And, really, if no one else around him speaks anywhere near remotely the same way, especially with such an ultracommon word as “the”, the kid will eventually standardize on his own through unconscious osmosis anyway, the same as we all do.
I’m trying to figure out how to say “the” with the e sound in berry.
That is cracking me up, because I have been trying the exact same thing.
I get the idea of different dialects, different folks. Pronounce it ’ joolery’ if you like, and I won’t join you, but I won’t judge you.
But my customers call in and pronounce ‘computer’ ‘com poo ter’. Now, that is wrong right, Hostile Dialect? They gotta be wrong on that one. Also, some of them say, ‘comprooter’. I am not making this up. Yes, they are southern customers, but this is no southern dialect, right? They are just saying it wrong?
Well, people pronounce “berry” itself in very different ways (particularly depending on their status as regards the berry-Barry-(bear-y) merger). Supposing one kept all three distinct, the <e> vowel in “berry” would generally be similar to that in “let” or “neck” or so on; thus, I suppose, one could say “the” like “then” without the /n/, thus rhyming with “meh”, though it would be at strong odds with conventional English phonology (where words generally don’t end in “lax” vowels), and I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone say such a thing. But then, I suppose that was part of the point, maybe? It’s hard to tell.
Though, since jimpatro is apparently from Texas, so I guess we can probably assume he doesn’t pronounce “berry” like so, and, indeed, probably merges “berry”, “Barry”, and “bear-y”. And going back and looking at the post that started all this, I’m even less sure I know what its point was. So… I’ll just let jimpatro come back and explain whether this is actually a pronunciation he’s heard, and, if so, what exactly it is.
It’s not “incorrect”. Look in a dictionary. You don’t even need to care enough about words to actually own a good one. Using the very same internet connection that allows you to access the SDMB, you can easily access the homepage of Merriam-Webster. The website is: www.m-w.com. Once you’ve gone to this website, you can then type in the word that you want to look up, and the website will define the word for you, as well as give a list of pronunciations.
It’s incredibly easy. Let me help you start by showing you what it says for realtor:
These might seem like a bunch of confusing symbols, but they’re intended to show various pronunciations. If you look near the bottom of the page, there’s a little link called “Pronunciation Symbols” that can decipher the meaning for you if you are still unsure about what it says there.
Until you’re able to understand the dictionary, it could be helpful to be aware of situations when you are likely to be wrong about what you’re saying. As a hint that there is more than one correct pronunciation, you should consider the possibility that the professionals in the field are actually more knowledgeable about how the word is used than you are. When you’re contradicting the people who know most about it, you might consider taking a step back from your hastily drawn and falsely reasoned conclusions.
Easy has nothing to do with anything. I could easily say “interesting” with four syllables instead of three, but there’s no reason for me to. The way I speak is already correct. And other people who say four syllables could drop a syllable, but it wouldn’t be easier for them. What’s easiest for them is to pronounce the word naturally, and sometimes naturally pronouncing a word includes an extra syllable despite our orthographic conventions. There’s nothing difficult about that, and it’s not automatically wrong when they do so.
(1) Your opinions of “better” and “cleaner” are mostly irrelevant. Of course, you have every right to your own language preferences, but you simply don’t know enough about this stuff to convince anyone who’s studied linguistics more than you that your alternatives are somehow “better” or “cleaner”, the definitions of which apparently being “the way you speak”. The only criterion I can detect from you is that if people speak like you, then it’s good, hygienic language. If they have the audacity to speak differently (even if those differences are standard), then their language is mud.
(2) This is a slightly better argument (though I have to note, again, that they’re not mispronouncing the words). But if you want to enter hypothetical-land, I could just as easily make the opposite case: they might just be speaking the way most of their clients speak, and they could potentially lose business by adopting a pronunciation that sounded wrong to their customers. I have no evidence for this, but of course, you have no more evidence for your hypothetical. You just threw it out because you’re egocentric enough to think that everyone should speak like you.
(3) This is just classic. You claim to know what’s in the dictionary without even bothering to look. It’s nice that you know that these books exist, but it would help your arguments if you actually bothered to peek into one before you started writing your post. This might stop you from making an ass out of yourself.
A mispronounced word is part of a person’s idiolect.
According to the definitions of Greater Los Angeles Area that I’ve seen, San Diego is not included. But even if we allow your definition, it’s still a California accent.
Los Angeles is in California. A Los Angeles accent is, in fact, a California accent. A San Francisco accent is also a California accent. Southern is an American accent. Midwestern is an American accent. The Boston accent is an American accent, as well as a New England accent. None of these statements contradict each other.
Prescriptivism doesn’t just have a bad reputation in this thread. It has a bad reputation among most language experts. But it is true that prescriptivism is not automatically off base.
