I respect it when I hear someone clearly attempting a word they've only seen written
I respect it when I hear someone clearly attempting a word they've only seen written
I respect it when I hear someone clearly attempting a word they've only seen written
Up until recently, I thought that the US national park was pronounced "yo-semite", as if it was some sort of ghetto-slang used for greeting a Jewish person.
Ahahhahhahahaaha that's actually amazing
That's amazing
There was an '80s cop show called Hill Street Blues that had a recurring latino character named Jesus. All I heard as a kid was "Hey, Zeus" so I thought his actual name was Zeus and everybody just said "hey" to him when addressing him.
I love this so much!
I thought Yosemite Sam had pretty much taught all English speakers the correct pronunciation. I remember my parents saying their Swedish relatives pronounced it "Yohsmeet."
I say it that way sometimes for fun. I live nearish so sometimes, when visitors hear me say if, they ask if that’s how it’s actually pronounced
are you Donald Trump by chance
Wait how do you phonetically say this?
Yo - seh - mit - ee
You're not alone, brother.
Doesn't mean it isn't cute/funny when it does happen, though. Just this week my SO pronounced chihuahua as "CHA-HOO-A-HOO-A" so I told them "you know this word, it's the taco bell dog" lol
Thank you for the new method to make my family groan.
I have been pronouncing it like this since my buddy fucked it up in grade school lmao
Les Nessman comes to mind.
That dog died over a decade ago. Do younger kids know what that is?
Also dialects are a thing. The way a lot of words come out of my mouth has been culturally labeled as ignorant. I go out of my way to change my pronunciations at work so I get taken seriously, but I've been doing it less now that I'm accepted in that world. Maybe that caps how much farther I can go, but maybe I don't want to go further if it means continuing to act like people who sound like how I sound are less than
Pour one out for all my epi-tome homies
Brian Regan presents: Epi-tome of hyper bowl.
Have some Worcestershire sauce on me!
You should never mock someone who pronounces a word strangely: They might be from Reading.
Me whenever someone can't pronounce a word
Which by the way is a town name that very often gets mispronounced by people who only read it in books.
Made even more confusing if someone is reading literature at Reading.
Whew don't get me started about towns called Lebanon in the USA Midwest..
Was that pronounced like red-ing?
Or... or you read it in the 3 word title of a meme. Doesn't matter, learned word.
Words go brrrr.
It was embarrassingly recently that I realized segue and "segway" were the same word which I apparently didn't know how to spell.
Edit: BTW - the weird way that English words are spelled or pronounced - and why - is one of my favorrite nerd subjects. I love this thread so freaking much. And how RIGHT nearly everyone here SHOULD have been.
In your defense, "Segway" is a real brand of some kind of transport thingy, which might be where you picked it up.
And they're named that because they make devices that move smoothly from one place to another, just like the literary device.
Bro let me tell you how recently I realized...
👆
Lol
segue puts me straight into a fugue state
Yeah, that’s very much an English thing. Many other languages use reasonably consistent spelling and pronunciation, so memorizing the handful of exceptions isn’t really a problem.
However, with English it’s the other way around. You need to memorize the handful of words that are actually pronounced the way they are written. Everything else is just pure chaos. If you read a word, you can’t pronounce it. If you hear a word, you can’t find it in a dictionary.
As a homeschooled kid with a big vocabulary I was largely not able to pronounce (more reading than talking), this is a sentiment I wish I'd heard earlier in life.
I'm sorry. I hate that the stereotype that stuck for homeschool kids wasn't that they're often very well read and advanced, because that has been my experience encountering them over the years.
In fairness, that stereotype is largely due to capital H Homeschooled kids like me. as in, the subculture as opposed to simply the method of schooling at home.
If you meet someone who was in the subculture, you need to navigate through a few levels of weird damage before our vocabulary is even close to the most notable thing about us.
Opposite for me. Homeschooled kids are weird and dumb generally. I'm sorry I'm weird too. May be my geography because I'm in a super conservative area. The people here who decide to do homeschooling are typically conspiracy theory rednecks.
This was me with a number of words over the years, but most memorable "paradigm."
