Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlearn

[linguoboy]

Someone just reminded me that for ages I thought febrile was /ˈfɛbrɪl/ or /ˈfɛbraɪl/. (I suppose I was taking my cue from February.)

[Sumelic]

Someone just reminded me that for ages I thought febrile was /ˈfɛbrɪl/ or /ˈfɛbraɪl/. (I suppose I was taking my cue from February.)

What do you think it should be now? /ˈfiːbrɪl/? /ˈfɛbrɪl/ and /ˈfɛbraɪl/ are both common enough to be listed in dictionaries. I mean, I'm all for pedantically excluding certain pronunciations that are only accepted because they're common spelling pronunciations (I don't like /wɔrt/ for "wort" and I won't use it even if it's listed in Merriam-Webster) but it seems a bit much to characterize a pronunciation as outright incorrect once it reaches that stage. And it's not even clear to me that /ɛ/ is more recent, or less common, or in any other way more objectionable than /iː/ in this word; Vocabulary.com actually claims the opposite.

[Soap]

Never heard of any pronunciation besides /wɔrt/ for wort. Im guessing it's supposed to have the vowel of "work"? Wiktionary lists only /wɝt/.

I've been saying "lapel" with the vowels of "label" all my life and even though I hear people pronounce it the other way all the time I have a hard time stopping myself from saying "LAY-pull".

[Arzena]

I am in the process of internalizing the pronunciation of 'butcher' as /ˈbʊt͡ʃ.ɚ/ instead of [ˈbət͡ʃ.ɚ]

[Zaarin]

Never heard of any pronunciation besides /wɔrt/ for wort. Im guessing it's supposed to have the vowel of "work"? Wiktionary lists only /wɝt/.

Same, though I can't say "wort" is a word that I use very often, even as a fantasy buff...Then again, for the longest time I pronounced "draught" as /dɹɒt/ rather than /dɹæft/.

[Salmoneus]

/dɹæft/.

*shudders*

[linguoboy]

Never heard of any pronunciation besides /wɔrt/ for wort. Im guessing it's supposed to have the vowel of "work"? Wiktionary lists only /wɝt/.

I'm only familiar with it as a combining element (e.g. mugwort, spiderwort, liverwort) and here it's always /wərt/. But I've got so much variation in vowel quality before /r/ that I'll accept a broad range of values here.

[Zaarin]

/dɹæft/.

*shudders*

It is a rather unpleasant sounding word in American English.

[Sumelic]

Never heard of any pronunciation besides /wɔrt/ for wort. Im guessing it's supposed to have the vowel of "work"? Wiktionary lists only /wɝt/.

Yep. Historically, it had the same vowel as worm and worse (/y/ in Old English, which the OED says was later backed to /u/ between /w/ and /r/). The spelling with "o" seems to be due to a purely graphical replacement of "wu" with "wo."

/dɹæft/.

*shudders*

...I don't get it, but OK. Are you just allergic to American English pronunciation, like Zaarin suggests?

[frankskim]

I used to pronounce and spell "geminate" as "germinate". Because letters. And that's what happens when you are into both gardening and linguistics.

Also, I used to metathesise "defibrillator" into "defillibrator", shift the initial stress of "alias" onto the following syllable (with accompanying incorrect vowels, schwa and /ai/), and say "monk" with a caught/cot vowel. In my head, I used to and still often pronounce "vehement" as /vɛhɛmənt/. Dodgy words like those I often avoid using in speech altogether to avoid embarrassment.

Whew, this was cathartic.

[Pole, the]

TIL there is no /b/ in “subtle”.

[linguoboy]

TIL there is no /b/ in “subtle”.

I sometimes sarcastically add one back in. Cf. /dəˈboːnɚ/ for debonnaire, /ˈsweːv/ for suave.

[Sumelic]

concomitant /kəŋˈkɑmɪtənt/. Probably by analogy with "commit," I had been pronouncing this mentally as /kɑŋkəˈmɪtənt/.

spirant /spaɪrənt/. For some reason I wanted to use /ir/ ("NEAR") instead.

This one isn't incorrect, but I'm reconsidering my pronunciation of "feral" as /ferəl/ now that I've learned that the pronunciation /firəl/ also exists. I have to think about which one makes more sense to me.

[Zaarin]

concomitant /kəŋˈkɑmɪtənt/. Probably by analogy with "commit," I had been pronouncing this mentally as /kɑŋkəˈmɪtənt/.

spirant /spaɪrənt/. For some reason I wanted to use /ir/ ("NEAR") instead.

Why is there a velar nasal in the first syllable of the first pronunciation of concomitant? I've never heard a dialect that assimilates nasals across syllables; I don't, anyway.

/spaɪrənt/ is painful to my ears; right or wrong, you can pry /spirənt/ from my cold dead fingers.

[clawgrip]

Why is there a velar nasal in the first syllable of the first pronunciation of concomitant? I've never heard a dialect that assimilates nasals across syllables; I don't, anyway.

Outside of careful and deliberate speech, you almost certainly also assimilate it. People regularly assimilate nasals not only across syllables but across words even.

