For “centimeter”? They’re pronouncing it “sen AH me ter”? I’ve never heard that in my life. I can only think people are analogizing from “kilometer” to “centimeter”, but normally units of distance are stressed on the penult and measuring devices are stressed on the antepenult (with kilometer as the one exception.) How in the world do people confuse that?
and it’s especially challenging to correctly pronounce them in a written medium.
To Excalibre:
I think **Nithotep ** is thinking about what sometimes happens to alveolar stops. Examples are easy to come up with for medial placements of orthographic “t” trending to (af)frication, such as in nature, fortune, nation. I suppose for “d”, one could also point out how it commonly yields to a fricative in derived forms such as divide – division.
And while you’re at it, please learn to correctly pronounce Greek words like stoichiometric 
And while your at it could all y’all stop pronouncing American like its English. At least when we kicked the Brits out we stopped talking like them.
p.s. I nominate the OP for lame pit of the year.
No, they’re pronouncing it “SONtimeter”. Proper syllabic emphasis, pseudo-French pronunciation.
It’s disheartening to hear that it’s a problem amongst healthcare workers nationwide.
And while we’re at it, will everyone please stop slurring the “s” in “Jesuit” and “parmesan” and the “c” in “species”?
Thank you.
Dale
Sorry, “spee-sheez” is the correct pronunciation. (My Webster’s shows only this pronunciation; dictionary.com gives this first and “-seez” second.)
Wow! All this over pronunciation of a letter!
I’m from NYC and there’s a street there spelled just like the city in Texas, Houston. If you say it the conventional way, your marked as an out of towner since NY’ers say House - ton Street.
So my mispronunciation of a letter is insulting? Dang - I was just trying to be friendly. I think I’ll call you Miss - oops - should that be MS. or Mrs. or citizen?
That’ll be Mister, thank you.
A contributing factor is the way that many north Indian dialects sometimes conflate “j” and “z”. Indo-Aryan languages didn’t have the voiced sibilant “z”, so when they encountered Persian or Urdu words that contained it, they sometimes used “j” instead. (Thus “Mumtaz Mahal” --> “Taj Mahal” and so forth.)
So it’s not always clear which Indian words that have a “j” in them actually need to be pronounced with a “j” (e.g., Rajiv, Jaipur, pajama) and which can acceptably be pronounced with a “z” (sometimes softened to a “zh”) instead (e.g., sabji/sabzi, gajal/ghazal).
Overall, though, I like this rant. I think it should be broadened to include the annoying dolts who keep spelling “Gandhi” as “Ghandi”, too. You may consider it trivial, but if you were constantly reading references by foreigners to “Lilncon” or “Rooveselt”, that would get on your nerves after a while.
While it is true that this characteristic exists in some regional dialects, I do not accept that this is a factor that has any influence whatsoever on Americans (apparently, who have never heard these words pronounced) who are pronouncing them.
This can be an influence only on those who have some personal familiarity with regional speech in India and, most probably, who have actually been to India. Generally, it is very clear, because in standard Hindi, the spelling ambiguities have been cleared up (there is now a separate letter for “Z”).
And of the words you have listed, only the clearly “J” words are words that American news broadcasters are likely to pronounce. Anyone who has to use words like sabzi or ghazal is likely to have learned something about what these words mean and how they are to be pronounced. And they’re not going to be spelling them with Js.
I have never heard these sounds “softened” as you say to a “zh.” So far as I know, the “zh” sound is completely non-existant in any standard form of an Indian language and, I suspect, rare if not non-existant in any regional dialect.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Sorry Mistah (that’s how we NY’ers pronounce the word you wrote)
actually - it’s somewhere in between, but certainly shy of coughing up phlegm ;j
and while we’re on the subject
its NU-CLEE-ER - not NUKE-YOU-LER
supposedly educated people have been mispronouncing it for decades!
it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up
Well, when I lived in Jaipur I heard quite a few native Hindi speakers pronounce, say, “sabzi” that way, with a sound that almost seemed like a cross between a “j” and a “z”, as if they knew that the consonant was originally supposed to be “z” but they were more comfortable pronouncing the “j”. I make no claims whatsoever for this being a regular linguistic feature of any Indian dialect.
However, I’m not as convinced as you are that, say, American broadcasters could never possibly have heard an Indian native speaker using such a softened “j” sound and mistakenly got the idea that it was the correct way to pronounce the Hindi “j” in general. I agree it may not be very likely, but I don’t think it’s impossible.
While we’re on the subject of pronunciation, I’d just like to point out that the word is spelled P R O N U N C I A T I O N, not P R O N O U N C I A T I O N. Thank you.