Yes, I am sure I know how to pronounce Maryland. My friend ruadh, who’s originally from Maryland but is an expat in Ireland, says the way Irish people pronounce her home state makes her cringe.
I can see pronouncing the d at the end. That wouldn’t be too bad.
As in the Caribbean sea ,you colonials(Sorry but I cant recognise your illegal,revolutionary government)pronounce it Carribb eann,where as we say Carrabeeean.
Everyone I know pronounces it Aluminum. We pronounce it that way, because we spell it that way. We spell it that way, because that is the way the guy who first identified it spelled it. Ok, not quite. We do spell it the way the guy who first identified it spelled it, but we spell it that way because the guy who made big bucks with a better way to produce it sold his process that way. It’s the Brits and their evil stepchildren who had to make it even harder for children to pronounce by adding an extra syllable!
On VH1 they showed a small clip of a UK female pop singer, I forget her name, but anyway, she called herself Bri’ish, and she wasn’t imitating anything.
I think her accent sounded like this
So you’re saying that you 'Merikins learn mathematic over there? Well we’ll stick to our mathematics, ta.
Ah, that means you folk learn mathsematics, I suppose.
Oh, and by the way, we live in America, not, Americer.
Also, there is no such country as Chiner.
Hehe…the one person that comes to mind for this is Phil Keoghan, host of The Amazing Race. He’s from New Zealand, and his accent is relatively subtle (I couldn’t place it at all the first three seasons of TAR, until I read somewhere that Phil was a Kiwi), except for that “r” ending on words that end in vowels.
Now you’re just arguing mathsemantics.
The way that certain people in Britain say year and British is all dependent on where the person is from. I am from the north east of Scotland and pronounce these words the way god intended!
A couple of words that grind my gears when some Americans say them are:
tuna and opportunity.
British:
tune-a
opporTUNEity
Amercian:
toon-a
opporTOONity
YAR!!!
But … those all sound the same to me.
I think that the British pronounce Tune like T-you-n.
Australians and New Zealanders are just about as bad as the British.
The R at the end of words that end in vowels only occurs if the following word also starts with a vowel. We don’t just sat “Chiner” on its own, it’s only in cases like “China and Japan”. It’s called intervocalic intrusive rhotacization, as explained by Johanna in the following old thread: Brits and linguists: What is “Vodker” and “Canader” all about?
I don’t get it. “Tune” and “Toon” are pronounced the same way.
It wasn’t the best way of illustrating the difference in pronunciation, choosing two spellings that sound the same in American English, was it?
I’m not going to be defending any pronunciations on either side of the pond, but I’d like give some explanation or justification or something of a few of these American pronunciations (I’m an American).
Eye-rack, Eye-ran, that’s more or less the great vowel shift if, I’m not mistaken, the long /i/ dipthongizing. In any case, it seems to be a regular sound “change” based on phonological principles. I generally say “ee-rock”, “ee-ron” or “ih-rack/rock”, “ih-ran/ron” myself, since I can see that these words are borrowings and probably don’t conform to the pronunciation rules of American English. The second pronunciations listed are a sort of compromise with sounding American.
Math not maths. I’m not sure why the ‘s’ on the end of ‘mathematics’ has to remain when you shorten it. I don’t see any problem with leaving the ‘s’ either, I just don’t see any good reason why it has to remain. (BTW is it a plural? I’ll need to think about that; I’m not sure it is.)
Also, British versus American ‘tuna’, the British version inserts a ‘y’ sound whereas the American version gives the vowel its unencumbered sound. I’m not saying that either is more correct, but I’d say that the British version is less transparent.
Put another way, the British pronunciation of ‘tuna’ ‘opportunity’ etc. seems to involve some sort of regular sound change from historical sources (I’ll say that the Italian opportunita’, which I imagine is closer to the Latin source, has a ‘u’ much more like the American version). This isn’t a bad thing at all (see the previous post about ‘eye-rack’), but if you appeal to the historical sources of the word I’d say America comes out ahead in this case.
I, personally, love the British pronunciation of ‘figure’. Unlike ‘tyuna’ or ‘opportyunity’, ‘figure’ is more or less ‘figgar’. Educated Americans say ‘figyure’, while some less educated Americans say it pretty much like the British (except they tend to have a rhotic ‘r’). I have no idea why this one word reverses the pronunciation situation entirely.
And then there’s the way the Brits pronounce potpourri (POT-purry) as compared to the way us Yanks do (po-purr-EE). I once heard an interview where an American announcer used the word in an interview with a British expert, who replied, “How did the Pope enter the conversation?” (i.e. popery)