There's probably a word I've been pronouncing wrong my whole life that I don't know about

pruwyben@discuss.tchncs.de to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 255 points –

Just based on how often I notice someone mispronounce a word without realizing it (or have done so myself and realized it later). Statistically I'm probably still doing it with some word.

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Welcome to the world of Irish names!

We got:

  • Dearbhla (Derv-la, f)
  • caoilfhionn (kee-lin, f)
  • Meadhbh (Maeve, f)
  • Saoirse (seer-shuh, f)
  • Seoirse (shor-shuh, m)
  • Caoimhín (kee-veen, m)
  • Sadhbh (sive, f)

And many more!

Hope do you pronounce Siobhan?

Shuh-vawn

My American accent pronounces it "Shove-on".

There’s meant to be a fada over the a (á), so it’s definitely meant to be a longer vowel sound.

Take the name Sean for example. Spelled like that it’s actually pronounced shan, and means old. The name that we all pronounce as Shawn is actually spelled Seán

The name that we all pronounce as Shawn is actually spelled Seán

And, fun fact, is the Irish version of the Hebrew name Yohanan (יוֹחָנָן) from which we get John and Jean and Jehan and Johan and Shane and Juan and many other variants!

Everybody's named John. All the way back. There is only one name, just lots of different spellings and pronunciations.

It actually helps a little if you realize the Russian letter В is pronounced like an English V.

We should re-do Romanization. Start over, sound it out, have a big Anglosphere conference to decide on what letters make what noise and stick to it.

Many of the slavic romanizations have largely centralised on strict roman phonetics. There are still exceptions, but many of them can be sounded out with a bit of learning.

Yeah. English doesn't use the "bh" and "dh" digraphs the same way we use "th", but Irish does. One you learn that, that's like 80-90% of the confusion.

My Irish cousin-in-law recently had a daughter and named her Blathnaid. I was very surprised to learn it is pronounced Bla-nid

Worcestershire

And nearby Leominster

And Cirencester

Sern Stir?

It's pronounced "siren sester".

“-cester” is usually pronounced “stir”, I’d assume then “Sir In Stir” if I got the first part wrong

There's a Worcester in Massachusetts, local pronunciation rhymes with sister (which is in turn said like "sista")

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One of my friends once called me pedantic, and I got to correct his pronunciation of it - he stressed the first syllable. One of the high points of my life.

Someone is peDANTic, but they themselves are a PEdant. Probably why they made that mistake

Like how we can reCORD some music and release a a REcord

Or make some COMpost by putting those scraps in the comPOST

I still put scraps into the COMpost, but only the comPOSTable scraps.

Ghoti

I remember this one! They're was another one as well which I've sadly forgotten. I believe I tried to make a couple up myself once upon a time.

Ha I don't even know what that is so I will never say it.

GH is pronounced F like in "enough".

O is pronounced E like on "women".

TI is pronounced SH like in "action".

Therefore, ghoti is pronounced fish.

You CAN pronounce it fish, but you can also just simply not pronounce it.

GH is pronounced _ like in high.

O is pronounced _ like in jeopardy.

T is pronounced _ like in potpourri.

I is pronounced _ like in receive.

Therefore, ghoti is completely silent.

Fun fact: every letter except V can be pronounced silently.

That's interesting! How about Q?

Lacquer. (Which I believe is the only word in English with a silent Q. Proper nouns don't count.)

Do you mean stuff like acquire? There are a good bunch of 'cq' words.

T is pronounced _ like in potpourri.

Kind of a cop-out, since that's a straight-up French loanword. "Soften" would be better. Or "often," if not for the fact that it's so commonly mispronounced.

True! I just remembered that there was a way to make the whole word silent but didn't remember the T bit so I looked it up. This was the first example. Soften is much better!

its aluminium

aluminum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium

tomato tomato lets call the whole thing off!

oh what, that's an actual spelling? I was just saying that

Yes, "aluminum" is the original, and "aluminium" was later adopted to make it sound more Latin.

For me it isn't "some" word it is "many, many" words.

charcuterie (shar-KOO-terr-ee) (TIL)

potable (POH-tah-bull)

prerogative (preh-ROG-ah-tiv) -- wait, wat? Damn. I say it (pur-OHG-ah-tiv)

preternatural (pree-ter-NAT-chur-al)

remuneration (reh-myoo-ner-AY-shun) -- I'm not admitting how I say it lol

surprise - let's just say I spelled it suprise for ages. sigh

victual (vittle) - wait, that's how you spell it??

