Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlearn

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Imralu
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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Imralu »

vokzhen wrote:Velar nasal, instead of alveolar/palatal, in <onion>. People never seem to notice anyways. It seems to be a widespread but uncommon thing.
Me too. I think I got that from my mum.

A weirder one is the words "length", "strength" and "breadth" which I was pronouncing with /ɪ/ ("lingth", "stringth", "bridth") until my early 20s. At least for the first two, that's what it sounded like to me when other people pronounced it, which might be the velar nasal after it having some kind of effect, or it might be from analogy with "width". When I worked in a bottle shop, I kept fucking up with my hypercorrection, and saying "med stringth" instead of "mid strength" ...
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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Ser »

I can hardly think of any mispronunciation in Spanish I've had to unlearn. I guess having a quite shallow orthography really helps weed out reading pronunciations. Uh, I used to pronounce the 2SG and 1PL preterite forms of venir 'to come' as veniste(s) and venimos instead of the correct viniste(s) and vinimos. Then again, about every Salvadoran does this, so it's not that incorrect...

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Sumelic »

Imralu wrote: A weirder one is the words "length", "strength" and "breadth" which I was pronouncing with /ɪ/ ("lingth", "stringth", "bridth") until my early 20s. At least for the first two, that's what it sounded like to me when other people pronounced it, which might be the velar nasal after it having some kind of effect, or it might be from analogy with "width". When I worked in a bottle shop, I kept fucking up with my hypercorrection, and saying "med stringth" instead of "mid strength" ...
Huh, interesting. For me, /ɛŋ/ sounds like /æŋ/, so I'd be more likely to shift the pronunciation the other way. It's an uncommon sequence of sounds.

Looking at my file of mispronunciations I discovered I have, here are some others:

eidolon (I thought it was /ˈaɪdəˌlɑn/, but it's actually /aɪˈdoʊlən/)
pathos (I thought it was /ˈpæθoʊs/, but it's actually /ˈpeɪθɑs/)
epistle (I thought it was /ˈɛpɪstl/, but it's actually /ɪˈpɪsl/. This one still trips me up, even though it should be easy to remember as it's just like "apostle")
conch (the pronunciation with /tʃ/ has become fairly well established by now, but still, it really should be /k/)

And also, Greek names were really hard for me to get the hang of.
Like, "Calliope" is not /ˈkæliˌoʊp/, Danae is not /ˈdeɪni/, Pasiphae is not /ˈpæsɪfi/, Laocoon is not /laʊˈkuːn/. All the hiatuses and non-silent final "e"s.

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Post by linguoboy »

Sumelic wrote:Like, "Calliope" is not /ˈkæliˌoʊp/, Danae is not /ˈdeɪni/, Pasiphae is not /ˈpæsɪfi/, Laocoon is not /laʊˈkuːn/. All the hiatuses and non-silent final "e"s.
After narrowly missing saying "hyperbowl" in class (the teacher was about to call on me and then suddenly digressed to tell a story about a student he'd had who'd mispronounced that word because he'd only ever seen it in print ha ha ha), I made a list of all the words I could find with non-silent final e. Offhand the only example I can think of which wasn't Greek is ante (as in "ante up!").

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by clawgrip »

Karate. Karaoke.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Sumelic »

There are a fair amount from Latin as well, like simile, facsimile, rationale, triticale, recipe. I just learned that the Latin plural of simile would be similia, and the Latin plural of rationale would be rationalia.

There are also some from Spanish, like adobe, coyote, abalone.
Last edited by Sumelic on Wed Mar 02, 2016 11:50 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by din »

clawgrip wrote:Karate. Karaoke.
You mean it's not /kəˈɹeɪt/ and /ˈkæɹi.oʊk/? :P
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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by linguoboy »

Sumelic wrote:There are a fair amount from Latin as well, like simile, facsimile, rationale, triticale, recipe.
I have never in my life heard rationale with the e pronounced. The OED doesn't even list that as a variant.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Sumelic »

