According to here American Heritage Dictionary Entry: sunday, Sundee is just fine.
“Oh” is fine. What really got me confused as a kid was the Chicago city vehicle stickers used to have the words written out beneath the sticker number, and “0” was always written out as “cipher.” That’s the only context I’ve ever seen zero written out as such, though the dictionary does say that is a definition of the word “cipher.” This would have been in the 80s, possibly as late as the early 90s.
All this talk reminds me of an old saying, “don’t laugh when someone mispronounces a word, chances are they learnt it by reading”
A classic was when my 18 year old son asked me if we had any vinnels lying around, what the hell are vinnels he said records, oh you mean vinyls.
Cipher and zero both derive from Arabic صفر ṣifr, the former through French and the latter through Italian. From the Arabic root verb ṣafara ‘to be empty’, translation of Sanskrit शून्य śūnya.
Huh. How 'bout that? I wouldn’t have guessed a common etymology, but there it is.
My favorite is “AW-ree” for awry.
I had a friend who says that as a kid, he’d read out “misled” as “misle” + d, /'maɪ z(ə)ld/
I had to do a report on “The Ancient Ma-REEN-er” when I was a kid. I’m still embarrassed.
I’ve heard people mispronounce victuals as vick-chew-ulls. I suppose they misspell it vittles! [SIZE=“1”](I’m surprised no one else brought this up)[/SIZE]
I grew up in Pennsylvania and occasionally heard that pronunciation as well.
I think we Pennsylvanians tended to find places to use all the R’s that our friends up at Hahvahd have been discarding :D. As it happens, I thought our nation’s capital had ‘R’ as its third letter. No, it’s NOT “Warshington” despite my mother pronouncing it that way (nor do we “warsh” our hands). But I’ve learned it’s not worth going nucular over it :D.
Oh, in that vein, the second month of the year somehow has become pronounced “Feb-you-ary”. Maybe the people in Warshington appropriate that R as well.
My father and his parents and sibs were East Bawlmer and they all warshed their hands in the zinc.
Chirurgeon. Is it “ch” as in “loch”? “church”? “character”? A funny spelling of “surgeon”? Or does nobody care…
? It worked for DeFoe, Swift, and Twain…
This could turn into a Gallagher routine PDQ:
victuals = vittles
actuals = attles?
quick = kwik
Buick = bwick?
I was at a D&D con back in the 70s, and a kid in the party, suddenly achieving something important, shouted “voy-luh!!” It took me a minute to figure out what he thought he’d said.
Well, I always wondered what this “wallah!” was that people shouted.
And it took me some time to realize that rendezvous and ron day voo were the same word.
And I was definitely one who thought that another way to say you had been tricked was to say you had been my-zled.
You really can’t call something “childish pablum” without it coming off as snobbish. And you must’ve missed some her previous posts in this thread, like her “Was that so hard, everyone?” post in reply to my post using IPA to help her understand a previous post. And don’t forget assuming that everyone who doesn’t choose to spend their finite time and energy learning it is deliberately and proudly ignorant–something several other posters have agreed with.
I get that IPA proponents are just passionate about it. But I’d argue that what defiance there is here is largely because of these posts. When you feel pressured into it or get chastised for not learning it, that decreases people’s desire to learn it, and makes them defensive. (They may even start looking for flaws and blow them up bigger than they are.)
I wish we could push some giant reset button and everyone would forget all the talk about IPA, starting anew. But it’s just one of those topics where the history of the board has made it contentious when it doesn’t need to be.
What we can do is what some have done, providing easy links when using IPA, and explaining it when we do use it, so that people learn without having to put in any extra effort. If they read enough of these threads, they will learn a little bit despite themselves.
Rather than complaining when people don’t use IPA, just use it. If you don’t understand someone who didn’t use IPA, ask about it, and then tell them which IPA symbols to use. Provide a convenient link, as Johanna has done in her better posts.
That’s my advice anyways, as someone who uses IPA and never encounters any hostility as long as I explain it. I would really love it if we could make it through a pronunciation thread without someone getting all upset about IPA, one way or the other.
As I suspected, it’s one of those words where we added back the C (and possibly the U) to conform with Latin, even though we’d already lost it in pronunciation back in the Old French.
c. 1300, vitaylle (singular), from Anglo-French and Old French vitaille “food, nourishment, provisions,” from Late Latin victualia “provisions,” noun use of plural of victualis “of nourishment,” from victus “livelihood, food, sustenance, that which sustains life,” from past participle stem of vivere “to live” (from PIE root *gwei- “to live”). Spelling altered early 16c. to conform with Latin, but pronunciation remains “vittles.”
I think of it as the type of word that is rarely written, so a spelling pronunciation makes sense. I actually encountered its spelling as “vittles” before I learned of the existence of “victuals.”
My high school physics teacher always said “warsh”. She was from southern PA. I think it’s something that goes from southern PA, through southern OH, southern IN, southern IL and into MO.
And then there’s Trump, with “that Rusher thing”.
Hmm - “fillet” is not commonly used in the US. “filet” is pronounced “fillAY” and is quite common, e.g. filet mignon, or McDonald’s filet o’ fish.
Though I looked at Dictionary.com and merriam-webster.com and both describe “fillet” much like I think of “filet” (e.g. filet mignon, salmon filet). Webster does say that “fillet” is most commonly pronounced “fill it” though it lists “fill-AY” as an alternative.
And they also list fillet as possibly meaning a thin strip of something like a hair ribbon or wood trim.