The problem: I have never in my life come across a self-described prescriptivist who knew enough about language to provide consistently accurate advice about how language should be used. The random people on the street (or on this message board) drop inaccurate statements just about every time they let loose with a language opinion. And even usage “mavens”, whose advice is sometimes excellent, have large holes in their knowledge that result in many inaccuracies.
A good prescriptivist would ideally be like a good architect. They’d be mostly interested in aesthetics. Sure, they’d know enough about the structure of things to keep their edifice from falling, but they wouldn’t presume to claim that their own beliefs are the end-all and be-all for putting the pieces together. They wouldn’t have such swollen egos that they’d claim there is one and only right way to build a building, and they most certainly would not make a habit of telling any nearby engineers that they’re full of shit.
But that’s just not what happens with language. The overwhelming majority of prescriptivists are ignorant, disrespectful to experts, and incapable of keeping their mouths shut about things they don’t understand.
There’s a commerical now about real-tors. I find it jarring that they carefully pronounce it that way, given that everyone else I’ve ever heard say the word says real-a-tor. Real-tor sounds like Thor’s less important sidekick.
So I must be a racial minority to be offended by racial bigotry? No, in fact I speak a prestige dialect. I’m in the majority. You probably wouldn’t be bothered by most of how I speak. As for the word ‘realtor’, I don’t even know, since I’ve been saying both ways in my head so many times while reading this thread that I can’t recall how I usually say it.
No, I wouldn’t. I’ve been to Texas many times.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” -Mark Twain
It’s Hungarian. Something like Yaw-maw-ee-kaw aw yaw-maw-ee-kaw-ee-aw-kae. (Jamaica belong to the Jamaicans. Its a tongue twister.)
Why are you asking me to condemn pronunciations you don’t like? I’ve expounded upon this quite a bit in this thread.
You are simply delusional. I won’t even start on the rest of your massive ignorance. Since you clearly have no intention of fighting it, I suggest finding a board that fits your style better, like /b/.
You’ve touched on an important point about English phonotactics.
When children acquire tag words like “the”, it doesn’t register as “voiceless dental fricative + mid-close front vowel of duration X”. It registers as “voiceless dental fricative (or plosive) + default vowel of briefest possible duration as the oral cavity changes shape to accomodate the next sound”.
So if you hear a child say “theh teddy bear”, that’s something you won’t have to actively correct. Indeed, what happens naturally in many such situations is that the adult engages the child by repeating back part or all of the child’s message: “That’s right – thuh teddy bear!” That is the “correction” – reinforcement of the prevailing standard by example.
“Correction”, huh? How about just correction?
More hypocrisy. Which is why I brought up the unique pronunciation of the.
I figured someone would show their true colors.
And I don’t speak with a drawl or Hispanic accent. The reference to the e in then was what I was getting at.
One discussion of descriptivism vs. prescriptivism I came across put linguists(those who study language) in the descriptivist camp and teachers in the prescriptivist camp. When one comes across a new language to learn, say English, one should learn the standard form. There has to be a standard to start from that every English speaker can relate to. And this definitely puts the new language learner on steady ground from which to begin.
The student can then move on to dialects but they shouldn’t have to bother. We’re all taught American Standardized English in school , or at least we’re given the opportunity to learn it, so why not just speak it?
Wait, what word are you talking about? “The” or “then”?
I put correction in quotes to distinguish the passive “correction” that goes on all around a toddler learning English from active “No, say it like this” correction. Children normally learn language in the home and in their immediate environment from imitating (ultimately very well but imperfectly) the speech of those around them – not through focused active corrections of individual mistakes. Please note that I am referring to small children first acquiring children, not school-aged children who will be actively corrected much more often during formal schooling.
Where’s the hypocricy?
In any case, “the” is a bad example of a word of which a small child might hypothetical learn an “improper” pronunciation. It is assimilated as a tag, more of a grammatical rule expressed through a small series of indefinite phonemes than an actual word that carries lexical meaning.
British, American, Australian, or some other?
No one speaks American Standardized English very often. Like British Received Pronunciation (RP), American Standardized English (aka Newsspeak) is an artificial standard that is never learned at mother’s knee.
Consider Dan Rather, who is Texan. He spoke Newsspeak on the air, but did not speak that way to intimates (family & friends). Colin Powell speaks Newsspeak when “on the job” and speaking publicly, but speaks in an entirely different manner when around his Jamaican parents.
Because there is now, and will always be, value in being ourselves instead of mindlessly conforming to what other people want us to be.
Which does not mean that students should be allowed to breeze through their English classes without learning about the standard language. Being able to employ a “neutral” dialect at will is a powerful tool that every person should have available. But it’s only a tool, to be used as necessary (e.g. during a job interview) and then put away when it’s no longer required. Nobody is obligated to speak stiffly round the clock just to please people like you.
