Kill is the Dutch word for channel, e.g. Arthur Kill is the strait between Staten Island and New Jersey.
That is a trick question, isn’t it? The Oxford English Dictionary has /kɪln/ first and /kɪl/ as an alternative. So, I guess, kɪlnz ?
LOL, that’s no word, that’s just a grunt.
Then the creakily conservative OED has changed to conform to modern usage, as my 1920s edition shows just the opposite.
I’m from Cleveland (East Side). I was about 5 and carpooling to school. We went by Doan Brook and a kid said, “That’s a crick.” I said, “No it isn’t. It’s a creek.” The other kid insisted it was a crick. I guessed his dialect had trickled into Cuyahoga County from another part of Ohio. I was already a linguist in the bud.
For that matter, the use of “brook” instead of “creek” in the Western Reserve is a heritage from Connecticut.
Yeah, this is one of those words I’m well aware of the “correct” pronunciation of, but if I try using “PLANt’n” in conversation, people are going to do a double take, so I say “planTANE.” It’s kind of like encountering “bruschetta” on a menu. Fuck. It’s “broosketta” and I prefer the pronunciation “broosketta” but to a lot of people I’m going to sound like a pompous ass, so I tend to defer to “bruschetta,” unless I’m dealing with proper Italian speakers. Like with many things language, it’s always a “know your audience” situation.
For the OP, it’s OFF’n, but either I hear “OFF-ten” more often, or I just notice the time when “OFF-ten” tweaks my ears. But it feels like it’s borderline majority pronunciation to me.
It’s a brook, dammit!
No, I say “creek,” but my (now departed) father-in-law always said “crick,” even though he grew up in the same neighborhood I was born in. I’m not aware of “crick” being much of a Chicago pronunciation, so I’m wondering if he picked it up a bit later when he spent time downstate for college and then out in Idaho. Or maybe it’s just the generational difference.
The type of hypercorrection often heard in “often” is called spelling pronunciation. We are all using spelling pronunciations whether we intend to or not. Hearing the /t/ in “often” is a little jarring to old ears because it started after we were grown. But my parents’ generation was already pronouncing the /l/ in “almond” before I was born. I was surprised to learn as an adult that it used to be silent. That back in the 1920s or whenever the l began to be pronounced, old people thought that sounded strange.
When I was 5, a sculptor brought clay to my school for us kids to sculpt something (I made an Allosaurus), then she would take it and fire it in a kil. I asked why not pronounce the n in kiln. She told me that’s just how it’s said. That was in 1964. Clearly I was not the only one to ask that question, because thereafter the spelling pronunciation took over. Thanks to my generation of kids who didn’t like the sound of “kil.”
In second grade the teacher showed a map of the “Artic” ocean. I asked why not pronounce the first c in Arctic? She said it’s OK to say it that way, but the way she said it is also correct. Meaning it’s your choice, kid.
Which raises the tangentially related question of how you pronounce “er,” as in “well, er, I don’t know.” I was taught that it’s just the British spelling of “uh,” but you’ll occasionally hear it pronounced “urr” with a hard R, as in Ted’s JFK impression on Mad Men.
If you look at the captions, a lot of British shows spell the sound I would spell “umm” as “erm.”
Better to risk sounding like a pompous ass (you won’t) than piss off an Italian in matters of Italian food. You’d better have used the right type of durum flour bread, too.
But do you order a panino when you only want one?
I’m the US it doesn’t bother me if someone orders a panini. But when I was in college I spent six weeks in Italy as part of a language institute trip with other students taking Italian and some of those students kept talking about ordering a panini. That was irritating.
I thought everyone knew that panini are only properly ordered in twos.
Panini in Italy are also very different than in the US. Most of the ones I got in Sardinia are just a buttered roll with capicola and provolone.
That sounds like Pittsburgh to me. It’s what my DIL says.
As long as I am posting again on this thread, let me mention a few more quirks in my dialect. First words like air, fare , pare (or pear) are not pronounced with short a, but with what is called a tense a, that could, with some exaggeration be described as ayer, fayer, etc. although it is lighter than that. As far as Mary, marry , merry, the first is with the tense a, the second is lax and the third sounds exactly like Murray.
I say Wensday for the midday of the week. The first d is gone. Oh, and bad and sad do not rhyme. The first one has a tense a and the second is lax. The two words can (as in can of corn) and can (modal) have the same difference. And the plural of house is the regular houses, rather than houzes as it is in most American dialects. Bet you didn’t know that house had an irregular plural in most dialects.
Hice?
“Do you have a hice in tine, or a hice in the country?”
Does your house have a mouse, or does your hice have mice?
For gods sake, man, keep your tenses straight!
Do your hice have mice?