Can anyone please give me a logical and UNPREJUDICED answer (as most of you are in the USA and think you’re pronouncing everything right! )
I live in Ireland and let me rightly clear, I have therefore no love of the English. However, it is their language and therefore their way of pronouncing things is the ‘right’ way - is it not?
My plight is this…
I live in Ireland and my Fiance, soon to be husband in December and I are forever contradicting each other on the pronouciation of say,
‘Dictionary’
I, as do English people, drop the ‘a’ and say ‘Diction-ry’
My beloved always pronounces the ‘a’, nay, much to my chargrin over emphasises it to say ‘Dict-ion-aaaaary’.
UGH!!!
<<<cringe>>>
I feel physical pain at the thought of it.
All the same, I wpuld pronouce the ‘u’ in Jaguar whereas he drops it and it sounds like ‘JagWar’ when he says it.
Other words we say differently are, to name but a few -
Amphitheatre (let us not open the Pandora’s Box of spelling differences either, thank you very much!)
Herb!!! Why, oh why does he drop the ‘H’ when we are discussing the herbs of holistic medicine???
Hostile: He drops the ‘e’, we pronounce it.
Misile: He drops the ‘e’, we pronouce it.
So many differences…
But hey, he’s easy on the eye and has a tongue sharper than an adder.
Nota Bene: Take from above comment wht you will dear, dear readers…
So please, please, some one of you decidely learned and thoroughly decent folk give me an answer.
Be sure to exclude you pride and prejudice at all being from the Land of the Free, no Mr. Darcy’s need reply.
Well there’s nice, Corry. I can understand why you might not like my forebears, but I wonder what I might have done to offend you?
As for your question, try something like the three accents in question developing over many years derived from a common ancestor, with the Irish accent influenced by the Irish language, and the US being more heavily influenced by immigrants from many different nationalities and languages.
I am Scottish and I pronounce the ‘a’ in “dictionary”.
Does he pronounce “vivacious” so that the ‘viv’ part rhymes with “five”? I pronouce the ‘viv’ so it rhymes with “give”.
Basically, American English and English English have been diverging since around 1600. Until there was mass trans-atlantic voice communication (e.g TV), there is no reasons for seperated laguages to remain the exactly the same for 400 years. Even in Ireland, A Dubliner will say some words differently to someone from Cork or Waterford.
Cork - some words differently?!?! Bwa ha ha haaaa. Try “all of them, and then some new ones thrown in that nobody’s ever heard of and probably the Corkonian has made up on the spot just to be a cute hoor.”
There are plenty of different dialects and pronunciation within England itself. Just off the top of my head: Cockney, Scouse, Cornish, and RP (i.e., standard BBC pronunciation). So you’re starting from a false premise.
Language evolves differently in different locations. Period. What’s “right” or “wrong” pronunciation can depend entirely on where you are and where you’ve been. No serious scholar of language would accept the basic idea behind the OP that there is one “correct” pronounciation and others are wrong.
That depends, could you start over and ask a logical and UNPREJUDICED question instead of the highly irrational and PREJUDICED question you asked?
How much of the science of linguistics have you studied? The Phillipine islands no more “own” my Filipino genes than England “owns” my mother tongue.
Does your fiancee realize he’s going to marry such a narrow-minded and oversensitive person?
Yup, and Englander Schwein also pronounce the name “Manuel” as “Man-yoo-el”, even though that’s utterly wrong.
You say “hos-till-ee”? Since when?
Yes, you very silly (“mi-si-lee”)
No country “owns” a language. “Correct” pronunciation is merely a matter of local custom and temporary fashions and fads.
As a related aside a very good case has been made that the high-falutin’ snobby, pommy, poofy accent adopted for Shakespeare on the “legitimate” stage is most likely not the way that it was pronounced in Shakespeare’s day.
Now, if we take the Bard as being such a pinnacle of great English, then that would mean that the pommy accent would actually be the WRONG way to pronounce English.
I agree jjim, the melting pot of America has influenced the language to the point that “Queen’s English” was manipulated and changed to facilitate communication with the mass diversity of immigrants language and cultures.