Indefatigable (IN-dih-FA-tih-gə-bl) not in-dee-fa-TEEG-able

Primer: \PRIMM-er\ -- small book / short informative piece of writing. (Brits can use long-i for both the paint undercoat and the book).

Mischievous: \MISS-chuh-vuss\ though mis-CHEE-vee-us is a non standard alternate pronunciation.

Interlocutor: \in tuhr LOCK you tore. I had no idea how to pronounce this so I never said it.

I think some "mispronunciations" are down to regional pronunciation. Like, I say miniature as MIN-ih-chure by habit though I'm well aware of how it's spelled and "should" be pronounced. I swear that's how I heard it growing up.

Maybe it isn't regional and it is just me. That would explain some things lol.

And uh, yeah I have a bunch more, some I know but am forgetting at the moment. Undoubtedly I mispronounce many more while having no idea. What must people think of me? Lol

Look, I was on board until you started throwing out made up words like preternatural, victual, and indefatigable, then I knew you were pulling my leg.

Looks like you're mainly struggling with words of french origin, which is fair, the language is fucked up.

I'm American and have never heard "prim-er" I've always heard "prime-er".

I say miniture when it's an adjective like a smallish thing, but mini-a-ture when I'm using it as a noun, like the pieces used in tabletop gaming.

victual (vittle)

I knew that "vittle" was from the word "victual," but I never knew that they were actually pronounced the same!

Mischievous: \MISS-chuh-vuss\ though mis-CHEE-vee-us is a non standard alternate pronunciation.

I hate that alternate pronunciation. How do you get "vee-us" from "vous"?

Idk. Likely some people misheard or misread it way back and then repeated.to others and it spread. How does any word change over time, right?

The only time I have actually heard someone use indefatigable is in the Monty python, where they intentionally pronounce it wrong

/prəˈrɒgətɪv/ Huh. I guess usually when a schwa and a rhotic is involved, my dialect drops it. I pronounce it /prˈrɒgətɪv/ which could be romanized to pur-ROH-guh-tiv. But there's no actual separation between the u and the r there.

Interesting. I find the combination of rhotic - schwa - rhotic rather awkward. That could explain why it is commonly mispronounced.

A "niche" is not a "nitch"

You're a bit too late for trying to complain about that one.

The latter has been the dominant American pronunciation of the word for so long that it now appears as the primary pronunciation guide in American dictionaries.

Both Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster agree that "nitch" was the correct pronunciation in both British and American English until very recently. You already linked Merriam-Webster, so here's O.E.D:

N.E.D. (1907) gives only the pronunciation (nitʃ) /nɪtʃ/ and the pronunciation /niːʃ/ is apparently not recorded before this date. H. Michaelis & D. Jones Phonetic Dict. Eng. Lang. (1913), and all editions of D. Jones Eng. Pronouncing Dict. up to and including the fourteenth edition (1977) give /nɪtʃ/ as the typical pronunciation and /niːʃ/ as an alternative pronunciation. The fifteenth edition (1991) gives /niːʃ/ in British English and /nɪtʃ/ in U.S. English.

(N.E.D is the original name of the O.E.D. "/nɪtʃ/" is pronounced "nitch" and /niːʃ/ is pronounced "neesh".)

I hope cache isn't pronounced like cachet (rhymes with sashay) rather than cash.

Australians pronounce is as kaysh which Ive always used, and I was horribly annoyed by Americans pronouncing it cash.

I was even more annoyed when I learned that cash is the “correct” way to pronounce it!

It varies by region at least in the US based on a few years of doing service desk work. Listening to YouTubers, it seems a bit all over the place as well.

It likely correlates with French influence in the South, seeing as it is a French word.

Some of the the Louisana folks would often say ka-SHAY in a wonderful Cajun accent.

Fun fact i lost a regional spelling bee because of those exact words. I should have asked for usage example but I was like 11 and terrified

I was like 25 when I found out it was wheelbarrow and not wheelbarrel

Gnocchi

Knee-yo-key

Even that is an approximation, I don't think English has the Italian gn sound, which is the same as Spanish ñ.

I can't think of any way to spell it that'd lead to a precise pronunciation, or any English word that contains that specific sound.

I mean, this word does have an English pronunciation that is distinct from the Italian pronunciation, which follows English phonology.

Of course, I just found it interesting there's no equivalent sound

Re-reading I can see you weren’t actually claiming English speakers needed to use the Italian pronunciation. Some people do claim that so I just kind of continued my lifelong argument with those people :)

I agree that basic sounds from one language that don’t exist in another language are interesting.

