And people who don't read make fun of you for it.
And people who don't read make fun of you for it.
And people who don't read make fun of you for it.
This is 100% my girlfriend, and I take great pleasure in never correcting her, I find it charming.
Mine is full of 'oreos' (Oreoles), 'emeralds' (Admirals), 'see-ment' (cement), and very cute regionalisms like 'roundy-rounds' (roundabouts). I love it
That's a slightly different phenomenon called a mondegreen (Hendrix singing 'scuse me while I kiss this guy' etc)
Better than my one friend. He seems to only correct pronunciations. It's gotten to the point that he denies idioms if he hasn't heard of them before. I don't actively seek him out anymore.
Thing is, I know she knows exactly what she is saying. The context is correct, she knows what the words mean, she just didn't grow up around people who spoke that wide a vocabulary, and while working in blue collar trades, she was looked down on for all them fancy college words.
She can swear with the best pipe fitters, well, because she was a union pipe fitter.
Language is so fluid, people who get too hung up on syntax and not the substance really annoy me.
When I was in the military, one of the smartest people I knew was from the bayou of Louisiana. To me, a yank, he sounded like a complete idiot, and in fact I often couldn't understand him when we first met. Once I was able to look past his mode of speech, and actually listen to him, I realised what an ignorant fuck I was being.
As someone who has learned the English language primarily by reading thousands of books, I wholeheartedly agree. On the other hand, English pronounciation sucks big time.
When the English tongue we speak.
Why is break not rhymed with freak?
Will you tell me why it's true
We say sew but likewise few?
And the maker of the verse,
Cannot rhyme his horse with worse?
Beard is not the same as heard
Cord is different from word.
Cow is cow but low is low
Shoe is never rhymed with foe.
Think of hose, dose,and lose
And think of goose and yet with choose
Think of comb, tomb and bomb,
Doll and roll or home and some.
Since pay is rhymed with say
Why not paid with said I pray?
Think of blood, food and good.
Mould is not pronounced like could.
Wherefore done, but gone and lone -
Is there any reason known?
To sum up all, it seems to me
Sound and letters don't agree.
This makes my head hurt and I love it.
Worst lingua franca evurr
Along the same vein as "the chaos"
Uhh! A new variant of "The Chaos".
I'll take the English reformation any time now.
Blame the french and people using endonym loan words.
*pronunciation. So, spelling too ;)
You got me there. Im a very systemic person, and pronunciation is higly asystemic, even in the English language.
Like, how THE FSCK would I know that a geoduck is pronounced gooey-duck? Also geo-duck sounds like a Pokémon, so that’s gotta be right.
geoduck
Hey, at least it is a nice, short word. In German, it is an "Elephantenrüsselmuschel" (elephant trunk clam). At least there is absolutely no question how it is pronounced, so that's that.
The one that I mispronounced for awhile was hyperbole. I thought it was pronounced like "hyper bowl."
But "hyperbolic" is exactly like you expect.
Segue for me. I pronounced it seg-goo and my mom busted out laughing.
Huh… don’t think I’ve ever seen segue written down. I’d be writing Segway if I had to.
I was at the store with my partner and I was like
“What’s… kwee-know-ah?”
I've heard segue being spoken in so many different ways that I have no fucking clue which is the correct. Se-geh, segway, se-goo-ee
That word's spelling is a practical joke and you can't convince me otherwise.
I tend to read it as Sergey without the "r".
Mine was "banal".
Sounds like "canal".
Were you pronouncing it b-anal?
Epitome and Penchant for me. Mocked mercilessly for those two.
Oh yeah, epitome for me too. It was the epi-tome.
So apparently for the latter you can just claim to be using the american pronunciation https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/penchant
Wait... it's not??
I gotta check now: Oh god dammit. I never made the connection.
Facade. Got laughed for saying fac-aid. How am I supposed to know a c make an s sound.
That's because it's not the correct spelling. It should be "façade" but English keyboards lack the correct glyph. This doesn't tell you how to pronounce it but it at least gives you a hint that you can't use English rules and that you should investigate it further
What? Shit
Hi per Bol e (e as in how it sounds in see)
Sound it out they said
I did that one
The other one I was embarrassingly called out on when I was a teen was pronouncing inevitable in eh VITE able.
Sounds like you never played Space Quest IV.
It's like the Super Bowl, only better.
laughs in a language that makes sense phonetically
Laffs.
Langwij.
Maeks
Senz.
Fonetikly.
Ai jenyuinely wish inglish woz laik thiz
Laughing phonetically
English speakers laugh at you too.
Don't kill me, it's a joke.
I always knew that "misled" in books (pronounced mīzulled) and the spoken "misled" (mis-led) meant the same thing, but it took me until high school to figure out that mīzulled was only in my head.
Yes!! I knew I wasn't the only one
Esoteric for me. I still have trouble with that word.
I want it to be eh-sot-uh-rik for some reason.
Wait til you find out about epitome.
The epicenter of tomes
Same!
