"Correct" pronounciations that people have given up on

Ah-DEE-dazs
SOO-Buh-roo
Heck if I know for sure, but FWIW I say A-sis with a long A sound. Like “stasis” without the “st”.

How do you pronounce Fila? I always say FEE-luh.

If they were speaking French, then they’d certainly be wrong. If they were using the word in English sentence, it’s not so easy to make that judgement.

Once a foreign word is adopted into English, it becomes part of the English language: we may keep the original spelling, but the pronunciation frequently (almost invariably, I’d imagine) changes. Forte’s a bit of an oddity in that an extra phoneme’s been erroneously stuck on the end, but it is what it is, and, willy-nilly, that’s how that word is now pronounced in English.

We have?

But I grew up with (and still hear occasionally):
AD-ee-das
soo-BAH-roo

These sound more right to my ears.

*wife

The first is certainly closer to how the founder of the company, Adi Dassler, would pronounce it.

It is?

People in San Jose would disagree with you.

Although it’s misspelled. In Spanish, it’s Cienaga.

Of course, the people in San Pedro wouldn’t. :wink:

If I remember my high school German,“ei” is pronounced “eye” and “ie” is pronounced “ee”.

^ This.

In sports (and video games), I usually hear “DEE-fense” when it’s used as a noun (“c’mon, defense!”) and “d’-FENSE” when it’s used as a verb (“pass defensed by so-and-so”).

And then when referring to the government department, I always hear d’-FENSE (“Department of Defense”, “Defense Secretary” etc).

It also depends on the whether forte is being used to describe a musical note or a person’s strength. Forte has two separate technologies, one French and one Italian. The musical note is pronounced “for-tay” and the person’s strength is pronounced “fort.”

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/forte

People write and spell chaise longue “incorrectly” based on etymology. The ‘u’ moves two spaces over and becomes chaise lounge. Google shows approximately the same number of hits, but all mass-market retailers spell it “wrong”. One correctly spelled hit on the first page is from a high-end retailer, and there are ads with it spelled “correctly” but I think it’s because it would say “Save on uvenjidfik at Target/Walmart” if you searched for “uvenjidfik”.

We had a whole thread just on the proper pronunciation (or lack thereof) of epitome. Well, okay, the thread went on into other words too.

Another more recent thread from earlier this year on “MACK-uh-bree!” And Other Determined Mispronunciations

Early Subaru commercial for the 360.

flaccid is apparently properly pronounced as flaksid although I’ve never heard that before in my life.

Also, I’ve given up trying to correct Americans on Melbourne. They pronounce it as the languorous “Mel-bawun” whereas the proper pronunciation is a much tighter “Mel-bin”

Boehner. C’Mon John, man up. Nobody believes you. :smiley:

Having been playing Fallout 3 and New Vegas lately, that’s what I came in to post.

No, Bethesda/Obsidian voice directors, it’s it not pronounced ‘Cachet’.

(Or maybe it was the actors for Three Dog and Oscar Velasco and the directors just didn’t bother correcting them…)

When I was in elementary school, the N in kiln was silent.
Oops, sorry! I see that was already taken care of.