Eight
Gauge
And, of course, Frasmotic.
So how do you pronounce “victuals”?
If I’ve heard it in RL, I didn’t recognize it. So it’s not vik-tchu-als?
vittles
then there are proper names. England has three family names spelled (approximately, who could remeber them) Marjoriebanks, Fetherstonhaugh, Chomondeley, that are pronounced, respectively, Marchbanks, Fanshaw, and Chumly.
Except for lingerie, which Americans have given a bizarre pronunciation that makes sense in neither English nor French.
A lot of the examples provided, such as victuals, chitterlings, and forecastle are pronounced because the fashion that arose in (roughly) the 16th centuryt to simply not pronounce the middle consonants in long words. Speech then would have sounded very strange and clipped to an English speaker today because they did that with most polysyllabic words. Eventually the fashion of pronouncing them fully came back, but only for some words. As Hari Seldon points out, this also happened to many proper names - consider Greenwich, which obviously should be pronounced “Green-witch” but is instead pronounced “Grennitch.” In fact, it’s quite impossible in many cases to guess how some names were originally pronounced because they’d be spelled a dozen ways or more. William Shakespeare spelled his last name at least a few different ways and none of them were the way we spell it now.
A neat example is the word “cuss,” meaning to curse. In fact, “cuss” IS “curse,” or it used to be. That’s just the way a lot of people pronounced the word “curse” for many years, simply dropping the middle R, and eventually it took hold with a new spelling and now we have two words where once we had one.
How is it pronounced? I’ve only ever encountered the word in print (at least, I think I have), and just assumed that it was pronounced how it’s spelled. Is the S silent or something?
Chronos, yes, and the first syllabe is more like “vy” rather than the vowel in “vis,” if I remember correctly.
comfortable
I like ‘geoduck’, as it’s obviously wrong, yet persists.
By the way, what other languages have such inconsistency in their written forms?
See my post, #12.
Not to mention Tagliapharo/Tolliver
Nuptial.
Better that than ‘ofay’, I think.
Meanwhile, I’ve been mispronouncing ‘victuals’ in my head for decades, and now have it right. Thanks SDMB!
I just learned something. Every time I can recall seeing it in print, it’s been spelled “vittles”. I think whenever I saw the real spelling, I just figured what it meant in context, but never equated it to a pronounciation.
Probably the popular pet food brand “Tender Vittles” cemented it into my mind.
I had a new coworker/friend at an office I worked at who was from Denmark. He was doing his best to fit in, even participating in our weekly NFL pool.
He came to me and asked my opinion of the team from Fernicks.
“Fernicks?” I asked.
“Yes, the Fernicks Cardinals.”
Rapport rhymes with adore.
Vinegar.
Re English family names:
A young man called Cholmondely Colquhoun
As a pet kept a hairy babelquhoun.
His mother said, 'Cholmondely,
Do you think it quite colmondeley
To feed your babelquhoun with a spelquhoun.
Clue - Colquhoun is pronounced cohoon and Chol,ondeley is Chumley.
I am (was?) a high-school dropout. That means I had few fundamental courses. Fast forward about five or six years later, I’ve made a few changes, accomplished a few things, and now I’m an undergraduate at Columbia University. Sitting in a chemistry class. My first chemistry class. With Columbia students. :eek:
Keeping up the first year or so of school was a bit of a challenge — most students had taken courses such as AP Chemistry, so I had to teach myself a lot of the material before the semester. My background generally went unnoticed, but every once in a while it sort of peeked out.
In a nice, large lecture hall, I gave an answer using the word “cashon.” Giggles kept erupting, but I was sure I had the correct answer — cashon cashon cashon, answered I.
How else are you supposed to pronounce a word that ends in –tion?! :smack: