(To avoid confusion, by answer, I know I mean question)
If you were to respond to a question in Jeopardy with the proper name of a person / location / whatever, would you get it wrong?
“He wrote Cantebury Tales…”
“Who is…CHOW-ser?”
“This city houses the European headquarters of the United Nations.”
“What is GENN-eh-vah?”
“This Voltaire novel features a character named Pangloss”
“What is Can-DYE-d?”
Would you get the points?
On a related topic, would you get it wrong if you pronounced the answer correctly but the common pronounciation is different? “What is Amarillo Texas?” But you pronounce it with the correct Spanish accent?
Yeah, the best rule I’ve been able to deduce is that as long as your version could conceivably be a pronunciation of the actual answer as it’s spelled, they’ll let it go. Clearly, the show’s contestants (like most of its audience, I’d imagine) got their vocabularies from reading.
Conversely, Alex once clarified that in final Jeopardy!, you can misspell the word, as long as it wouldn’t affect the pronunciation. Writing “Chawsser” for Chaucer would (presumably) be OK, but writing “Caucer” would not.
Another vote for “sometimes”, “maybe”, and “it depends on whether you add syllables or just pronounce vowels funny”.
I’m not sure that I was certain that was the rule, but I have seen Trebek correct pronunciations and give people the points, and correct pronunciations and not give the points.
Oh boy, this reminds me of a judgment on Jeopardy! that I’m still upset about. The answer was “Federico Fellini” and the contestant said “Frederico Fellini” and they didn’t give him the point.
Alex even said if he had answered just “Fellini” they would have given it to him.
I think it’s a little bit much to expect Americans to notice that the Spanish name is Federico rather than Frederico. Along the same lines, I know lots of people who think the president of Mexico’s name is Vincente, rather than Vicente.
Yeah, Jeopardy! will bend you over and give you a good rogering for mispronunciations.
I lost two questions - first, I responded by saying “Who was Joe McCarty” instead of McCarthy. No love from the judges there. Of course I knew it was McCarthy… it just came out as “McCarty” for some reason. My boss, who is from Worcester, Mass, and from a huge Irish family said, “Hey, we pronounce it McCarty whether there’s an H in there or not!”
The next one was “What is Bosnia and Herzegovinia.” Wrong again. It’s actually “Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
After that I was pretty rattled and avoided guessing - there was a question about Kierkegaard but I was certain I’d pronounce it wrong …
When I was in junior high, my favorite game show was Tic-Tac-Dough. Part of the reason I liked it, of course, was the joy of watching grownups miss questions that I knew the answer to.
At the crucial moment in one episdoe, a contestant gave his answer as “Robinson ka-ROO-so”. To the audience’s collective astonishment, Wink Martindale declared the answer wrong. “Sorry,” he said, “I’ve got to get picky here. It’s Robinson KROO-so – not ka-ROO-so.”
For a show that lobbed softballs all day long, that was pretty surprising.
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