But more than that, even when we’re attempting to speak the standard language, that doesn’t mean that we are obligated to speak the language that you perceive as standard. Real-e-ter is an established alternate pronunciation. So is ju-le-ree. If your perceptions deem otherwise, then your perceptions are wrong. You can try to make a case that one pronunciation should be preferred over another, but that will be based on your opinions, not on the facts of English usage. You might even have a lot of good evidence to back up your opinions, but in the end they’re still nothing more than opinions.
If more prescriptivists realized that, and concentrated on aesthetics instead of “correctness” (which almost none of them understand), then prescriptivism would be in much better shape as a respected intellectual pursuit.
Well ‘jewel’ certainly is…
Not as annoying as extremist descriptionists who insist that however people pronounce or use a word is right. It’s still wrong when you pronounce it the way you do because you are trying to impress people but don’t understand the words well enough to use them correctly.
I agree with your point on “joolery”, because it does mean "things that are made by “joolers”, the latter being an essentially correct pronunciation of “jewelers”.
But if (generic) you don’t know the correct meaning, pronunciation, and usage of a word, just stop using it. You are not making your way right by doing it. If you didn’t have any French in school and don’t understand how French gerunds and occupational nouns work, don’t say “restauranteur” when you mean restaurateur. Just say restaurant owner.
If you didn’t have Latin, or haven’t read enough to understand Latin roots, don’t say “die-oh-sees” when you mean dioceses. Sad to say both of these mispronunciations are coming up in unexpected places, like NPR and CNN.
I could go on but I think I’ve made my point.
I wish you would expound a bit more, because after rereading the thread, I am still not sure if it is ok to use ‘com poo ter’ as a legitimate pronounciation for computer.
But, I guess I have no right to ask you to break things down to baby bites for me to understand it. It is my duty to try to read your posts again and figure out the answer.
Your analogy is as ridiculous as your other assertions. Eating baked beans on toast (or on bagels, or tortillas, or spread on a salmon) has no effect whatsoever on your ability to communicate.
HOWEVER, if you are a chef who expects people to treat you as an expert, and who wants to draw people into your restaurant, you probably won’t serve Oscar Meyer hotdogs as your signature dish.
I really couldn’t care less how you pronounce the word Realtor. But if someone who works in that profession and wants my business uses a widely-spread mispronunciation of the original word, it really won’t matter to me that it’s in the dictionary as an “alternate” or “also” (which is how my Webster’s Third lists it). It will tell me that the person doesn’t care enough about his own profession to know the standardized pronunciation, and that won’t make me want to do business there.
Are you really too dense to get the difference between correcting the pronunciation of random people (which I don’t do) and allowing someone’s pronunciation of their own profession to affect my opinion of their professionalism?
Did I use the word “significant”? I’m speaking of pronouncing a word in a jarring way that differs from its spelling and its traditional pronunciation. Fine for you (I don’t care how you say it), but a sign of unprofessionalism in a Realtor.
Really, now. How much brainpower does it take to say, “Hmmm. This word is spelled RE-AL-TOR, and that’s how my trade association, which gave me the legal right to use the title, pronounces it. It’s also the preferred pronunciation in my dictionary. I guess I’ll do it like they do and look like an honest-to-goodness real estate professional instead of someone who can’t figure out the pronunciation rules of the English language.”
They haven’t settled on a particular form. They’ve adopted a form without thinking about it. How could you possibly look at the word, think about the spelling and the standard pronunciation used by your trade association, and then pick REE-LA-TOR?
Nice use of sarcasm there, Kendall. You’re completely and utterly missing my point, and your sarcasm is totally misplaced, but it’s still kind of cute. Nice job.
And perhaps you should do a little homework before demonstrating your ignorance. You aren’t very clear about whether you mean professional in the real estate field or professionals in linguistics, but I would guess you’re talking about Realtors. The materials produced by their trade association pronounce it RE-AL-TOR, just like it’s spelled. Maybe you should take the hint that you’re being a pompous ass.
This has nothing to do with linguistics. I understand completely how dictionaries work, and how pronunciations vary regionally and culturally. What you don’t seem to understand is that a member of a professional trade association won’t be taken as seriously if he or she uses a pronunciation of the professional title that doesn’t match either the professional association or the spelling.
I am egocentric? You are the condescending, arrogant, expert in this thread. I don’t care whether you speak like me at all. You keep trying to draw the argument back to a linguistic la-la-land in which nothing is right and nothing is wrong. I’m speaking of the real world, and of trying to look like a professional. If an attorney ran a radio spot calling himself an “AT-TRON-NEE,” he wouldn’t get a whole lot of phone calls. He’d look like he wasn’t serious; like he hadn’t dealt with his own professional associations. The same is true of Realtors. Obviously, much of this has to do with opinions. Perhaps when you hire a professional, you simply pick the one whose name comes first in the phone book. I try to put together a set of criteria to quickly eliminate the non-experts, and then evaluate the rest for suitability. Someone who says “REE-LA-TOR” in their radio spot will be dismissed out-of-hand, as will someone who spells it “relator” in their print ad.