linguoboy wrote:
Sumelic wrote:There are a fair amount from Latin as well, like simile, facsimile, rationale, triticale, recipe.
I have never in my life heard rationale with the e pronounced. The OED doesn't even list that as a variant.
Yes, it does! It has two entries for two meanings: in the sense "The breastplate worn by the Jewish high priest," all of the listed pronunciation variants end in /i/ or /eɪ/. In the sense "a reasoned exposition of principles..." it doesn't list a modern pronunciation ending in /i/, but it has a note
Oxford English Dictionary wrote:N.E.D. (1903) gives the pronunciation as (ræʃənēi·li) /ræʃəˈneɪliː/, with which other dictionaries down to the early 20th cent. agree. Pronunciation with the final -e sounded and with Brit. /ɑ/ in the penultimate syllable is given by D. Jones Eng. Pronouncing Dict. from ed. 1 (1917) onwards and in Webster's New Internat. Dict. Eng. Lang. (1934). [...] Pronunciation with final -e silent and with Brit. /ɑː/, /a/, U.S. /ɑ/, /æ/ is noted in H. W. Fowler Mod. Eng. Usage (1926), who ascribes it to ‘confusion with such French words as morale & locale (there is no French rationale)’, and is regarded by E. Gowers Fowler's Mod. Eng. Usage (ed. 2, 1965) as ‘likely to have an undeserved victory’; it is recorded by dictionaries from the mid 20th cent. onwards, e.g. by Webster's Third New Internat. Dict. (1961) and the 13th ed. of D. Jones Eng. Pronouncing Dict. (1967).
There are living people who still remember this pronunciation, see the comments on this Language Log post: Mea culpae? Meae culpae? Meis culpis? Mea culpas?
Robert Coren wrote:...I was somewhat taken aback when, as an undergraduate taking a "law for non-lawyers" course, I heard the professor pronounce "rationale" as /ræʃʌ'nɛɪli/; I had always supposed that it came from French, and thought of it as /ræʃʌ'nal/. I suspect that most non-lawyers do pronounce it more or less the latter way. [...] the professor from whom I heard the Anglicized-Latin pronunciation of rationale was Paul Freund.
Viseguy wrote:I do recall hearing ra-shee-oh-NAIL-ee (rationale) — probably from Prof. Peterfreund — as a synonym for ratio decidendi in law school in the '70s. [...] My professor was Harvard Law class of '36, so maybe it was indeed a case of Peterfreund stealing from Paul Freund.
This reminds me, there are still more cases of non-silent final e in fixed Latin expressions, like vice versa, stare decisis and sine die.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Imralu »

Sumelic wrote:Huh, interesting. For me, /ɛŋ/ sounds like /æŋ/, so I'd be more likely to shift the pronunciation the other way. It's an uncommon sequence of sounds.
Maybe the /ŋ/ has a different effect on the /ɛ/ in our dialects, or maybe it's simply a difference in how our brains work ... "-ing" is such a common sequence. Maybe your brain interprets the difference as more salient and hears it further away and mine regards it as an error and "corrects" it to the usual pattern. I remember, for a while, I wondered how many other things I was pronouncing weirdly and looked up words like "English" and "knowledge" to make sure that I'm not just crazy for pronouncing those e's as i's.

(I've now realised, in an unstressed syllable, IMD, unstressed vowels tend to weaken to [ɪ] before velar and post-alveolar consonants, to [ə] before any other consonant and to somewhere around [a] (in a very strong Australian accent) word finally, so this accounts for knowledge having [ɪ], but English is just a funny word like "pretty" that has an "e" pronounced like an "i" ... and I apparently invented a whole other set of these words)
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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

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Sumelic wrote:This reminds me, there are still more cases of non-silent final e in fixed Latin expressions, like vice versa, stare decisis and sine die.
Really? I've always been saying 'vice versa' as /vʌɪs 'vɜsə/

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Zaarin »

KathTheDragon wrote:
Sumelic wrote:This reminds me, there are still more cases of non-silent final e in fixed Latin expressions, like vice versa, stare decisis and sine die.
Really? I've always been saying 'vice versa' as /vʌɪs 'vɜsə/
A lot of people (including myself) say /vaɪsə 'vɹ̩sə/.
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Post by linguoboy »

Zaarin wrote:
KathTheDragon wrote:
Sumelic wrote:This reminds me, there are still more cases of non-silent final e in fixed Latin expressions, like vice versa, stare decisis and sine die.
Really? I've always been saying 'vice versa' as /vʌɪs 'vɜsə/
A lot of people (including myself) say /vaɪsə 'vɹ̩sə/.
First couple times I heard this, I thought it was a barbarism. I was genuinely surprised to learn that /'vaɪsə/ in this expression was pedigreed.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

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linguoboy wrote:
Zaarin wrote:
KathTheDragon wrote:
Sumelic wrote:This reminds me, there are still more cases of non-silent final e in fixed Latin expressions, like vice versa, stare decisis and sine die.
Really? I've always been saying 'vice versa' as /vʌɪs 'vɜsə/
A lot of people (including myself) say /vaɪsə 'vɹ̩sə/.
First couple times I heard this, I thought it was a barbarism. I was genuinely surprised to learn that /'vaɪsə/ in this expression was pedigreed.
I grew up saying it without the schwa, but I re-trained myself during my teenage years when I liked to sound pretentious. I've (happily) dropped most of those pretentious pronunciations, but I kept the schwa in vice versa. And the really random but entertaining pronunciation of basil as /ˈbæzl/, just because I enjoy seeing other peoples' reactions...
"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Vijay »

Zaarin wrote:And the really random but entertaining pronunciation of basil as /ˈbæzl/, just because I enjoy seeing other peoples' reactions...
You just reminded me of Fawlty Towers, especially the episode that ends with Sybil yelling out his name over and over.