I understand your point and admit my comment could definitely be interpreted that way.

I could be a dick about it and demand people learn to pronounce it the way us Italians do, but then I'd also have to start pronouncing every English loan word perfectly and with a correct English accent while speaking Italian, and you can do that without sounding like a pretentious asshole, so I won't.

It’s funny that we call these words “loanwords” that we “borrow”. That implies they don’t belong to our language and that we don’t have the right to modify them however we want; it even implies that eventually we’ll return them to their language of origin. It would be much more accurate to say these words have been acquired, incorporated, or assimilated. That’s what languages actually do with words they get from other languages.

Personally, I enjoy the organic nature of the exchange of words between languages. Different languages and cultures treat foreign words differently. Some try to stick as close to the original pronunciation as possible, and some happily alter the word. This can even be handled differently by the same language and culture at a different period of time. For example, in English we have the words “gender” and “genre”, both borrowed from the same French word at different times. The older one is pronounced in an English-sounding way and the newer one is pronounced as close to the French way as possible. I find this kind of stuff very amusing.

But isn't that exactly why it's called loan words? In Swedish we've borrowed words like radio and nylon and we initially pronounced them as in English. But eventually we started to pronounce them as the spelling would dictate in Swedish (the English pronunciations would've been spelled rejdio and najlon). For toilet it's the opposite. We borrowed toilette from French, but eventually altered the spelling to match the pronunciation: toalett.

I'll grant you that once we have adapted and incorporated the words, we are no longer borrowing them. Maybe we should stop calling them loanwords at that point. But while they're still new and don't yet fit in, I would say that borrowing sounds about right.

On another note, I can't understand why a people wouldn't want to make every word work in their language. You completely lose the flow of speech when you have to pronounce something that doesn't fit naturally into it, and you either come off as a pretentious douche or a stupid person.

I'll grant you that once we have adapted and incorporated the words, we are no longer borrowing them. Maybe we should stop calling them loanwords at that point. But while they're still new and don't yet fit in, I would say that borrowing sounds about right.

Well, the definition of “loanword” means it isn’t just being used ad hoc because it is brand new, but rather that it has been incorporated into the language at least to some extent!

If that's the case, I agree that it's a bit strange.

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Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

What's the grammatical rule for using 4 l's in a row? Ma gawd what a mess

Not Welsh, but I think it’s a compound with successive elements ending and starting with ll

Exactly what I found, it makes sense and is just a large contracted description of the town, specifically made to be as long as possible!

4 l’s in a row

That’s basically how you spell “yellow” in 22nd century Spanglish

You know they specifically chose that place to mess with him haha.

For the C/C++ nerds: Clang. There are still many people pronouncing it "Cee-lang".

Wait but...but that means I'm supposed to pronounce it like the sound of slamming metal doors? but it's for the C language!

am I seriously getting gif'd again?

Why is it pronounced gif when it should be pronounced jif? It's so much clearer when you say jif! AND YES, I DO SAY GIRAFFICS! AAHHH!!

There is probably lots of stuff like that in coding. Href could be “huref, and it took me a while to realize that it was ‘em’ and not just ‘m’ after hearing it.

Sequel server grinds my gears.

Wait until you hear stuhd, that's how we agreed to pronounce std because "ess tee dee" would have been awkward.

I like pronouncing numpy so that it rhymes with lumpy just to make people uncomfortable.

Lol at my job someone referred to "E T C" and I was completely baffled until he actually typed it out, /etc... I just call it "ets" because it's short for "et cetera"...

Worcestershire.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiasis.

I must be pronouncing them right enough for voice to text to understand me because I certainly cannot spell those.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiasis.

I must be pronouncing them right enough for voice to text to understand me because I certainly cannot spell those.

Except voice-to-text spelled “pneumono­ultra­micro­scopic­silico­volcano­coniosis” wrong. It did “iasis” instead of “iosis.”

You can't pronounce worcestershire right. Nobody knows how it should be pronounced.

The pronunciation is easy, but seemingly completely disconnected from the spelling.

Wooster Shur.

I hear so many people pronounce "cavalry" as "calvary," which is a different word altogether.

A coworker of mine always says chipolte it boils my guts

I pronounce Chipotle with the same emphasis as Aristotle

Do it the other way around and it will sound closer to the original pronunciation of Aristotle.

