I am English and watch some US television programmes here, and very good they are. When watching these programmes I am struck by the occasional strange use of English and generally I don’t mind. The English language is after all evolving on a daily basis.
I don’t have a problem when the word “route” is pronounced as “rout”, or when “lever” is pronounced as “leather”. I don’t even mind the silent Ts, as when Bill Gates talks about the “innernet” or “compulers”.
What I want to know is how did the word Alternate become to be used instead of Alternative?
My British dictionary gives one meaning of “alternate” (adjective) as “being a second or further choice; alternative”, with no mention that it is an American usage.
Just think of it as a rare example of Americans using the shorter of two alternatives, when usually the opposite is the case (“utilize” instead of “use”, “burglarize” instead of “burgle”, and so on).
The literal meaning of alternate is back-and-forth, as in “Let’s start carpooling to work. We can each drive on alternate days.”
But the word has come to commonly mean different, as in “I have an alternate suggestion for our carpool. My car gets better mileage so let’s take that every day and you can pay me for half the gas.” In these cases, alternative should be used.
I don’t know where this originated but I do recall it being mentioned in discussions of science fiction. Some people said the genre of alternate history should really be called alternative history. They’re technically right but alternate history is what caught on.
Does anyone else pronounce the two uses differently? I just realized I say all-ter-net, when I mean alternative, and I say all-ter-nate when I mean back-and-forth.
I pronounce them differently but based on usage not meaning. I say all-ter-net when I’m using the word as an adjective - “This street uses all-ter-net parking” - and all-ter-nate when I’m using the word as a verb - “So we have to all-ter-nate which side we park on.”
Yes, the verb is ALL-ter-nate, the adjective is all-TER-nuht.
Lots of words are pronounced differently depending on the part of speech. With -ate words, often the -ate will be sounded out in the verb but reduced to a schwa vowel in the noun or adjective, eg graduate, separate, duplicate and so on. In other words, the consonant will be more strongly voiced in the verb form, eg abuse, or simply the stress will change, eg insult.
I would like to know when the subjunctive disappeared from British usage. A book I coauthored was published in England and the British copy editor marked as wrong a few dozen usages of such constructions as: “A necessary and sufficient condition that … have …”. I ignored her and, since the typesetting was ours, we had the final word.
American here. One of the two pronunciations of lever that I consider “right” does have the same vowels as “leather”, but the words are definitely different due to the [v] vs the [ð]. I also consider two “route” pronunciations to be right, one of which sounds like “rout” and the other which sounds like “root”.
Also, it seems that we sometimes change the T to something closer to a D (or all the way) when the syllable is stressed, such as in the religion of the Church of Jesus Christ of “Ladder” Day Saints. Latter and Ladder are homophones for me.
I used to listen to a podcast from England (sorry I don’t know which part), and some of the hosts had a very strong (to me) accent, and they would consistently pronounce the “th” sound as either a ‘v’ or ‘f’, depending on whether it was voiced or not. So “leather” would be pronounced as “leh-ver” and “with” would be pronounced “wif.”
I thought at first that this was a speech impediment, but then I heard another person doing it, so I figure that it’s a dialect thing.
But the OP was talking about TV shows from the US, and I’ve never heard anyone in the US do that.
What part of the world are you from? After my last post, I’m wondering whether you’re in England, in one of those areas whose dialect merges the “th” and “v” sounds.
But yes, in the US, “lever” is usually pronounced with a short-e sound (like leather), and route is commonly pronounced to have the same vowel sound as “out.” Though you’ll hear “lee-ver” and “root,” these are less common. “Leh-ver” is used about 95% of the time in my guesstimation, and “rout” is used about 80% of the time.
You will frequently hear people round-off the hard-T sound in words like “Internet” and “latter.”
I’ve never heard anyone say something like “compulers,” they usually just say it with a softer-T sound, like “compuders.” The “T” sound in the middle of a word is usually just said as a “D” sound. If we said a word slowly and carefully, we’d say the hard-T sound, but in speech it just gets rounded-off.
In my experience, “alternate” is more commonly used as an adjective, and “alternative” is more commonly used as a noun, although both words can be used as nouns and adjectives.
I’m an American and this bothers me too. In my own usage I maintain the distinction between alternate (things that switch back and forth) and alternative (another option).
This can, and does, cause real problems. I have seen an American professor of psychology, lecturing about the important psychological concept of “episodic memory” write it on the blackboard as EPISOTIC. When I called his attention to the mistake he was quite surprised and taken aback. I do not know how many generations of psychology students went away from his classes thinking that there is something called episotic memory. It took having me, an Englishman, for his TA to bring him to the realization that he was making a mistake.
Although she understood the rest of my order perfectly well, a waitress in a California Denny’s once had great difficulty in comprehending my request for a glass of water. Unfortunately, my initial, instinctive response to her puzzlement ws to pronounce the word, and especially the medial t, ever more carefully and distinctly. It took quite a while to straighten things out.
Although it probably originated from “bother” as pronounced in a Cockneyish (at any rate, London working class) accent. Since the early 1970s in England, “bovver” has been a widely understood word in its own right, with a meaning quite distinct from that of “bother”. Most people will understand both, and pronounce them quite differently.
