounce ř, including the most most famous president
- I grew up reading and mispronouncing a lot of words. But my family is pretty smart. Both parents are CPAs, one brother is a lawyer, another works in benefits, two sisters are teachers, and I'm a Financial Analyst.

Mine was facade. I read it as fuh-cade and thought phissod was people putting up a false front.
- The confusion probably arose because the authors spelled it as «facade» rather than «façade» as if the cedilha were just decoration in the french word.
- Why did you have to do "phissod" dirty like that 💀 At least write something like "fuhsod"
  
  That's what that sound was in my head. Ph specifically.

Idempotent
It still never sounds right to me.

I feel personally attacked.

I think this is more attributed to how the people around you spoke rather than strictly reading.
My college roommate and I both grew up reading. My family also read books and one parent was college educated. Her family only read the local paper (6th grade reading level). She was the only reader in her family.
So we both grew up reading, but I could pronounce words she couldn't simply because the people around me also knew and used them.
- The point you made is literally the point in the joke.
  You just proved it more right with another example. I'm not entirely sure what you are going for here 🤔
- You're saying the meme's joke is that reading causes people to say things wrong?

It genuinely is hard to master more obscure English pronunciation because so much of it is made up of loan words from very different languages, but this will help as a general principle to follow.

Arm-MEG-addon
- Makes it sound like a dinosaur, I like it.

Names from other languages I think are especially obvious for the self taught or avid reader. Euler, Goethe, Camus, etc
- Leibniz

One of my buddies is in his fifties. He's been an avid reader his entire life. He pronounces "chasm" with the ch of "chicken" no matter how much we correct him. I've known him long enough for that word to actually have shown up in conversation a not-insignificant number of times.

People care way too much about correcting people on how to pronounce certain words.
- Well, if we don’t know what someone means then what’s the point of language? You’d just be talking past one another…tho yeah, some “mistakes” are easy enough to reconcile in your head and you get what the other person is trying to convey
  
  There is no better way to come off as a pretentious asshat in my mind than to stubbornly stomp a foot and declare "my way of pronouncing this word is correct and everyone else is wrong."
  Language evolves, and some folk can't handle it.

Annihilator - i used to say annie he lator - the spelling on this word. Seriously.
Hyperbole - like 2 years ago i found out its not hyper bowl. Really?
Onyx - Onks. On icks? Only 40 years saying that word wrong.....
- Ok, you have to admit Onks was just a bad guess.
- How is annihilator supposed to be pronounced?
  
  Аннигилятор I guess. Just kidding.
  
  Relative to how OP wrote it out I would say it is usually pronounced an-EYE-ill-ate-or.
  
  uh nai ui laytor With a heavy accent on N. Say it as if you're just about to sacrifice a cat
- Wait, is Onyx not pronounced like the Pokémon?
- It is on icks though isn't it?? Please don't tell me that's another one I've been pronouncing wrong this whole time

Had to hear Triumvirate before I said it out lound...but honestly it has never come up in casual conversation, so go figure.

Reading comments here: TIL

Thanks to Hugo's House of Horrors, a childhood of peh-nuh-lope for Penelope
- I student read that book but the word epitome got me the same way. "Ep-i-tome", right?
  
  Eh-Pit-To-Mi
  I always have to force stop myself from saying, epic-tome.
  
  I was definitely guilty of that as well. Had a friends mom correct me back in middle school and I remember it more than 20 years later.
  
  DOS game.. probably abandonware if you're interested

chaos, debris, plumber. I hate the english language.
- Chaos was mine, I still grit my teeth when I remember first saying to others how I thought it was pronounced and that was almost 3 and a half decades ago...
  
  My classmates thought I was saying 'cheers' in singaporean. Bless them.
- It's not the language it's the transliteration, Noah Webster tried to fix it though

I call it being bookish, pronounced "bawkish"

Instance of this I remember, was genre. I had seen the word, knew what it meant, 0 clue how to say it. At work one day in my teen days and someone asks "What kind of genres do you like" (in context, we were talking about video games). I clearly had a confused look on my face and the guy that asked me that switched to insulting me for not knowing a word. It took me maybe 30 seconds to figure out the word he said and the word I knew were the same thing, but apparently that was "too long".

Now pronounce “Nukular.”

How else would you pronounce shibboleth??
- si-bo-let
  The story is people from one area pronounced it one way, and it was used to identify them, or something. As in, the word shibboleth, Hebrew for... I've literally no idea, but that's the reason this word means something like "tacitly recognised in-group identifier" nowadays.
  I want to embellish the story with murder and stuff but I'd be winging it, I can't remember the details properly.
  Edit: it means grain, apparently, or more specifically the "ear" of the plant in the context of grains. But that's not important now.
  
  Oh... Then the pronunciation guide from my search engine is saying it the wrong way. I guess so many people have pronounced it incorrectly that now it's kinda acceptable. It's "foyer" all over again. Say it the right way and people just think you're pretentious.
- I guess long i vs short i? Not a big deal. Bad example imo. A better metric would be something like boatswain or colonel.
  
  Wait how do you pronounce boatswain!?

I said Hermione "hermy-own" in my head until I watched the movies.

Hey. That is not a nice thing to say.

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