My wife uses “ideal” for “idea”. (That’s the ideal!) I’ve tried to correct her a few times, even though it’s cute, but she persists. I think at least a tiny percentage of the reason why is just to bug me.
“Excetera” instead of et cetera. I’m not going to name names.
Why on Earth did you edit out the words “Vienna sausages?”
The day that I can convince people that llama is NOT pronounced as Lama, it will be a happy day. In Spanish the double ll is completely different sounding - it is the sound of the English Y as in “Yes.” Some folks say, “Yeah well in English it is pronounced as an L…” Wrong. Do you say the word “quesadilla” as if it had only one L? Nope, I can bet you don’t. Please Dopers, say Llama like this: <Yama>. That is the correct way to say it.
I have heard this.
Well, me too, and it drives me insane.
Here is another: Let’s go to the liberry to borrow some books. Good god people! It is LiBRARY.
I hate to be pedantic, but I can’t resist passing up this tiny teaching moment…
The Spanish double-l (and y) sound’s closest English equivalent is our consonantal “y”, so you’re right about that. But tha actual sound is somewhere between o
English “y” and the French “j” (the sound which appears in just a few English words, like “azure” and “pleasure”.)
Thus, when we pronounce, say, the word “Maya”, or the word “llama” to a Spanish speaker by using a purely English “y” sound, the listener hears it as a bit oddly “soft,” because we give it none of that hint of French “j”.
Now…Most would agree that the word “llama” is now solidified as an English word, pronounced “lama”. In nearly any English-speaking situation I can think of, you will be given strange looks if you pronounce it “yama”. You don’t say “tahbl”, do you? (It was borrowed from French – a thousand years ago, that’s true…)
ETA: The English word Borrowed from French I was referring to at the end of my last post was “table”.
Huh, I always thought of it as American. ‘An herb’ is the one I always notice- we pronounce it with a much harder ‘h’, so that really sounds wrong to me.
I’ve met the odd person in England who says ‘an historic occasion’, but it sounds really pretentious, and I was certainly never taught it as correct at school in the UK.
You are absolutely right with your explanation of the sound of the letters mentioned, JKellyMap, though perhaps for me, it just does not ring right in my ears being that Spanish is my native tongue. I did not learn English until I was 12 years old. The strange looks do not bother me, and by the way, I have a kid named Maya.
I was making a dirty joke.
In older books, I’ve seen “an hotel” many times.
youtube warning:
Atbout the 2:15 mark there is a wordburgering of the word** difficulty** that is just wonderful. My wife and I intentionally mispronounce it so often that now I have to really think about saying it correctly at work.
The whole video is only 3 minutes or so, it’s a classic.
I know several people who say “acrosst” instead of “across.”
Chimney has a lot of variations across British dialects, including chimbey, chimbley, chimdey, chimmock as well as the aforementioned chimbley and chimley.
So you’re saying there are lots of ways to pronounce it in the British dialect fambly?
People I knew who visited the choirpractor also knew southmores, in their second year, and PutMAN rather than PutNAM. You also can tell when a well-read person has only seen an unusual word in print but never heard it spoken.
Well played.
Queue pronounced as quay.
“Where’s my document that I printed? It must be in the print quay.” It actually got picked up for a while as a running joke in my office.
I’m not saying it’s my favourite, but the one I hear all the freaking time, and it bugs the heck out of me, is
kilometer.
It’s pronounced KILL-o- meeter, not kil-AH-meh-der.
Words that end with -meter, that are pronounced _____ -meh-der, are measuring devices for something or another. Words that end with -meter and are units of distance, are invariably supposed to be pronounced ______-meeter.