Oh dear. As youngsters we used to laugh at the way US Americas pronounced words. Hailing from Wales where place names could be said to cause road accidents (Ystrad Mynach anyone) we also found English people’s attempt to pronounce thing equally, erm, interesting.
Then I moved to France. Nice place actually. Pickup up the language and now after fifteen years I can buy a baguette with confidence.
But I cant say ‘frog’. Not the English word ‘frog’ but the French word for ‘frog’. Its ‘grenouille’ and it has defeated me. Children ask me to say ‘grenouille’ as a means of entertaining themselves. It never fails. They think my pronunciation is hilarious. I hate kids.
In high school I realized I was unable to pronounce the phrase “an enigma.” I still practice it sometimes; I still can’t pronounce it fluently.
ETA: rural is a tough one for me too. And I can pronounce both “conscious” and “conscience” but I almost always have to correct myself when I use one or the other.
Note how you didn’t include SO-she-ul? The SH sound is an amalgamation of the S and EE sounds. It is indeed odd that we accept uh-SO-she-ate(ett) but not uh-SO-shate(shett).
I don’t have any that I literally can’t say, but I do have problems saying hyper-bowl instead of hyperbole as the latter just sounds wrong. (I often avoid the noun and just use the adjective hyperbolic, where hyper has the normal accents.) And I still want to both say and type disrepancy instead of discrepancy.
A word I can say correctly except when I’m reading it is awry. That’s right, I want to say AW-ree.
This simply isn’t true. ‘sh’ or /ʃ/ is its own sound. It is not constituted of any other elements. You’re conflating it with the different vowels.
More to the point, spelling does not necessarily have to correlate with pronunciation, and more often than not does not.
Another vote for February here. And sixths. Well, I can pronounce it, but I don’t enjoy pronouncing it. In fact, as far as words go, it’s downright obnoxious.