The one that wakes me up in the middle of the night is albeït. I thought it was fancy foreign speak pronounced “all bait”, but it is just a short form of “all be it”, is pronounced exactly like that, and is a synonym for “all though it be”.
"Facade" caught me in high school.
Interestingly (to me), I have the opposite problem in Spanish. I've learned mostly through immersion, so when I see a Spanish word written down sometimes I'm like "Holy heck THAT'S how you spell carrot??" Spanish is a language where the spelling/pronounciation rules are really consistent, but it's still surprising to see some of these words without having ever thought of how they might be spelled. Toallas (towels) got me too.
I still have to "translate" that one in my head every time I read it.
Same!
And I definitely read it out loud in front of a class in high school the wrong way.
When I was learning Japanese, I came across a sentence along the lines of "lets buy stuff at the
<shoppingumouru>
", I could understand most of it fine, but didn't recognize bracketed word, which was conveniently written in a script that denotes loan words (and I have trancscribed phonetically above). I probably spent at least half an hour trying to look up "shoppingumouru" simce I couldn't find it in my dictionary. Eventually, I turned to Google translate and immediately facepalmed when I saw the answer.I studied Malayalam (the language of Kerala state in India) a few years ago. I learned the script quickly and one day walking through the capital of Thiruvananthapuram I saw a van with the word "POLICE" and then the Malayalam word underneath it. I was all excited to learn a new Malayalam word without needing my tutor, until I sounded it out and realized it was just "POLICE" written with the Malayalam script.
Fun fact: Malayalam is the only language whose named is a palindrome. Its English name, at least - in the Malayalam script it's not.
When learning Spanish I read in a book that skateboarding was montar en monopatin. In college I spoke that in oral exam. My professor was like what the fuck is that?
Gif
Me as a small children: I'll PRE-FACE this by saying...
Family: wait, what??
I did not feel honorable...
Me as a grown-ass Spaniard right now: wait, it's not pre-face? Is it pre-fis?
It is. And yet, we're both still correct. Somehow...
Same with pre-dator for me xD
Unless it's a YouTuber. Then they're possibly pronouncing it wrong so people will comment about their pronunciation and fuel the algorithm.
An-tea-queues
And rather ironically:
Kway instead of Queue --8th grade substitute teacher caught me on that one while reading aloud.
Ha - and yet "quay" can be pronounced as "kway", or "kay" or "key" - and mean the same thing - depending on context. Mostly if it's part of a name, and who named it.
Also sometimes it's spelled "key" instead.
Yo sa mite for Yosemite is my worst one.
My sister and I did this intentionally to be funny as kids. We took my son there last year and he did the same thing without hearing the story. Pretty funny for me.
Segue still gets me. In my head I still pronounce it like rogue.
Every time.
OK, so then I'm proud of the fact that I thought Hermione from the Harry Potter books was pronounced HER-me-own.
I pronounced it the same way, until whichever book has that scene with Viktor Krum pronouncing it wrong and being corrected. I believe the story goes that Rowling included that scene because there were so many of us doing it.
That's how we pronounce it in Spain! Actually the H has no sound, so she's just "er-me-on"
So how is it pronounced?
Her - my - un - ee
Her my ohnee
I thought I was mispronouncing "duodenum" so I changed it, then I heard doctors on youtube saying it the way I thought was wrong. I had gone from right to wrong back to right. lol
Lol, I think I heard this one verbally for the first time from Peter Griffin in an early season of family guy.
I keep pronouncing "sweat" like "sweet", even though people keeps correcting me about it because my stupid brain is stuck with the wrong pronunciation
It doesn't help that it's a meme to swap them out. Lol
Sich a dumb word, but somehow I never really clicked on this word: "question". I have spoken the word a lot, but somehow I practiced speaking english less when I moved away from my parents to study. English became more of a read and written language than spoken, so the words became just things to read, not to sound out loud.
After attempting to speak a bit more english again, words were drawn from memory by how they were written. And for some reason the word "question" was incredibly weird. "Kuest-ion"? No, I'm sure there is a "ch"-sound in there. "Kwest-chien"?
I had to check out some youtube videos on pronounciation to get it right.
