And to those of us who are both foreigners and capable of (at least partially) following IPA. Even if I don’t know what’s the exact difference between two or three different symbols, I can see that they’re different and, if I care enough, I can go and find out; when an American* says something such as “oh, that’s a ch sound” it can mean three different ones (/x/ as in l’chaim, /k/ as in Schuylkill, /ʧ/ as in church) so we end up needing to ask for clarifications and getting lost in a sea of “wait wait, how do you pronounce that?”.
Around here, it’s either YEE-ro(s) /'jiːɹoʊ(s)/, YIH-ro(s) /'jɪɹoʊ(s)/ or GHIH-ro(s) /'ɡɪɹoʊ(s)/. Most people will drop the final “s,” though, although I do remember posters growing up in Chicago gyros shops that said It’s Better When You Say YEE-ROS" The “JIE-roh” /ˈd͡ʒaɪɹoʊ/ pronunciation I hadn’t heard until I went to college and met people from other parts of the US. Had no idea what in the hell they were talking about, as I was so used to the YEE-ros pronunciation that it didn’t click, even though if they spelled it out, it would have been obvious.
That said, I’m pretty sure in Greek there’s a third way that initial consonant could be pronounced, though I’m forgetting what it is.
Oh yeah! Those old British Teach Yourself books were a hoot! The blue-and-yellow ones left over from the interwar years, before they completely revamped the series. They indicated pronunciations like “Now, in order to pronounce this correctly, you must say it as would a Yorkshireman” or “This is the sound as heard in the Cornish accent,” making them completely useless to me.
Cafe without the second vowel is a different thing to café with the second vowel though. A cafe is where you go for a full English breakfast, a café is where you go for a posh coffee. They’ve both existed for a long time. And in British English the stress is on the first syllable, not the second, same as in ballet (I know you know this, obvs, but it’s worth pointing out).
(I like IPA but I don’t think the particular specific interchange needs it since we’re talking about number of syllables and stress).
For the ‘forte’ hypercorrectionists, Merriam-Webster points out that no matter which way you go, you’re wrong. This is not quite as good a write-up as their paper usage guide, which goes on to admonish that if you’re going to go around saying ‘fort’, you should also be insisting on ‘apostroph’ when you talk about the punctuation mark
I’ve mentioned it here before that I have trouble deciding between “proper” pronunciation and “common” pronunciation. I speak before groups where I don’t want my listeners to suddenly get pulled out of the story I’m telling to ponder “What’s THAT word? Oh, did he just use the original Serbo-Croat word, or is that the correct pronunciation? Why have I never heard that before? Is it because I went to school in Cincinnati? Why can’t he just say it normal, like reg’lar people?”
So I’m amassing a list of Words To Stay Away From (like forte and mischievous…).
Thanks to the Dope, that list is getting really long really fast.
Quite true. However, telephone numbers, street address numbers, win/loss records, ball/strike counts, and batting records are not really numbers, so it’s OK to say “oh” for those.
