It’s not the letters that are getting mixed up. It’s the sounds. The spelling of a word doesn’t change just because of some variations in its pronunciation.
It’s perfectly natural for the the pronunciation of a language to change over time, especially with languages that are connected to populations in flux and transition. The fact that English spelling hasn’t changed much to accommodate those changes in pronunciation doesn’t mean that the pronunciation changes haven’t occurred. That has more to do with the historical lack of an “official” academy as some other languages have.
Every time one of these threads comes up, people run to their dictionaries to “prove” that their version of a pronunciation is “correct” (or that someone else is “not correct”). But the way we spell a language is not the determinant of how we speak it. Speech has a natural life which is independent of orthography. And not every dictionary can be expected to completely reflect every manifestation of the way a language is pronounced.
It seems that metathesis is the most common motivation for threads like this here–over and over again. Yet, as the Wiki articles explains, it’s a natural aspect of all language (and learning to speak a language), and it has nothing to do with the way we spell words.
Sometimes metathesis results in changes of pronunciation that eventually become standard.
Mostly, I believe. I think the Wikipedia link I gave has more examples and probably better explanation than I can give.
It’s also true for similar sounds (like “strawberry” or “laboratory”). We generally say “strawbree” (or maybe “strawbuhree”) and “laboratory” is quite different - “la-BORA-tree”. It’s also true for “Canterbury” (“Canterbree”). Although “circulatory” is “circulate-uh-ree”.
Of course not everyone pronounces them like that. Some people do pronounce “military” like Americans. I’m not sure whether that’s considered incorrect or simply a secondary pronunciation. My flatmate does it, but I think he thinks “militree” is just a lazy pronunciation.
I bet they also would have pronounced the city’s name as Los Angle-eez; from having heard a lot of archived radio broadcasts from around 1950 it seems almost to have been the media standard back then.
In the history of English, this has been particularly true with /r/ followed by a vowel. Geoffrey Chaucer still wrote brid and thrid for “bird” and “third”.
What grates to me are commercials for the Jaguar sports car. Here in America we pronounce it jag-war. But the announcer in the commercial uses the British pronunciation, jag-oo-ar. But I figure it’s a British car so that’s the correct way I suppose (although it’s named after an American animal).
While I don’t have a citation to refute this categorically, I think it unlikely. The referent of “short-lived” or “long-lived” has a long or short life respectively, just as a ruby-throated hummingbird has a ruby throat and a Galapagos blue-footed booby has blue feet. This is why I think believe that -lived in long-lived more likely originated as some kind of oblique inflection of “life” in the singular.
Strictly with regard to pronunciation, the short “i” “long-lived” seems more natural to me, though.
I can’t count the number of people who come into the library and ask for a liberry card–ticks me off to no end. Of course they’re only coming to the liberry to use the internet anyway.
There was an SCTV sketch that poked fun at Anglophones’ exaggerated pronunciation of “-re” endings in French. The cast were all supposed to be famous Impressionist painters, and at one point one of them, praising the work of another, says "your paintings will hang in the Louvr-rRRRRRGRGRRRRRRe.
Do brits always say -tary as “tree?”