Of
That’s not in front of a voiced suffix, though.
“Carmel” for “Car-a-mel”. Makes me insane - I’ve even heard it from radio “professionals”.
UT
I’m not sure what I’m arguing for at this point, but
roof -> rooves
hoof -> hooves
dwarf -> dwarves
wolf -> wolves
half -> halved
life -> lived
The [f] becomes a [v] naturally in English phonology.
It does, I agree, but it’s then written as a v. The only word where f is pronounced as a v is in of, and I’m not sure a word as different as that (different to plurals and part participles, that is) is a good example.
(I assume you mean life-lives, not life-lived, since lived obviously is the past participle of the verb live, not the noun life).
Moved CS --> IMHO.
These constructions are almost as odd to me as pronouncing a long i in short-lived. I would write and say roofs and hoofs.
No, you wouldn’t. As evidence, the original “long i” backer in the thread provided the example “knifed.” That’s a hard f sound, not a soft v.
I was waiting for someone to say this. In my lifetime, I have seen roof (particularly) go from irregular to regular in its plural. It’s been very interesting to observe. M-W.com now lists only roofs as the plural, which would have been ungrammatical when I was in elementary school.
Thought of more examples where the past tense of a verb ending in a single f retains the hard f sound:
Proofed, briefed, chafed, strafed, dwarfed, engulfed, golfed, loafed.
If we’re just talking about sounds, [ph] pronounced as [f] is never converted to [v] in past tense. Graphed, (autographed, photographed, telegraphed, etc…), morphed, triumphed.
The same holds true for [gh]. Coughed, laughed, roughed, etc…
This is hilarious - I just returned to the thread to post the exact opposite: I keep hearing commercials in which it’s pronounced “care-a-mel” (with the three syllables) instead of “car-mul” (with two), which is the way I’ve pronounced it all my life. “Toe-may-toe”, “toe-mah-toe”, eh?
I don’t think I have ever heard anyone other than commercial narrators pronounce caramel as car-a-mel.
The Southern habit of (mis)pronouncing the -ture in words such as furniture and literature as “-tyoor” instead of “-chur” still irritates me after nearly 30 years of living here.
I can’t quite get behind this one because it seems to be a dialectical difference in pronunciation, rather than just laziness. In the modern classic A Confederacy Of Dunces the older working class New Orleans characters of Cajun extraction usually pronounced it “chirren”, as the author wrote it out. Toole wrote out a different pattern of pronunciation for the one young African American character.
OTOH, pronunciations like “liberry” and “track” (for tract), just seem like laziness. I know we’re getting into the prescriptivism/descriptivism debate here. But in every language, young children mispronounce certain common patterns of vowels or consonants. To retain childish pronunciation throughout adulthood just seems wrong, subjective though that judgment may be.
On still another hand, however, I have to consider that the possibility that the way children speak a language might well lead the way as that language evolves into another. As spoken Latin in the era of the Roman Empire evolved into Vulgate Latin by the twilight of the Empire, changing patterns of pronunciation led to the radical simplification of the inflectional system. Furthermore, the daughter Romance languages of today are characterized generally by the simplification of consonant clusters, e.g. /ct/ to /t/, not entirely unlike the loss of the first /r/ in library, resulting in the “liberry” pronunciation. Over time, a simpler pronunciation can “win out”, but before that happens, it can reflect poorly on the speakers who use it.
This is a blessing in disguise. Unless they are well versed in French, and that applies to a only small percentage of Anglophones, you don’t want them going around trying to pronounce words like Favre in the correct French fashion.
How about "asterix’ and of course “ax”? Or just about anything Al Sharpton says? (And I don’t want to hear what a racist I am, I agree with everything Al says I just don’t think he has the right to mispronounce everything.
This South Park clip might amuse you, and be relevant and stuff. (NSFW, naughty language)
North Americans also pronounce the “d” differently, don’t we? IIRC the British pronunciation is more or less “shedule”, while Americans say “skedjule”. Or am I misremembering?
I haven’t heard the “asterix” pronunciation; on the other hand I’ve heard “asterik” which drives me nuts.
- Asterik *is the singular. *Asteriks *is the plural!
I’ve been listening to a Learning Company course on religions and the instructor drives me nuts with his pronunciations.
Himalayas - he pronounces it like regalia
Muhammad - he pronounces the first syllable moo
Islam - he pronounces the second syllable slam
Buddha - he pronounces it boo da like it’s two separate words.
At first I was telling myself that this man is a scholar and has traveled extensively. He may be using the more correct local pronunciations for these words.
But, dammit, I know how to speak English. I know what the correct pronunciation is for words like poem (which he pronounces poyim) and peninsula (peninchoola).
This is a standing joke between me and my bf, who would rather die than say anything with the correct French pronunciation-MASSage, GEHRige, Herb- but can’t stand the FARV thing. We make a point of saying “FaaahvRRRRRRRa” in the most exagerrated faux French accent we can produce without coughing.
In my poll, long-lived with a short i is winning by a landslide…