The english language badly needs an orthography reform
Using an alphabet designed for Latin has had some dire consequences.
Using a Latin alphabet. Using Germanic pronunciation. Borrowing words from Spanish. Stealing words from French. Changing accent to avoid sounding Gaelic.
I have always loved the analogy that English isn't a language, it's three bilingual children stacked on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat and arguing about bologna.
Well, German has almost as many vowels as English and we're doing just fine I think. On the other hand, French orthography is similarly fucked up although it's a direct descendent of Latin and they don't even have any weird sounds they can't write concisely. So I think its just a matter of trying.
Simple, just read your books in IPA. Tæps ˈtɛmpᵊl
lˈʊk ˈæt ˈɔːl ðˈiːz dummies ˈɪn ðˈɪsθɹˈɛd ðˈæt dˈo͡ʊnt nˈo͡ʊ ðˈəˌa͡ɪpˌiːˈe͡ɪ.
What has the education system been reduced to smh.
Some of the accents are a little off since they would need to go in front of the consonants instead of the vowels and "dummies" isn't spelled correctly but other than that I had a chuckle :D (not mesnt to be rude - sorry if it comes off this way)
jɛs
Daps demple?
Not me! I only read audiobooks, so I know how to pronounce all those $5 words!
(Just don't know what they mean or how to use them)
Bold of you to trust the performer knows how to say the words.
A decent performer will likely verify words they're unfamiliar with. If it's being read by the book's author it's anybody's guess.
I'm looking at YOU Gibson
Pen wings.
I grew up reading Warner Bros comic books my grandma had and thought Yosemite Sam was pronounced "Yosemight". Eventually figured it out. Later my backpacking buddy and I were looking at a map of California when he told me we should check out "Yosemight" if we ever get around to visiting Yosemite
I said "miss happen" one time in front of my girlfriend. "What?"
"You know, like badly shaped, deformed."
"Misshapen?! BAH HAH HA HAA!"
Spanish would never pull this BS on you.
The power of phonetic languages.
I don't speak Spanish, but do Spanish authors pull the same shit English ones do, where they give characters absolutely nonsense names with ambiguous pronunciations? Is it even possible? I will read a name of a character or place and spend the next 20 chapters reading the word twice or three times in different ways.
My biggest gripe with spanish is J having the "ha" sound. Juan is spelled "Hoo-an", Jesus is "Heh-zus", etc. If you can get over that, the rest is mostly phonetically sound, like portuguese
Some names would also throw me for a loop. When I first heard how they said "Hermione", I was quite flabbergasted.
Oh man, I loved Her-mi-own-ee. She was my favorite character
Same. I think the official pronunciation was just JK trolling.
Do you pronounce Ginny like gif or gif?
It took a long time for me to realize its basically Jenny prounced a bit different.
This one floored me.
Reading through Lovecraft's (especially his earlier) work be like, "Hey Google! Define cacodaemoniacal.."
You're gonna need to know what gambrelled roofs and gables are too. Dude loved his gambrells and gables.
Extremely loud and demonic.
Nah, Google would be like, "Sorry, I don't understand. But I did find something else on the web. Did you mean "Cacodaemoniacal defined?"
Edit: Whoops, accidentally pasted in that word I couldn't remember how to spell.
Caco = shit (same as caca/kaka in many European languages
Daemon = background program that does things without user input
-iacal = suffix turning the above into an adjective
So, Windows 11
I know how to pronounce that because I played DOOM
Truth...hah! I still have words I have to look up on the sly on the internet and click one of those definition services that will pronounce the word for you so I don't sound completely wrong.
I pronounced epitome epi-tome for the longest time. Now as I read, I pop onto Google when I encounter something I'm unfamiliar with. And I'm 36, my job has me fairly familiar with the English language, but I swear some writers discover a word and they're like "can't wait to use this two or three times in the next couple chapters."
It's that and character/place names, but character names are dangerous lookups, spoiled a plot in WoT looking up how to pronounce Moraine. And the worst part is her name's pretty obvious, but I fucking looked it up anyway. I thought Hermione was obvious as a kid, but that's probably because I transposed the I and O, now that I think about it.
I was teasing my significant other about her epi-tome but then she caught me with indictment so we're back on equal footing.
As someone whose father had a doctorate in English, I grew up reading and being told off every time I mispronounced a word.
That's just rude really. Hope you're feeling better these days amigo.
I loved my dad, but he was always a professor, so proper English was a priority. Honestly, that particular aspect of my upbringing is not one of the upsetting or traumatic parts.
Interestingly though, I recently learned that he drilled something that was essentially incorrect into my head. He grew up in the UK and, when he was growing up, it was proper to write "an historic." Here in the US and now usually in the UK, it is "a historic." I've been using "an historic" for decades.
If you want to talk about the shitty thing about having an English professor for a father, it's when you show him a piece of creative writing and he responds by telling you about all the mistakes you've made rather than what he thinks of it. Again, I loved the guy, but he was always a professor.