Oh man, there must be dozens of examples like this you have. It's such a weird language, with so many words and spellings and pronunciations from so many sources.
I'm from American south, I've always said and heard "kwest-chen" - now I'm sitting here saying it over and over wondering how much is regional accent
It's all good. I sat kwestchen.
Ugh, as a young child I thought train was spelled "Chrain" for the same reason. People getting lazy and softening a T sound to a CH sound is fine, but can't we update the spelling too?
I have noticed a lot of (youtube) people are keenly aware of their faults. Admitting you have a thing to try improve up on, is an triple up that I can unfortunately only give as 1/3 of a triple agree. If you know you are butchering grammar/spelling, giving a pre-warning is only going to make it funny.
Kubernetes
Turns out Nginx is not N-jinx
Haha that's also the most popular pronunciation of nginx that I've heard. I try to casually drop engine-x in conversation, reactions vary from confusion to mind blow.
I kept saying Ah-zoore instead of Azure for too long
Mispronounced words by British people are unacceptable though. The Brits need to be stopped!
They invented the language, the least they could do is spell and pronounce it right.
They invented it, but then they started dropping r's while the Colonies kept them.
And their wacky spellings.
Seriously though, I know there is no right or wrong, just cultures but "vit-a-min" (vit rhyming with bit) for vitamin , "al-loo-minium" for aluminum and "let-toos" for lettuce is like fingernails on a chalkboard. lol
The origin behind Aluminum and Aluminium is kinda interesting because the inventor that first refined the element used both pronunciations and iirc I believe I he had even a third pronunciation ("alumium")that never caught on.
That's nothing. I throw up a little in my mouth every time I see "cheque" misspelled, "check".
I pronounced entrée as "entry" until I was in my 30s. 😭
I pronounced hyperbole as hyper-bowl until my mid 40's when I finally heard it used in a movie, and had to ask everyone around me if that's how hyperbole is pronounced. I knew the word genre, but didn't know that when I read "genre", it was the same word. I said gen-ree when using genre in a statement well into my late 20's.
As a kid I thought it was just "entreeee".
haha, I'd never thought of that, but it's true :D
Nah I learned words reading memes and take out menus
I wonder if by the same criteria the opposite also holds true. Are misspelled words dishonorable? And if yes does it matter if they're nouns or other functional words like there/they're/their ?
Correct
Currently staying here for a week and I have no idea how to pronounce Etobicoke. I'm sure it's not "Et oh buy coke". I asked a couple of canadiens but that hasn't helped because what comes out of their mouth is so far removed from the spelling.
Etoba koh is probably the closest I can get to it for ya lol
So the I becomes an a and you drop the Ke.
Since we're on the topic there's this historical word that I haven't heard pronounced in English, Alexander the Great had a bunch of generals that were called the Diadochi, I haven't seen this term pronounced in English, but recently I've taken into account the way English speakers pronounce words and I was wondering if the way I'm pronouncing it in English is correct or if I am just wrong.
I've been pronouncing it in an English context as: "Die-a-Dough-key" I'm no linguist so I'm not sure how to write pronunciations sorry if it looks dumb.
It's Διάδοχοι so rather Dee-AH-Do-(c)hee with accent on A, actually more like thee-AH-do-hee but that might sound a bit weird if you don't have a feel for greek pronounciation. A small tip is that "i" is never pronounced as in "die" in greek but as "ee" (or as in "tin" if short).
Edit: I know modern greek, not ancient. The χ might have been more like a K (as the end of truck) in ancient times but I'm not sure. My suggestion above would be a lot closer to the correct pronunciation though.
Dee-AH-doh-kee like in ancient greek is probably what you want to use. Sorry for the confusion.
Thank you! Guess I'll just stick to ancient pronunciations on these topics.
Wikipedia has the phonetic as daɪˈædəkaɪ/ dy-AD-ə-ky.
Which with their pronunciation guide would come out as Die-Add-A(h)-Ki(te).
I think.
I might be wrong (and if I am, I'm sure someone will be along to correct me directly)
This happens to me a lot in the medical field. "Parenchymal" has been my most recent, and I have to think about it every time I hear it or try to say it
I read it in my head as PAIR-EN-KIME-AL, but it's pronounced PA-RINKA-MAL... though how I read it does help me to spell it
Some words I still can't pronounce, but I know how to "read", such as "klebsiella aerogenes"
While we're on the subject: "Tachypneic" is pronounced like "TA-KIP-NIK", but I never hear anyone try and pronounce "Bradypneic". One would assume that it's pronounced like "BRA-DIP-NIK" (or maybe "BRAY-DIP-NIK"), but I can't confirm. I think saying "bradypneic" intimidates people
English fails hard at conveying phonetics through written language. In Brazilian portuguese (my native language) those words would be written as:
The lack of diacritics (and several other characteristics) makes English really easy to learn but in contrast you get those kinds of problems. I’ve never seen anyone get those words wrong in my field (I’m a vet)
That's really cool, and I appreciate the insight! I always liked Spanish ('Latin American' in my case) because you can pronounce the words as they are spelled. Doesn't matter if you know what it means, but you can still pronounce it (for the most part)
I've always been told that Portuguese is like "Spanish and French had a baby". Not sure how much truth there is to that, but a quick anecdote: My wife and I were in a cab with a native Portuguese speaker who knew a bit of English and a bit of Romantic languages. My wife knows a bit of French; I know a bit of Spanish... and between the three of us, we were able to speak to each other in a kinda "creole type" delivery. It was really cool to experience
Lastly, I have to ask... do you think "bradypneic" would be pronounced "BRAY-DIP" or "BRA-DIP" in English?
I'm about to learn Portuguese just so i can pronounce English words consistently
“Tachypneic” is pronounced like “TA-KIP-NIK”,
I’m clearly not qualified to lecture you, but deriving from words like pneumonia, and consulting merriam-webster, are you sure the “p” isn’t silent here, and that the “e” is?
As a kid I used to pronounce amoeba as “a-MO-ba” instead of “a-MEE-ba”.
I only pronounced that right the first time because I saw it spelt with a œ, which I misread as æ, like encyclopædia. So three cheers for "right for the wrong reason".
This happened to me.... The word was hyperbole. I said it as hyper bowl ee.
The kicker is I've heard the word hyperbole before, pronounced correctly, and never knew what it meant, nor how it was spelled.
So I spoke to someone who was a bit more linguistically inclined, both verbally and written (hes also older than me by a few years, and more "into" art and culture)... And he said "you mean hyperbole?" And everything finally clicked. At the time I was embarrassed because I knew both the written and pronounced versions of it, but never put them together, so I felt like it was something I should have been able to figure out on my own and didn't.
Now? If someone made the same correction to something similar, I'd be like. Ohhhhhh. That makes more sense. Thanks! Instead, I basically exited the situation to go die in private from embarrassment.
I should not have been embarrassed.
I love learning new things.
I had an English teacher correct me on that, except I said hyperbola which is a math concept and is pronounced hyper bowl a.
Mine is sidereal... I always said side real. Then, I learned it was (roughly) Sid air heal.
Though I did use to say Copernicus as copper knickers too.
Mine was Ganymede. I read so much scifi but didn't really ever see any scifi shows referencing the planet, and it never came up in conversation. I thought it was supposed to be pronounced gani-mee-dee, as if it was a Greek philosopher.
English is a garbage language anyway tbh you say words the way you like ‼️
I'm kinda the same here, except worse. I'm stuck saying Hyper-Bowl, and the "proper" pronunciation breakes down as hyperbally in my head. Sounding like an adverb trips me up so much, I just refuse to use the word now.
Suff-ice.
:(
How's it actually pronounced???
It's pronounced suff-ice, but I always said suff-is before I learned.
Clicking the audio button on the Merriam-Webster dictionary's page for "suffice" has it say suff + ice
I wonder how this works for logographic systems like Chinese, where the letter tells you nothing about the sound (though tbf English spelling is so bad that it's almost at that level too).
