I love words, but still sometimes pronounce things wrong.
And I bet you do too.
I'm not talking about speaking too fast or jumbling letters and saying belly jeans
instead of jelly beans.
That's a spoonerism, by the way.
I'm talking about good old fashioned mispronunciations.
Things you didn't know you were saying wrong.
I don't need a see-goo, so let's jump right in.
Wait. Segou.
Seegway. Segway. Really?
That's how you pronounce those letters?
We're in for a ride.
I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky
And this is Otherwords
(Otherwords)
If you read a word before you hear it aloud,
you might determine the pronunciation in your head.
facade, colonel, epitome, awry, or omniscience.
Only later to find out it's actually fissaud, kernel, epitimee, uh-rye and omnishints.
I sincerely thought that this word was chowse until I was corrected, but
reading aloud in class, how was I supposed to know it was a Greek spelling?
That's pure chaos if you ask me.
Just in English,
Q-U-E is kyuh as in queue
kyu, as in barbecue, and kwuh as in Quebec or queen.
And it's also keh or khu if you're asking what in Spanish or French.
And every time I see the letters Q-U-A-Y
A I have to remind myself that it's kee not kway.
Sometimes the pronunciation of a word gets bent to sound like another word with a related meeting.
Someone who's mischievous might also be devious.
So it warps into mischeevious.
Espresso can make you go fast,
so it gets contaminated with express, hence expresso.
This word is traditionally pronounced dure as in endure,
but since it kind of means sour, it's slowly becoming dower.
According to a 1996 American Heritage Dictionary survey,
two thirds of people prefer the traditional pronunciation. But in 2011, it was evenly split.
More than a decade later, where do we all stand on the pronunciation?
Another big part of speaking and hearing a word is tone.
In English, you can say no or NO,
but there's still the same word, just with a different attitude.
However, in tonal languages like Vietnamese, Masai, Cherokee and Navajo,
a change in tone is a complete change in word meaning.
In Yoruba for example, when you say this word, depending on tone,
you can be talking about a coconut (àgbọn), a basket (agbọ̀n),
a wasp (agbọ́n), or your chin (àgbọ̀n).
and you probably want to know if someone is talking about a casual basket of coconuts
or the much more stressful wasp on your chin.
In Mandarin, f you walk into a restaurant and say, “wǒ yào shuì jiào”
you're saying “I want to sleep,”
but you probably meant “wǒ yào shuǐ jiǎo,”
“I want dumplings.”
I've done that.
Also, I often say I'm looking for my yǎnjīng,
When I mean that I'm looking for my yǎnjìng.
Personally, I'm definitely more likely to lose my glasses than my eyes, though,
“Where my eyes?!” kind of works as an expression for “I can't find anything!”
In tonal languages, using the wrong tone is a mispronunciation,
so watch your tone.
But don't hyper focus too much because that can lead to another mistake.
Hypercorrection is when you make a mistake because you're trying too hard to be correct.
Have you heard of the ferocious “jagwire”?
You can find them in the American South.
Due to a hypercorrection based on the southern accent, in some regions,
words like fire and wire might be pronounced fahr and wahr.
So Jaguar, which naturally has the R,
gets hypercorrected to ire, hence jag-wire.
You might be asking why is this a common enough word that it gets regularly
hypercorrected in the American South, where jaguars don't actually live?
But it's thanks to the football team, the Jacksonville Jaguars
and the professional broadcasters trying to cover their regional accents.
Hypercorrection especially hits words that we think of as elevated
like scientific or historical terms.
That's how silicon became silicAHn, even though you'd never say falcAHn or bacAHn
and the Knights Templar became TemplAHr, which Tom Hanks’ character in “The Da Vinci Code”
definitely should have known.
The Knights TemplAHr.
These Knights TemplAHr.
The Knights TemplAHr.
The TemplAHrs.
But the Templars.
But hypercorrection
can also affect more common words like this one.
Technically, the T is silent.