But, that being said, I hear people get offended if you ask them if they’re from Great Britain and they’re actually from Austrailia or South Africa. I guess even 54 commonwealth countries deviate from the Queen’s English in some form or fashion.
Amreican English often pronounces words more closely to their original languages than British English does. Jaguar is a Spainsh word, and we pronounce it the Spanish way. The animal is native to Central and South America, so it would seem we have the upper hand here.
I never knew the British pronounce the final e in missile (we spell it with two s’s) and hostile. Do they say hos-tyl-ee or hos-tyl-eh? Do you pronounce the final e in mile, pile, file, or style? I believe Amreican English is more consistent in the (non)pronunciation of final e.
In regard to the above, I think she’s trying to say that they acknowledge the “silent e” giving a “long i” sound – HOSS-tile rather than HOSS-tul.
Corry dear, please think about how “differently” doesn’t always relate to “correctly/incorrectly.” We all have a fondness for the version (of pronunciation, of song lyrics, of rules to a game, etc.) that we learned as children. Regarding others’ versions as interesting and charming rather than irritating is a trait worth cultivating – especially when the “other” is one’s intended or one’s spouse.
Also, people in America pronounce it a bit differently for different purposes. In movies, people alsways say “HOSS-tiles inbound, captains”, but when using it otherwise, usually say “HOSS-tul”.
When I did some work for Jaguar, they would release memos to everybody on the proper pronunciation. Both ways you listed were fine with them, just never “Jag-wire.” And why bother to put the “a” in dictionary if you’re not going to even pronounce it? We don’t pronounce the “u” in colour, so we got rid of it
No, it isn’t. As I keep pointing out on the SDMB, the English language predated and extended beyond what became England. It is therefore not “their” language.
Besides, there is no one single English accent. So no one single way of pronouncing anything even within England.
And why get upset about American pronunciation? Don’t forget the peculiarities of English as spoken in South Asia or in Jamaica.
I don’t even know where to begin in trying to phoenetically type words in those, uh, versions (can’t think of the right word at the moment) of English.
What I find hilarious, but apaprently has not been noticed, is that Corry is IRISH. So she doesn’t pronoucne things the English way, but evidently that’s okay. Given the fact that Corry does exactly what she’s angry at Americans about - albiet with an Irish accent - is this possibly the worst-worded OP question in the history of the board?
Corry, you do know that you don’t pronounce English words identically to the way English people do, right?
Aliester Cooke has addressed this many times on his Letter from America feature on the BBC WOrld Service.
As Cooke notes, the great weight of the evidence suggests that when American and British pronunciations differ, Americans are usually pronouncing a word in the way it was traditionally pronounced before people in the British Isles changed their way of saying it.
In Colonial times Americans had little or no access to dictionaries. This, and the fact that court reporters generally had very little formal education, meant that transcriptions of trials in the American Colonies were generally written with words rendered with idiomatic, phonetic spellings. Time and again these phonetic spellings have demonstrated to scholars that people in what later became The United States–including the best-educated and persons who were very recent immigrants from England–pronounced words the way Americans pronounce them still.
It has often been observed by philologists that The British Isles, although much smaller that The United States, has more regional accents than are found in the U.S. and, further, that the differences among accents in the U.S. tend to be less pronounced than the differences among accents in Great Britain and Ireland; the differences between people from Cork and from various parts of London are far, far more pronounced than, say, the differences between a native of Los Angeles and a native of St. Louis.
One likely reason that American accents tend to be less distinct, and pronunciations are less given to changing over time in the U.S., is that the American population has traditionally been more mobile, so it is less likely that a community of people will become entrenched in a place and develop idiomatic ways of speaking. Where American accents are the most distinct, and pronunciations have been most given to changing over time, are places where an ethincally distinct group has maintained an enclave for a very long time–for instance, the Gullas and the Cajuns. In The British Isles, apparently, new pronunciations developed by specific communities have from time to time become the general standard for the polulace.
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