[Sumelic]

concomitant /kəŋˈkɑmɪtənt/. Probably by analogy with "commit," I had been pronouncing this mentally as /kɑŋkəˈmɪtənt/.

Why is there a velar nasal in the first syllable of the first pronunciation of concomitant? I've never heard a dialect that assimilates nasals across syllables; I don't, anyway.

Oh, you're right: I just checked some dictionaries and they all give the phoneme as /n/. My mistake; I was focusing on the position of the stress. I assumed it should be /ŋ/ since it's from Latin, where nasals always assimilate to following plosives. I forgot that the pronunciation doesn't actually derive from Latin pronunciation, but from the spelling and from analogy with other words in English with this prefix. But as Clawgrip says, the phone [ŋ] is likely to appear here in ordinary speech as a result of assimilation, which does occur across syllables (for example, people often use [ɱ] in the word "infinity").

[Zaarin]

Why is there a velar nasal in the first syllable of the first pronunciation of concomitant? I've never heard a dialect that assimilates nasals across syllables; I don't, anyway.

Outside of careful and deliberate speech, you almost certainly also assimilate it. People regularly assimilate nasals not only across syllables but across words even.

To be fair, concomitant is not an everyday sort of word and not one I'd probably say with that kind informal speed. Actually, concomitant actually has a sort of pleasant "mouth-feel" when said slowly...

[Travis B.]

In the English I'm used to /n/ almost always assimilates to following plosives, including across syllable boundaries, when it isn't elided all together in that position, leaving vowel nasalization behind. Not doing so feels overly careful to me. And yes, I would pronounce concomitant (would because I do not think I have ever actually pronounced that word) with [ŋ] or just a nasalized vowel.

[Zaarin]

To be fair, my dialect doesn't really "pattern" with specific dialects. While it's broadly speaking GenAm, I grew up all over the place and my accent is correspondingly all over the place--both online quizzes and people IRL generally peg it as "Seattle" or "Pacific Northwest," one region of the country I've never actually lived (though it's where I would live, if it were up to me).

[Travis B.]

I'm the opposite - I speak basically like someone who grew up in the specific suburb I grew up in, to the point that I have had people I had never met before pick up where I grew up exactly (and based on this I know I did not just innovate how I speak, because if that were the case they would not have been able to do that). And I feel I speak quite weirdly just from having moved and working outside of the inner suburbs of Milwaukee or Milwaukee itself; the people speak much more conservatively, while having specific innovations like ɔ > ɑ along with ɑ > a, where I now live and work, despite that I work only 15 minutes from where I grew up and live only 30 minutes from where I grew up - I scarcely hear people speak like the people I grew up with anymore with the exception of probably my sister.

[Zaarin]

I'm the opposite - I speak basically like someone who grew up in the specific suburb I grew up in, to the point that I have had people I had never met before pick up where I grew up exactly (and based on this I know I did not just innovate how I speak, because if that were the case they would not have been able to do that). And I feel I speak quite weirdly just from having moved and working outside of the inner suburbs of Milwaukee or Milwaukee itself; the people speak much more conservatively, while having specific innovations like ɔ > ɑ along with ɑ > a, where I now live and work, despite that I work only 15 minutes from where I grew up and live only 30 minutes from where I grew up - I scarcely hear people speak like the people I grew up with anymore with the exception of probably my sister.

That's actually really interesting. I've always found people with a strong sense of "home" interesting, because I've never had that--in fact, the most attached I've been to a place (Coastal Washington/British Columbia--love that area, it's so beautiful) is a place I've never lived. I've moved so much I really don't attach to places easily. Shame that Canada is so expensive and that Washington is literally on the opposite end of the country from me.

[Travis B.]

I'm the opposite - I speak basically like someone who grew up in the specific suburb I grew up in, to the point that I have had people I had never met before pick up where I grew up exactly (and based on this I know I did not just innovate how I speak, because if that were the case they would not have been able to do that). And I feel I speak quite weirdly just from having moved and working outside of the inner suburbs of Milwaukee or Milwaukee itself; the people speak much more conservatively, while having specific innovations like ɔ > ɑ along with ɑ > a, where I now live and work, despite that I work only 15 minutes from where I grew up and live only 30 minutes from where I grew up - I scarcely hear people speak like the people I grew up with anymore with the exception of probably my sister.

That's actually really interesting. I've always found people with a strong sense of "home" interesting, because I've never had that--in fact, the most attached I've been to a place (Coastal Washington/British Columbia--love that area, it's so beautiful) is a place I've never lived. I've moved so much I really don't attach to places easily. Shame that Canada is so expensive and that Washington is literally on the opposite end of the country from me.

To me, the thing is right now I do feel like a snowflake.

[linguoboy]

Even since I found out that the Mongolian form of Genghis Khan's name is Chinggis, I've pronounced it with intial /ʤ/. But /g/ does seem to be the norm in current American English (to the point where I wonder if this is related to the "wandering h" problem).

[Travis B.]

IIRC the name Genghis is filtered through Persian.

[linguoboy]

IIRC the name Genghis is filtered through Persian.

Nu?

According to Wikimedia, the contemporary Persian form is چنگیز Čangiz. (Cf. Anatolian Turkish Cengiz.)