Yeah, pronunciation rules for English are something like:
- Try to think of familiar words, or parts of familiar words that resemble the new word (or parts of it).
- Try to pronounce it that way
- Good luck and Gods peed.
Holy cow, I’m not the only one! In my slightly younger days, I read it with the “tome” sound in my head, but would speak it properly, until one day I read it out loud (it was the name of a store in a mall we were driving by) and everyone was very confused.
What?
Where are you from that you pronounce pious as PEE-us. That’s… utterly bizarre.
I wonder if they worked backwards from imperious (which is not im-per-eye-us)
True, but “Quixote” isn’t pronounced “Quix-oat” in Spanish, or in American English
Most kids of my generation will know that one from the original Battlestar Galactica. Imperious Leader!
suh nek duh kee
This is why there’s a movie entitled Synecdoche, New York. It’s a pun on Schenectady, New York.
In case you are interested, the original Spanish terms are:
quijotesco, -a: cite
donquijotesco, -a: cite
quijotil, which has no femenine, as it means relative to or pertaining to the book El Quijote. cite
It’s a nice hill to fight a guerrilla warfare from. I’m with you in spirit.
Though I still don’t know how anyone wants megalodon, iguanodon, pteranodon (the “p” is silent! that much I care for) to be pronounced. I guess I am doing it wrong.
That would be weird, even by the standards of any English, American or not.
Now I wonder what you call the inhabitants of Ibiza.
Right. Just like speed limits.
Not to mention that some substantial fraction of Spaniards (speakers of the Castilian dialect, I believe) pronounce “x” the way English speakers pronounce “sh” – so “Don kee-SHOTTAY”.
Ninja’ed – I was replying to Pardel-Lux.
You can’t tell the English language what to do. Logic has nothing to do with pronounciation.
Yep. If people were logical, we would never hear mischievous mispronounced as miss cheeve ee us.
I remember once reading about something bilobed and spending a breif time trying to figure out what a bill-oh-bed was.
Or people misspelling “mischievious”.
Did you do #3 on purpose? Either way, I love it.
There’s also the case of Raymond Luxury-Yacht…
Back in the olden days, when I transferred from community college to a University, my major required that I take one Classical Language course. At registration, I found exactly one class with a seat open, which is how I came to be the only music major among a bunch of pre-medical students studying Bioscientific Terminology. It was in this course that I learned about the Greek prefix MEGALO (as opposed to simply MEGA), from which we derive such terms as megalomaniac, megalopolis, and MEGALODON.
I’m also aware that the Greek root for tooth is ODON, not simply DON, and that dropping the supernumerary O was a well-thought out convention adopted by the paleotaxonomists.