I studied Malayalam (the language of Kerala state in southern India) and the script was fucking awesome. It's purely syllabic and it's impossible to pronounce a written word wrong - you just sound out the syllables and you've got it. Everything else about the language was impossibly alien to me as a native English speaker (like you can't just say yes or no, you can only negate or affirm other words), but at least the script was easy.
I used to think "chaos" had the same "ch" as "church" when I was a kid. Don't know why I never heard it spoken aloud by someone earlier than I did.
But the one that I find inexcusable is Southern US people who pronounce "jalapeno" with a "j" and "n" instead of an "ha" and "ñ" even though they know better. Sounds so willfully ignorant
Chaos, pronounced like multiple "ciao" in Italian. 🤌
And on your jalapeño comment: I spent 6 months sending my coworker "hola" in morning greetings until he told me that he thought "hola" was just me saying "Holler [holla] at a player [playa]". To his credit, he took German on high school. To his discredit, we had been working in Spain for 2 weeks when we had this conversation.
Holler at a beach?
I used to think “chaos” had the same “ch” as “church” when I was a kid.
The chao of Sonic Adventure (1998)?
Anyone remember the Eyjafjallajökull outbreak in Iceland?
I refuse to believe unscurpulous is pronounced in that goofy ass way. People say that in courtrooms goddamn it.
It might help if you spell it correctly. Unscrupulous
I am going to saw off my feet.
(wondering what's especially weird about it)
Edit: like, if you think it's weird that "scrup" isn't pronounced with a "u" as in "cup", there's like 48 thousand other examples in other words.
See holler, tow-up.
Hysteresis got me.
This was me as a 7 year-old, reading The Hobbit and LotR. 33 years, and many rereads later, I still pronounce Gollum as golem and Smaug as smog.
"[...] I still pronounce [...] Smaug as smog."
Wait, what? I can't remember when it was pronounced in the movies and I also (mentally) pronounce it as 'Smog.' It has never come up in IRL conversation so I don't know how it's actually pronounced.
Does anyone have a clip/timestamp on a video to show how it's actually pronounced? It's been a long time since I've seen the movies.
It's /smawg/, it should sort of feel like the name doesn't fit me your mouth properly, English phonotactics doesn't allow for gliding from W to G without a vowel in between.
When I was younger and listening to The Hunger Games, I thought the boy's name was Peter and my narrator just had an accent.
I read a book with a Chloe and I thought it was shlow
I was pronouncing "Byrne" like "buy-er-nie" until I saw someone who had that last name pronounce it like "burn". The way I was pronouncing it was as if I was excitedly saying "bye Ernie" 😂
Don't count on last names for that stuff.
You'll find duboise or dubois pronounced dubose which is horrifically wrong.
This feels like my Achilles heel sometimes
Your achills heel?
…or from my word-a-day calendar.
My parents had a dictionary of foreign words and I didn't always use them correctly
About 20 years ago when memes started appearing there was a site called memebase. I pointed it out to someone and he laughed at me for pronouncing it mêmebase because I speak french
Poutain 😂
Is it meem or mehmeh? I use mehmeh.
It's meem. Originally coined by Steven Pinker, IIRC, to contrast with gene.
It's spelt "Poutine".
My wife is Jewish. One day when she was very little, she and her mother were walking around the neighborhood and saw a Christmas wreath hanging somewhere. Having previously read the word in a book where it was spelled a lot like the word "breath," she asked her mother why they didn't have a "wreth" in their home.
In our household we now and forever pronounce it "wreth" on purpose because of how much I love that story.
Yeaa... I totally learned skibidi rizz from a book...
I respect when people misuse meme formats that they've only had a verbal description of.
Or you like to fuck with people.
Paprika? Pahp-reh-cah.
paper-ka
For me it's the word: ruffians
I still slip up and say roff-ians
Are people who learn via videos, audio media, or social interaction dumber?
Definitely. We hates them.
That depends. Which type of media has a denser word count, and goes into deeper detail? Which format requires active attention to consume? Which format enables side by side comparison with other works? Which formats sacrifice accuracy to try and grab attention with dazzle and drama? Which format uses more varied vocabulary and sentence structure?
But it isn't saying someone is smarter. It may be more accurate to ask which person is better informed; a reader or a watcher / listener?