My fiance pronounces the L in salmon and the word iron with the R where it looks like it should be. I fully assume this is because, while he is a native speaker of English, his parents are not, and he picked it up from them.
(just now, I talked to him on the phone, and he used the word lattice, but said it “lateece.” I didn’t say anything.)
I remember as a kid reading aloud to my parents and pronouncing the word “wound,” as in an injury, as it if were"wound" like a clock. I swear though, it was in a poem, and the next line ended with “found”! How was I supposed to know?
Here in Australia there used to be a sitcom called Acropolis Now, about second-generation Greek Australians who ran a cafe of the same name.
As for the pronunciation of “integral” it was always INT@gr@l here (where I’m using @ for a schwa) until maybe 15 years ago when inTEGr@l entered the scene. I’ll be sticking with INT@gr@l until we start saying inTEGr@t@d.
Wow. I was confident I wouldn’t learn anything from this thread but you got me with victuals. I thought vittles was just a sort of folksy way of saying it, like critter for creature.
I wonder how many times I have said vik-choo-al out loud. I hope people thought I was being silly on purpose.
My story: when I was a kid I went to Sunday School for the first time and got called on to read something about disciples. I pronounced it DISS-i-puls (as in principles, multiples, and every other iples word I’d ever seen) and was roundly laughed at by the kids.
For a long time I thought ‘Segue’ was pronounced ‘Seg’ and was the root of Segue-way. Luckily, I always wrote the one I thought was pronounced ‘seg’, and nobody seems to bat an eye when I say it, so I never looked silly.
I still have no idea if the ‘knuckle’ is the bone, or the joint between the bones.
A lot of words that have a ‘ch’ in them tripped me up until I was into my teens (big reader, don’t often hear a lot of the words in question spoken).
I have no idea why I constantly misread non sequitur until I was into my 20s (always inserted an o after the first u). I’d have twigged faster if I’d heard it said before I was in a university class. (Luckily, I wasn’t the one who said it.)
My friend’s kid said “ice creamo”, and was never corrected because it was cute. The five siblings all said ice creamo until one day, the ice cream truck pulled up and all the neighborhood kids gathered…
One Fail Swoop…my son’s friend
Connecticut, Massatoosetts, my wife’s Geechee talk
In Charleston there are a lot of strange speech patterns (not very southern) including Geechee, a combination of Gullah (slave language) and British, spoken by whites who were raised by black nannies. My mother in law has it.
Syllables are highly separated:
Fish= Fee ush
Boat = Bow it
Vegetable= Veg a tawbull
Walmart = Walls Mat Stow
Legare Street = La Gree Sreet (french influence)
Shrimp = Skrumps
Vanderhorst Street = Vandross Sreet (dutch influence)
I have heard people say “foke” and every dictionary I can find online says “foke” but, as with “victuals” being pronounced “vittles”, I don’t believe it.
And in this case I’ve got more grounding for my disbelief. I have never heard “victuals” pronounced out loud, but I hear “folk” pronounced fairly regularly, and in my experience it’s usually (in my region and on TV) said with the L sound. So I don’t know where the dictionaries are getting their info from.
Well, if you call the Q’tari embassy, as I have, they themselves pronounce it “Q’tar”, not cutter. So, I’m going to go ahead and keep correcting people who pronounce it “cutter”.
In undergrad, I was involved in a play set in 19th century England. The theatre department’s speech and dialect professor was brought in to act as dialect coach. She told us about “victuals” (“VIT-tels”) which blew everybody’s mind, but she also told us about “waistcoat,” which, as it turns out, should properly be pronounced “WESS-kit”.
My dictionary backs her up, but it says the intuitive pronunciation is acceptable as well.
Re: Qatar. I was taught that the “Q” here actually represents a hard G when pronounced (“GUT-er”). But no dictionary I can find says such a thing. Ignorance fought.
“Yeah, it’s like goldy and bronzy, only it’s made of iron.”
I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it any way other than “foke”… Nobody I’ve ever heard pronounces the “l” that I can remember.
I tease my Atlanta-born fiancé because the thing he uses when it’s raining, he calls an UM-brella. We’ve been together 4 1/2 years and it still makes me laugh every time he says it that way. I can’t help it.
Thank you, whoever it was, for desultory. I would have pronounced it wrong, if I had ever used it aloud. Although, as I haven’t had occasion to do that in some 53 years (52 if you only count the ones when I could talk), the odds are against that happening.
I will have to remind myself when I read it, though. It still doesn’t sound right in my mind.
And how do you pronounce “Thanksgiving”? My father always said “THANKSgiving,” which actually makes sense, but he’s the only person I’ve ever heard who doesn’t say “ThanksGIVing.”