Same as you, but in my defense I've never heard it out loud. A mexican friend taught me the correct way, I then understood the word comes from Nahuatl

Similarly, chocolate and coyote and tomato are also Aztec/Nahuatl words in origin. Which means our pronunciation is likely inaccurate

Avocado is our English speaking ancestor's poor attempt at the Nahuatl word "ahuacatl."

Not exactly related to the question, but as a non-native English speaker, whenever I read something related to weights in imperial, e.g., 150 lbs, my mind reads it as 150 lubes.

I know it's pounds, if I would read it out loud, I would say pounds cause I'm not a weirdo (well...). But still, my internal monologue has lbs = lubes

Right? I’m a native English speaker (Aussie, so…loosely native English speaker) and my first exposure to “Lbs” was for the weight of Pokemon in the physical red Pokédex handbook, so I always just said they weighed “X labs”, still don’t immediately correct it in my head 25+ years later.

I was the same except I said it as "ibs" was quite a while I was thinking that when I was younger. My internal monologue still says it this way anytime I read it even though I know now

If anyone is wondering why this is abbreviation for it, it is because the full name for pound weight in latin is libra poundo. We use the libra part for the abbrievation into lbs but pounds for the actual common name.

Mine was "daschund". I always thought that was a separate breed from a "doxen".

Even after being educated on how the word is actually pronounced, I still purposefully pronounce it literally "daschund". Fuck 'em - should've spelled it better.

Daschund is pronounced like "daak' snd" in case anyone else didn't realize this. My mind is blown.

  1. It is spelled Dachshund (Dachs-Hund, German, lit. Badger-Dog, as the breed was created to hunt foxes and badgers in their burrows)

  2. It is pronounced Dax Hunt (good example by a native german speaker: https://youtu.be/6aveG0N6Jtc?si=mzCsfrVA95VJZggG )

I made the mistake of pronouncing epitome as "ep-i-tome" for a while.

Sometimes I like to pronounce it “lingerie” just to piss people off

I had a roommate in college that pronounced "epitome" like "epi-tohm." He also pronounced "tome" like "toom." Drove me nuts.

My buddy would always talk about the skill toom's used to unlock the "ruin" (rune) skills.

Barely Sociable did this and got a chuckle out of me, great that he owned it in a later video, though.

You could record the times when you find out a new word that you've been pronouncing wrong. You should notice less and less new mispronounced words as your list of known mispronounced words gets longer and longer. If you graph the data out, you can extrapolate the curve out to infinity, and you can estimate how many total words you're mispronouncing.

So swaive vs suave or deboner vs debonair? Maybe 'fisticated vs sophisticated? You could be a swaive, deboner, 'fisticated urbane 'burban urbanite.

Personally, I blame the French for the short comings of the English language, just because I randomly can.

And that is fine, when/if someone corrects you, you explain that you have never heard the word spoken, just read it.

Tri-ummm-vir-ate

This right here! I tell my kids not to give someone a hard time mispronouncing a word because it means they learned it from reading.

I once spoke with a Southerner about favorite books. They recommended a series they called "The Will of Time".

Only later I found out they were talking about The Wheel of Time.

I started at a company that had a lot of people from India. I have no problem with anybody from anywhere but It takes me a little while to become familiar with accents. That little fuzzy search option in my brain that listens to one thing and realizes what they're trying to say is woefully undersized.

It's my third or fourth day on the job I'm nice and early and my boss's boss strolls in. I'm the only one there.

Suresh: I need you to check on the Catalina office. Me internal: I roughly heard of Catalina but I don't know anything about it I don't even know where it is, maybe it's a city in Spain or something. They do have some international offices maybe I'm missing something. Me: Catalina? Suresh: Catalina, I need to know the status of Catalina. Me Internal: s***, that didn't help. Furiously googles, no, that's not any help either. Can I ask the CTO to spell something, would that be a career-ending move on day three? Should I ask him what country it's in, should I say I don't have the information for that office obviously I'm a working human being I could look them up and call them if I knew. Suresh reading my confusion: Catalina, Catalina, about 6 hours from here.. Norte Catalina. Me: ohh so sorry, no problem, I will find the contact information for our North Carolina office check on them and let you know.

I pronounced puddle as poodle up into my thirtys. Maybe I didn't use it too often so it wasn't noticed. My second wife did. Absolutely scundered!

Thing is, language is constantly changing, so if enough people say it wrong, it makes it correct over time.

As an example, people have been using nauseous incorrectly for so long, that it's now correct again.

Insurmountainable - Michael Scott

ITT: people who care about how you represent yourself are evil, apparently.

