Pronunciation follies

[ms_interpret]

The CBC needs to get people who know how to pronounce words properly. I had a good laugh today at the anchor who called the capital of Uruguay Montevideo [man tə ˈvɪ di jo] instead of the proper [man tə və ˈde jo] and, my favourite, vehemently [vi ˈhɛ mənt li]. For those of you who cannot read IPA (learn it!), I'll try my hand at fake phonetics.

Comments

[sunnydale47]

I thought it was AW-ree too! I was a voratious reader, and I knew a lot of words in writing that I had never heard pronounced.

But the mistake I remember best was the name Penelope -- I thought it was PEN-a-lope! (Well, we don't put letters in an en-VEL-a-pee, so how is one to know that name is pronounced pen-ELL-a-pee!)

One of those that I didn't have but apparently is quite common is misled. Many people seem to have thought it was MIZ-z&ld, as in the past tense of to mizzle, instead of miss-LED!

There's a couple that I'm acquainted with who go to a church named Kittamaqundi Community. The church is named for the nearby lake, Lake Kittamaqundi. (It's an artificial lake in the middle of a development. It was supposedly named for the Indian town that supposedly originally occupied that site, and I guess someone was trying to make it look more authentic or exotic or something. I've sometimes wondered whether they deliberately omitted a vowel because they thought Kittmaquundi was worse, or whether they thought the u was a vowel

[ms_interpret]

On the Kittamaqundi, I might have help for you. The /q/ often represents a sound we don't have in English. It's like a /k/ but is further back in the mouth. It's a uvular stop. It is almost certainly not just part of the qu. That stupid qu drives me NUTS. Why we can't just use kw like everyone else... grr.

Oh, man. I did the Penelope one too. And I never dreamed that Selene rhymes with Melanie.

I've heard both TERR-ist and hunnert on NPR too. Annoying, but the first one is at least forgivable. Dropping /r/ is nothing new. Chris says [mir] for 'mirror', for example.

[sunnydale47]

Ack! It wasn't till I reread my own comment just now that I realized I had misspelled voracious! Darn LJ and its un-editable comments!

In this case, the q is not pronounced as a uvular stop, just as a simple k. I think the whole story about it being an Indian word is a myth perpetrated by developers to create mystique. The development was built on land that had been farmed for hundreds of years. I don't think anyone actually knows what tribe of Indians lived in the area or what language they spoke -- any archeological evidence has been long since plowed under. Whoever came up with the spelling Kittamaqundi was just trying to make it sound fancy. It's just stupid. But in any case, even if it's hard to figure out the pronunciation of the last syllable from the spelling, there's no excuse for transposing the consonants!

Oh yes, "mir" is another one that drives me crazy. The second vowel can be a schwa (maybe even should be a schwa -- I don't think I've ever heard anyone say MIRR-roar) ... but it's not that hard to say both syllables! I

[ms_interpret]

Oh, that uvular stop always gets made into a k in English, but you're probably right about it being made up to "sound Indian". And no, no excuses for transposing. :)

Ya know, I've heard a few people put the middle syllable in Wednesday, but it sounds more like 'weddinsday'. Still wrong.

Oh, and that reminds me. Iron. I-ron, not I-urn. Gah. Those 'r' sounds are tricky.

Another one Chris does, but like klwalton I've given up on for marital safety, is 'impetus', which he constantly says 'impetuous'. Never mind that it means something else entirely, he always gets that one wrong.

[sunnydale47]

I wonder how that happened to iron? Just carelessness like MIRR and TERR-ist, I guess, but it's old enough to be universal, at least in the eastern US. I-urn (and similarly, I-urn-ee) seems to be the accepted pronunciation by now. The two or three times in my life I've heard someone say I-ron it sounded very strange and affected. I've heard I-ron-ee slightly more often, but it's still very unusual and sounds odd to me.

Saying impetuous for impetus is different from slurring a syllable, it's just plain wrong! Tom had one like that too -- he pronounced aficionado as a-'fik-ee-ON-doe instead of a-'fish-a-NAH-doe! I corrected him, but he said he'd been saying it his way all his life, and he wasn't going to try to change now. Agh! I tried to tell him that it made him sound ignorant, but he didn't care, he wanted to pronounce it his way. Fortunately it isn't a word that comes up a lot, but he did use it sometimes and it always set my teeth on edge