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Post by linguoboy »

Zaarin wrote:And the really random but entertaining pronunciation of basil as /ˈbæzl/, just because I enjoy seeing other peoples' reactions...
That's the pronunciation I learned from my father (we grew herbs together when I was young) and his language is anything but pretentious. (Nonstandard pronunciations he trained himself out of include [ˈsʌˑɫ] for soil, though he still says [ˈɑˑɫ] for oil.) It amuses me when I ask for "b[æ]sil" at the local pizza joint and the server is like "B[eɪ̭]sil?"

Speaking of herbs, I've never been sure where to put the stress on marjoram.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

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Zaarin wrote:And the really random but entertaining pronunciation of basil as /ˈbæzl/, just because I enjoy seeing other peoples' reactions...
That's not random. It's the normal pronunciation in most dialects outside of north America. For some reason, the names of herbs (and the word "herb" itself) tend to show a lot of difference between US versus Commonwealth dialects. /ˈhɜːb/ /ɒɹɪˈgɑːnəʊ/ /ˈbæzəl/ ... and words like coriander vs cilantro ...
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Post by linguoboy »

Imralu wrote:...and words like coriander vs cilantro ...
Oddly, we use both terms. We have "coriander seed" in our spice cabinet. But if we buy it fresh, it's "cilantro". (Similar, I guess, to how it's a "bell pepper" in the market but "paprika" once dried and ground.)

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Post by Nortaneous »

Coriander is the seed. Cilantro is the leaf.
Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by finlay »

Imralu wrote:
vokzhen wrote:Velar nasal, instead of alveolar/palatal, in <onion>. People never seem to notice anyways. It seems to be a widespread but uncommon thing.
Me too. I think I got that from my mum.

A weirder one is the words "length", "strength" and "breadth" which I was pronouncing with /ɪ/ ("lingth", "stringth", "bridth") until my early 20s. At least for the first two, that's what it sounded like to me when other people pronounced it, which might be the velar nasal after it having some kind of effect, or it might be from analogy with "width". When I worked in a bottle shop, I kept fucking up with my hypercorrection, and saying "med stringth" instead of "mid strength" ...
I was about to say isn't this normal in Australia... but I think I was thinking of NZ...

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

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Imralu wrote:
Zaarin wrote:And the really random but entertaining pronunciation of basil as /ˈbæzl/, just because I enjoy seeing other peoples' reactions...
That's not random. It's the normal pronunciation in most dialects outside of north America.
I know that--but being North American myself from a purely North American family, it's somewhat random for my idiolect. Actually, I think I picked it up from Siddig El Fadil, who played one of my favorite characters (Dr. Bashir) on Deep Space 9.
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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Travis B. »

Final e in German names here are traditionally pronounced /i/.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Post by linguoboy »

Travis B. wrote:Final e in German names here are traditionally pronounced /i/.
That's true in Missouri as well (e.g. Spoede, Schulte, New Melle), but I wasn't thinking of names when I made my list.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Zaarin »

Travis B. wrote:Final e in German names here are traditionally pronounced /i/.
That reminds me of something I've been wondering about. In the US, German names with <oe> are generally pronounced /oʊ/, because of orthography. But why are German names in <oe (ö)> /œ/ pronounced /ɚ/ in English (viz., Goethe /gɚtə/, Goebbels /gɚblz/, etc.)? Meanwhile, French <eu> /œ/ tends to become /u/ or /ʊ/...
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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

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Zaarin wrote:
Travis B. wrote:Final e in German names here are traditionally pronounced /i/.
That reminds me of something I've been wondering about. In the US, German names with <oe> are generally pronounced /oʊ/, because of orthography. But why are German names in <oe (ö)> /œ/ pronounced /ɚ/ in English (viz., Goethe /gɚtə/, Goebbels /gɚblz/, etc.)? Meanwhile, French <eu> /œ/ tends to become /u/ or /ʊ/...
Traditionally German ö/oe in names is pronounced /eɪ/ or /ɛ/ here, depending on whether it corresponds to Standard German /øː/ or /œ/.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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