You’re quite right. I was not paying enough attention. Mea culpa.
Your cite is Wikipedia? Quite the expert you are. Did you write that one? You’re so pedantic linguistically that you feel any mispronunciation is “acceptable,” but you won’t accept the use of the words “greater XXX area” to mean “the area surrounding XXX”? That’s what “greater” MEANS to the majority of Americans. I understand that people from San Diego have their own identity and don’t want to be seen as part of Los Angeles, but to most people outside of southern California, “greater L.A. area” is just some radius around L.A.
Therefore, by your reasoning, saying “the 101” is an American accent. If that’s how you’re looking at it, I have no choice but to agree. I was merely trying to be a bit more precise, as people in the general area surrounding L.A. (does that make you happier than “greater L.A. area”?) tend to say “the 101” but people in the northern 2/3 of California tend to say “101” or “Highway 101.”
No wonder you chose a username with the word “hostile” in it. How, precisely, do you figure that using “greater L.A. area” to mean “the general area surrounding L.A.” is “massive ignorance”? If you can demonstrate to me that this isn’t a common usage, then I’ll cheerfully admit to ignorance fought and cease to use it that way. You, on the other hand, seem so set in your ways that you’re unwilling to even share a message board with people who notice the geographic proximity of San Diego and Los Angeles. Maybe you should go back to writing comments on YouTube.
Life in your world is very different than mine. In mine, you try to figure out who’s effective, not who talks purty.
I am a bit of a hypocrite, though. I hate when people pronounce my name (Julie) to rhyme with “goalie.” It makes me want to bite, but it’s the dominant pronunciation around here so I can’t just kill them all and bury them in the basement.
Why this fixation on the mere spelling of the word “realtor”? Lots of words aren’t pronounced in the way that strict adherence to their spelling would indicate. As I said before, look at “laboratory” (both the popular American and British pronunciations). Look at “iron” and “Wednesday” and “business”.
Also, the trade association is made up of many different people, who each pronounce the word in their own familiar way; it’s not some homogenous creature with a single voice which all members must emulate.
Furthermore, I don’t know that I’d say dictionaries contrast “preferred” and “disfavored” pronunciations, as a normative judgement; it’s more a matter of indicating that some pronunciations are more common than others. But there’s no great need to switch from one’s native less popular variant to an affected use of the more popular variant. Surely, in your own speech, you employ plenty of pronunciations which, though common (at least in the speech community from which you absorbed them), are not the globally most popular. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. and anyone would be foolish to draw conclusions about your intelligence, competence, familiarity with the words and the subjects they denote, etc., from that. You are essentially making an empirical claim: that there is some evidentially significant level of correlation between a realtor’s pronunciation of the word “realtor” and their competence as a realtor. This does not seem to be a supportable claim; we could put it to a rigorous test to see for sure, if you would like, but it is analogous with a great many other discredited ideas of linguistic prejudice.
Finally, these people have figured out the pronunciation rules of the English language; the pronunciation rules are not so tight as to banish all variety.
No single person, out on their lonesome, is making a pronunciation “right” by using it. That’s likely just a mistake that’s crept into their idiolect. What you don’t understand is that this mistake, after catching fire and spreading across the country, is no longer a mistake. If large swathes of people use it, then it’s a part of the English language.
I think you’re the fourth person in this thread so far who didn’t bother to consult a single dictionary.
But for your information: We don’t speak French. We speak English. We are not bound by French rules. We do not have to say “lingerie” like the French do, and so we don’t. We don’t have to say “forte” like the French do. And we don’t have to say “restauranteur” the same way either. We are not bound by French language conventions, not their pronunciation, not their spelling, and not anything else.
First and most important: if the pronunciation shows up on NPR or CNN regularly, then we have overwhelming evidence that it’s not a mistake. You can’t even argue that it’s nonstandard like “irregardless”. If it’s consistently used by multiple national news broadcasts, then it’s correct English.
And for your information (again): We don’t speak Latin. We speak English. We are not bound by Latin rules. An “agenda” is singular for us, not plural. A “caption” does not have to appear above a picture instead of below it. To “prevent” in English is not “to come before”. And to claim that “manure” is work done with the hands is a load of bullshit.
No, you didn’t.
There are potentially good points hidden deep inside, but they got lost in a haze of incorrect statements. I agree that “die-o-seez” is a pretty poor choice for a plural, and I wouldn’t use it myself. But my opinion that it’s poor doesn’t make it incorrect. My preferences aren’t any sort of arbiter for what English is. And neither are yours.