As in soften and listen and fasten.
But in the last couple of decades, people have started pronouncing it ofTen,
which is incidentally closer
to how it was pronounced before the advent of modern English 400 years ago.
In Cockney English, H’s are often dropped at the beginning of words,
so someone trying to correct for that might add H’s where they don't belong.
Like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.
In ‘artford, ’ereford and ‘ampshire,
‘urricanes ‘ardly Hever ’appen.
no, no, no.
The only H she pronounces is the one she added in front of the H-free word ever.
Similarly, it's not uncommon to see hypercorrect R adding in R-less dialects of English
like those in Australia, South Africa, or regions like where I'm from, New England.
If you grew up hearing this word pronounced watuh or watah and you learn it's spelled with an R,
then adding an R to other words you hear that end with the “uh” sound isn't a stretch.
Pasta becomes pastaR.
In fact, instead of idea, I used to say ideaR.
A similar pronunciation situation happens with words borrowed from other languages.
Hyperforeignism occurs when you overpronounce something
based on what you assume the authentic pronunciation is.
For example, the pepper jalapeño is spelt with an ñ, an n with a tilde on top.
Its spicier cousin, the habanero,
is spelled with an n, yet you'll occasionally hear it mispronounced habañero.
You'll also commonly hear the capital of China pronounce BeiZHing with a ZH sound
instead of with a J sound that is both written in English and pronounced in Mandarin.
I used to say ZH, but now it's always BeiJing.
And what about the French borrowing? Coup de grace?
“Stroke of grace.”
I only just found out it's not pronounced coup de grAH,
Meaning “stroke of fat.”
Which sounds so much more French with the dropped consonant.
that's hyperforeign in action for you.
Are there words that you started purposely mispronouncing
because it's funny and now you always say it that way?
Think people who say TarJAY and ChipoTTIL when they know full
well the official pronunciations are Target and Chipotle.
Or even better, that viral video of chef Nigella Lawson
pronouncing microwave “meecro-wahvay”
“which I’ve warmed in the meecro-wahvay...”
And I know Vine star Marlon Webb forever altered my pronunciation of water-melLONE
“They got helmets on their heads, but I got a watermeLONE instead!”
I've heard plenty of stories of kids who pick up the humorous mispronunciations from adults
and go out into the world not knowing that only their family says it that way.
The words and special pronunciations that your friends or family use are called “familects.”
When I say mispronunciation, that means there's an error.
There are often multiple correct ways to pronounce a word based on accent or sociolect.
Take, for example, this word or this word.
Do you say carmel or caramel, pee-can or pecAHN?
All are correct.
For the nut (fun fact) the closer you live to where the tree naturally grows,
the more likely you are to say pecAHn, which we get from the Algonquian language family.
Another example is this word Do you say “ask” or “ax”?
There's some prejudice against ax by those who consider ask to be the standard,
but actually ax was the original pronunciation.
It comes from the old English ācsian, and can be traced back to the eighth century.
Chaucer used ax and so did the first English Bible, in fact.
This phenomenon of transposing or switching sounds in a word is called metathesis.
This is where you'll see things like nucular and nuclear.
Or interduce and introduce.
The real difference between a pronunciation and a mispronunciation is time.
Mispronunciations win out over the centuries if enough people adopt them
because they're easier to say or sound better or look like they should be pronounced a certain way.
In fact, a lot of our correct
pronunciations are mispronunciations of our linguistic ancestors’ words.
We say fish and asp, they said fiks or fisk and waps.
Pronouncing the T in often is now so widespread that it’s listed in most dictionaries
as an alternate pronunciation, and may eventually become the standard way to say it.
Now, I don't think chaos will become chowse in my lifetime, but in 200 years, who knows?
Language is not set or frozen.
According to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, the only constant in life is change.
And that's just what language does.
So someone
trying to correct for what might add a correct for that.
Oh. Ooh. In Cockney English H’s are often
which is incidentally closer to how it was pronounced before the
Franklin!