I suspect people got a little butt-hurt when they discover their shirt is a little stuffed.

I would say you're actually witnessing the very real phenomenon of language-drift. Languages evolve for a billion reasons, but there's no right or wrong state of language.

That's why we distinguish between language, dialect, idiolect, sociolect. Each bearer of language is also a producer of language. Their version is just theirs, in whatever many ways that makes that version unique.

(Check linguistics to better understand this process of language-drifting )

My teacher told me that he'd fail me if I mispronounced "Data" as "Da ta" and not "Dait a". So I always mispronounce it

Is it a dialect training class? Because otherwise that feels like boarderline racism to penalise someone for having a different an accent.

"Da ta" vs "date-ah" is regional. If you're pronouncing it "wrong" move across the pond and suddenly you'll be right.

I mean I live in Colorado and I've heard it both ways all the time. I've even heard "da tum" and "date 'em" for the singular.

He claimed it wasn't an accent. It was a database class. I think he was correct though as that type of thing transcends accents

He was weird. He spent an entire class talking about his divorce and once came in dressed as a cowboy. Oh, and he also taught us for mathematics, and ended up failing the entire class on coursework.

Your teacher clearly watched Star Trek TNG, because it's Mr *Dait a" not Mr. Da ta.

You just reminded me of my highschool AP bio teacher who was a new Englander, but lived and worked in the UK for a few years. He pronounced half like "hawf" and it was always jarring because otherwise his accent was mostly normal.

Though I want to know why Wednesday is pronounced "wendsday" or "wensday". The n is after the d!

It’s wed-nes-day.

Or so my wife insists, while giggling.

The d before n is inherited from the original name Wodans dag (like Tiu's dag, Thor's dag and Frey's dag inherited through the Saxons and Danes from pagan germanic gods)

The rest is just linguistic shift through the centuries of changing language. Like Dag -> Day while for example in German Dag -> Tag.

But the root of the word is still Wodan then old english Weoden then Wedn.

Same guy as Marvel's Odin.

Exactly, just more (and different) linguistic shift. Woðanaz -> Woden -> Oden -> Odin

Go ahead and say it literally. The middle syllable is still barely noticeable when said quickly.

That's probably why it got dropped.

My favorite example of this happened during a D&D game years ago in which the DM kept pronouncing the word portcullis as PORK-YOO-LISS.

To this day, the word causes the image of some sort of ancient Roman pig gladiator to appear unbidden in my mind.

Panacea. I pronounced it incorrectly for a long time. Never knew because no one corrected me. Fortunately it didn't come up too often.

The channel this video is from can be a useful resource.

You can just look up words in the dictionary and look up the phonetic pronunciation key to refresh your memory. It pays to do this every once in a while.

I said automaton wrong for years. I said auto-maton instead of au-tomoton. I still cringe a bit thinking about it :-/

I only just woke up so forgive me if you're right, did you mean automation?

No.

automaton — Noun: 1. A machine or robot designed to follow a precise sequence of instructions., 2. A person who acts like a machine or robot, often defined as having a monotonous lifestyle and lacking in emotion., 3. A formal system, such as a finite-state machine or cellular automaton., 4. A toy in the form of a mechanical figure. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/automaton

  • genre
  • only
  • gif
  • croissant
  • Aloysius
  • Edinburgh

The rest I can understand, but... only?

I had heard the word “only” spoken in English, but didn’t know how to spell it. At the same time, I had seen the word written, but thought it was pronounced “on-lie” — oddly enough, I had never heard anyone use “on-lie” in speech; I thought it was one of those words that exist but aren’t used very much, like “splendid” or “indubitably”.

I just remembered I also had trouble for so long with the English words “union” (pronounced like English “onion”) and “onion” (pronounced “onny-on” or “on-ion”).

We've probably all said a sentence that no other person in history has ever said.

Contiguous. Didn't find out about that one till I got to college... That was embarrassing as f***.

At some point in my life I started enunciating every syllable of the word "comfortable," where as most Americans opt for "kuhmf-tr-bl." I don't remember when or why I started doing otherwise, but I can't go back now.

If people can correct you then it means they understood it perfectly clear.

You underestimate the narcissism of small differences. As exemplified in the below recent local news clip that demonstrates the publics furor over the correct pronunciation of "pierogi."

https://youtu.be/Jgi-tZevbNc

^Also a great look into the mind of the average white working class swing state voter and where their priorities sit

Every time I mispronounce a word, people are assholes and make fun of me. Human beings are pieces of shit for so many reasons.