On the other hand, he ended up becoming a film historian and growing up with a film historian for a father is pretty amazing.
(Thanks on the health front, we're working on it.)
Trebucket
in-ter-MINE-able / in-TERM-in-able
Is one that jumps to mind which I still cock up to this day, I feel a little called out 😂
Posthumously was mine.
Epitome is mine.
I don't see what's so humorous about that
Omg I love hummus
Did you pronounce it such that it would pair nicely with postpita and postolives?
Also... fuck the cobbled together mess that is English.
Edit: some of it is regional pronunciations too
Cobbles, or moguls if you work with it. Granted English is my native language so maybe I just don't know better, but idk, I think it's kinda fun. I can almost always come up with a way to say something with exactly the connotations that I'm going for. And all the overlapping meanings and pronunciations make fertile ground for puns
I did this, and grew up in a ESL English only house,I pronounce so many words wrong with a perfect American accent.
Which American accent? We talken west coast standard, East Coast standard, Appalachian, Yooper, Inland Imperial, Bakersfield, Rocky Mountain North or South ya gotta he more specific.
Soft "ch" chimera just makes more sense to me.
you mean the original Greek pronounciation, instead of the mess, that is "kai-mera"?
Ancient Greek is the "kh" pronunciation. Same root as Chiron.
That's the old pronounciation soo ya
Bunch of y'all didn't watch TV with the captions on or movies with subtitles.
None of my books even had an audio track?
You have to double tap to play it.
I feel like this is especially true for English since it seems to me there are no spelling rules that convey pronunciation. You can have 2 words spelled completely the same save from one letter and the pronunciation is nowhere near the same.
I'm not sure how this is in other languages, but in my native german (which is always said to be difficult to learn) when you understand the spelling rules you can always assume the correct pronunciation of a word. Certain letter combinations always amount to the same way of pronouncing it.
I guess this is because both languages started out in the germanic language family, but over the course of history english adapted way more from other languages and just made them their own. Including differences in spelling, but maybe not as much pronunciation. Best example is "Bologna", which is still the italian/latin spelling, but no one near italy would call it "Baloney" .
I'm always amazed at how native speakers learn to write things like that, since you cant count on what you hear at all.
Anyone else say "ba-LO-na" for something with coarsely ground meat and heavier spice - e.g. "Lebanon Bologna" - and "ba-LO-nee" for the Oscar Mayer stuff?
You can have 2 words spelled completely the same
save from one letterand the pronunciation is nowhere near the same.
ftfy:
if you read a lot then you're well-read
Metrocity
school
That one was deliberate actually - some pompous reformer (possibly Dr Johnson or a follower) decided we needed certain spellings to be more like Dutch. That's where the H came from in 'ghost' as well, used to be 'gost' like in 'most hosts'
As a French Canadian moving from Quebec to Ontario, that struggle was real.
Bonjour! Bienvenue à Ontario!
English is an absurd language, and something like 30% of English words are from old (Norman?) French. English is my first language and it just seems like pure chaos to me.
Hey thanks! I moved back to Montreal after a few years. I learned a few things while I was there lol.
My English learning process was me being a eight year old kid who wanted to play diablo. No clue about shit. Barely able to read in the first place and just going from one word which is similar to one in my native language to the next similar one. Like "ok, intelligence looks a lot like intelligenz. Dexterity makes my bow do more damage so it should be something like speed or whatever" so basically trial and error over the years. The pronunciation was accordingly. As an example, strength was "stren g t hö". Not sure how I'm supposed to write what i said back then xD Still to this day from reading and such and not practicing enough speaking English some are way off.
Jokes on you, I pronounce most of words in English wrong, because no one bothered to teach me proper pronunciation at school.
I call this being bookish, pronounced "bockish"
This is why I love spanish as my second language. You don't have to guess what the word sounds like. Spelling and pronunciation always match.
The colour Beige was my downfall 🙈
I always vaguely wondered where in-FRAIR'd light fit into the spectrum because I only heard people talking about infra-red and ultraviolet...
Read a quote somewhere a while back, to paraphrase:
Never make fun of someone for mispronouncing a word; it means that their reading vocabulary has outgrown their spoken vocabulary.
Fuck, it's me
Im bad at pronouncing words and i know a lot of them
I also dont and never did enjoy reading books
What kind of games do you play?
I'm pathetic at both pronunciation and spelling. I just know when I hear it lol.
Auto complete isn't helping either with the situation.
That's how i was until i took a French class. Before that, I was trying to fit everything into a single set of rules with a multitude of exceptions. But really there are multiple sets of rules. Learning another set of rules for a language that had such a huge impact on what English is today really helped (although, there are still plenty of exceptions to keep in mind lol)
Just wanna share this interesting and relevant thing.
Unless, of course, they read books that exist just to tell you how to pronounce words. I remember seeing a gigantic book on display at a Borders years ago that was nothing but odd (and often very large medical term) words and how to pronounce them.