Curiouser and curiouser!
But here’s my opinion: People who say “supposably” are just morons with rocks where their brains belong. As evidence of this, I give you a certain former landlord I had about 15 years ago.
And the internet is a catalog of abusage.
We live in a society where both teams get an award for playing a game of soccer. If the idiots can’t learn and remember how to spell a word they will invent new ones and be happy as pigs in shit. Beware the current generation (X,Y,Z) whatever it is called for when they are ruling the world and don’t get their way and their X-box is broken all hell will break loose.
You both are just standing in the way. Move or be run over by progress!!
Many people mispronounce data (date-uh) as dat-uh. It’s catching on, unfortunately. I’m only 54, and I have read dictionaries in which the only pronunciation of protein is pro-tee-in. No one says pro-tee-in any more. When I was in elementary school, the only pronunciation of kiln in the dictionary was kill.
Yep, pronunciations change.
I used to say it the first way until I realized it’s like saying Favre as Farve. Now I make it a point to pronounce it as it is spelled.
That was just about typology (and hand script). That character wasn’t dropped because of any change in pronunciation.
That said, the particular case of costed, as Leaffan’s daughter says, is not necessarily so far-fetched. We already have burnt vs. burned, dreamt vs. dreamed, etc. Usually, however, the irregular form is the newer verison.
AS Kamino Neko points out, these changes are often originally phonological, and they frequently involve consonant clusters that are motor-physically more challenging than usual in English. As a case in point, sjc points out on this board in a long ago discussion of the original pronunciation of ask (which often was pronounced in Middle English as /aks/):
[QUOTE=sjc]
I’m not certain if ‘ask’ or ‘aks’ came first, but the ‘aks’ pronunciation can easily explained as a simplification of a difficult consonant cluster through metathesis. That is to say, the ‘ks’ consonant cluster is difficult to pronounce (most languages find this one hard) and in order to make it easier the two sounds are transposed (technical term: metathesis*).
Sound changes to make pronunciation easier are pretty common in every language. ‘Aks’ just happens to not be the Standard English pronunciation of today, though it might have been in the past.
[/quote]
Just to be clear, metathesis is not simply a result of “mishearing” a word. It’s usually a result of hearing a word. I’m sure that quite a few of those posting here, when they’re speaking unselfconsciously, pronounce prescription as /pərˈskrɪpʃ(ə)n/, even though they might deny it when asked. But that’s not from “mishearing.” It’s because many other people say it that way.
I used to quietly, very quietly… just in my head, in fact, mock my dad for saying “vegetables” with four very distinct syllables when everyone else said it with three.
Surely the canonical example is butterfly / flutter-by?
I’ve been noticing something that I think is rapidly becoming standard: dropping the final consonant of words, or contracting endings with multiple consonants. An example of the first is when Charlie Rose pronounces world as “worl” or Egypt as “Egyp.” An example of the second was a recent documentary about the role of forests. The usually well-spoken, educated scientist narrator had no trouble pronouncing the singular “forest,” but when using the plural, it consistently came out as “foress.” I had to work very hard to prevent this from ruining my enjoyment of the program.
I’m hearing both of these phenomena from somewhat Southern or ethnic (Black) speakers, but it sounds like the “standard” is moving in that direction.
And don’t get me started on “sinators” and “dimocrats.” So far, only the pronunciations are affected, but I won’t be surprised if some people have already altered the spelling.
You’re basically describing French.* Nes-pa*?
Ambivalid writes:
> So there is no such thing as a spelling mistake or mispronunciation to you then?
> It’s all just the English language, evolving?
There are two sets of things that we mean when we talk about the English language. (The same true of most, and probably all, languages.) There is each set of rules within each person’s head at a given time. This is their best attempt to understand how other English speakers talk (and presumably write), and it will be different for each person and even different at any given time. There are always certain ways in which any given person at any given time has reinterpreted what they have heard other people say or write to construct a different pronunciation, grammatical expression, or item of vocabulary. In other words, they have made a mistake according to what you mean. Changes in languages over time happen when enough people change the way that they speak or write.
The second thing the English language means is a set of rules that language arbitrators like English teachers, copy editors, accent coaches, etc. have declared to be the way English is now spoken and written “properly.” There is nothing wrong with this, and it may be necessary to have a “standard” language at any moment, but that doesn’t mean that the language will stop evolving. It’s useful for language arbitrators to understand how language in the first sense really operates though. Some language arbitrators have attempted to create rules that no one, including themselves, have ever used and which they themselves don’t even use. They don’t then really help standardize usage but just muddle things up.
I think most of those are known as unreleased stops, and as the wiki article implies, they’re pretty standard for most non-formal North American English dialects–though I agree they can be more pronounced with some speakers than with others.
Ignorance fought!
And of course you guys insist on using ‘al oo min um’ instead of ‘al u min yum’. I mean - it’s spelled - ALUMINIUM not ALUMINUM.
Do you say “Wednesday” or “Wendsday”?
I plead guilty. When speaking selfconsciously, I am careful to say February. But I am ashamed to admit that when speaking UNselfconsciously, far too often it comes out as Febyuary.
I think that this thread ought to distinguish between changes which result from error or laziness, and those which are deliberate. And I don’t mean new words that result from new inventions. There are also cases where someone creates a new word for rhetorical purposes, and then it becomes popular: “ginormous” is the first to come to mind. And also words which were invented specifically to address a real or perceived problem: Am I correct that “nonflammable” was invented recently, because of confusion over “inflammable”?