So Penis is pronounced as Pee Nus
So why is it spelt as Pee Nis ( Penis )
Who is responsible for this cock up:D
Can we start writing it as Penus?
Merry Christmas guys.
I’ve always said nis since that’s how it’s spelled. Never knew I was saying it wrongly.
If there’s a problem with the spelling, it’s not in the second syllable. It’s in the first. It should be pinis or peenis instead of penis.
You’d have to apply this standard to a thousand different English words, then.
Why isn’t “gross” spelled as “grose?” Or pronounced like “moss?”
Why isn’t “knee” just “nee?”
etc. etc.
Like nearly all English words, it’s spelled the way it was pronounced *at the time it entered the language *.
Words often change their pronunciation over time. There is no way for spelling to catch up.
Not sure what you are asking about but it is spelled correctly in Latin (long e, short i). When Anglicized, the long “e” becomes a long “i” for some reason. No u or ə.
You’re good.
Because there are like 20-30 unique vowel sounds in English and we use 5 (or 6 including ‘y’) letters to represent them all?
Who put the schwa in schwantz?
I’ve never pronounced it with “-us” either; that sounds weird to me.
Some years ago, I was an employee of a pizza place. One of my duties was to take the previous evening’s deposit to the bank and while there get a change order. That is, they’d give me some large bills to exchange for a specified amount of coin rolls and small bills. I usually was given a list of what change to get, how many rolls of quarters, dimes, etc. At the bank, when I asked for the change order, the teller would usually want to see the list, rather than having me read it off.
My usual supervisor was a Mexican woman who could speak English fairly well, but hadn’t learned English spelling. She spelled everything as if it were a Spanish word. So on the list, she spelled “quarters” with a C instead of a Q. That was OK, the teller could usually figure that out. But for “pennies”, she didn’t double the N and left off the second E… got a fair number of double takes on that one.
Why does the OP mispronounce penis?
If it was pronounced with a ‘us’, this joke wouldn’t be funny:
"One day a man walks into a bar and to his amazement, he finds a tiny person playing a tiny
piano. Stunned the man asked the bartender where he got this amazing person. The
bartender replied that inside the closet there is a genie that will grant him a single wish.
The man dashed into the the closet and as the bartender said, there was a genie inside.
Without hesitation the man wished for a million bucks, but instead 1 million ducks
instantly appeared. Infuriated the man stormed to the bartender and screamed
“I think your genie is hard of hearing, I asked for a million bucks but instead I got a million ducks.”
The bartender shook his head and replied, “You’re telling me… Do you really think I asked for a 12 inch pianist?”
I checked six online dictionaries and they all give the pronunciation with the last vowel being the “i” of sit, which is how I’ve always pronounced it. Who says that it’s pronounced “-us”? Am I missing a joke?
No. Because the first syllable is just pe-, the vowel is long, not short. If the syllables were pen-is, then you’d have a problem.
What a dick.
Doesn’t Schwantz make TV dinners?
That’s if you already know the pronunciation is pe-nis and not pen-is
I just call it Throatwarbler Mangrove, but that’s just me.
I was surprised too, but I found this -
The American pronunciation recording there does seem that way to my ear, or at least ambiguous. I have no idea though, I can’t say I’ve paid much attention to Americans saying the word in the wild.
It’s an unstressed vowel, so it often can get reduced to a schwa, which is what I assume the “us” is representing. Both versions sound fine to me. I think I personally make a vowel sound somewhere in between the two. I do the same with the word “pianist,” so it makes no difference to me in the telling of the joke. I think I schwa it even more in “pianist,” actually.