I’ve always pronounced the word “Southern” to rhyme with howthurn. I know most people say it like “suthurn” instead. I didn’t realize that the way I pronounce it is considered weird until recently!
I over-pronounce Wednesday. Like wed-nes-day. Most people say wendsday.
Also apparently I’m weird for pronouncing jewelry correctly. I pronounce it like it is spelled, and what it means. It is personal ornaments often containing jewels. Jewel-ry. Not Joolery.
Same thing with Aunt. It’s not Ant. There is a U in there.
It may surprise you that outside of the US, the word is spelled ‘jewellery’ (three syllables)
agghh these comments my eyes the fauxnetics please god why can’t Lemmy have a bigger linguistics community and you mfs wonder why i still use Reddit
There just aren’t many linguists unfortunately. I’m a huge grammar and language nerd but learning IPA takes time and exposure to a lot of sounds you’re not used to. I wish more of the reddit linguists would come over. Even the grammar communities here are dead.
If you start one I will subscribe
I purposely pronouce “download” like dunlaad to annoy my SO.
I pronounce dragon as dragòn, if you know what I mean.
I’m fluent in both Spanish and English (obv). When speaking English, I’m conflicted on whether I should pronounce Spanish loan words in a shitty English accent like everyone else, or in a proper Spanish accent. So instead I pronounce them as horribly as I can.
Jalapeño is “yah-la-PEEN-oh”. Fajita is “fa-JAI-tah”. Quesadilla gets “QUAY-sah-dilah”
(As a joke of course)
Once in a while, I’ll arbitrarily drop juh-LAP-in-oh in a grocery store, just to see who flinches.
Overheard in a pizzeria:
Customer: I’d like a quattro sta… quattro shta… How do you pronounce it?
The Turkish and not Italian waiter: Shtuh gon ee (for stagioni)
Habanero is pronounced jabaññññero.
ah! WITH the doppler effect?
Even funnier because it doesn’t have the ñ.
My wife cannot say empanada. It’s empañada. The locals would always wonder why she was asking for a window.
My family is french/english and we like to do the same with french loan words
In the army it was “Qu’est-ce que le shake?” or so, for “what’s shakin?”
I worked with a guy who did the exactly opposite, in Calgary (and that may explain a lot):
- comPLETEly fluent in French
- would only speak French by imitating those early “Bonjour Pierre!” tapes with the over-done voice pitch.
It was both impressive as hell, and funny. And he’d do this for like a few minutes at a time as part of a conversation. We’d try and get him to break but his vocab was strong (for an anglo) and he’d never break character. I fantasize about him meeting my Parisienne friend and conversing back and forth, her a little stereotypical and him a little bizarre.
I like it!
Quesadilla looks like there’s room to mangle it further:
KWEZZ-ah-dill-ah
or even
kwe-SADD-l’a
like there was saddle in there
You should go the Tralerpark Boys route for pronouncing jalapeño.
I used to pronounce “adjacent” as adjuhsent.
I say appree-see-ate for appreciate, and artif-isss-ee-al for artificial.
.ǝdoɹnƎ uᴉ ƃuᴉʌᴉl uɐᴉlɐɹʇsn∀ uɐ ɯɐ ᴉ ʇnq .ǝɯᴉʇ ǝɥʇ ll∀
Australia is so hellbent on making words sound cute by shortening everything. It makes me giggle even when they are mad.
The sprinkles on bread is adorable
Fairy bread is the best.
My wife has to be careful when picking child names because I will immediately Australianise it to something stupid.
Yes but I do this on purpose. Mazda with a flat A like in Aztec. Bag is bayg, measure is maysure. My long Os are longer like Psy saying ope in Gangnam style or like the movie Fargo. Snow is Snew with an Irish accent like Ygritte. There are too many more to recount, about every fourth sentence on average I pronounce a word wrong on purpose, it has become my dialect.
As an American, it didn’t click for me until I visited London for the first time why names like Leicester and Gloucester were pronounced the way they are by Brits. My dumb American brain sees the names as Lei-cester and Glou-cester rather than Leice-ster and Glouce-ster.
oh wow, you blew my mind
Was on holiday in Scotland with my father. And bless this girl at the tourist information who realised that when we stupid Germans said “glennis law” that we meant Glenisla (glen ila).
Unfortunately our linguistic history is a huge tangle and there are few safe assumptions. Depending on where you are in Scotland, the places names might derive from Gaelic, Pictish, Welsh, Norse, or English, and then they probably got Anglicised at some point but it could have happened at basically time within the last five centuries. A substantial number of the non-Gaelic ones are doubly messed up because they got Gaelicised first and then the Gaelicisation got Anglicised. Glenisla is a good example - glen derives from Gaelic, and nobody is sure where isla comes from.
Still, Glenisla is a lovely area! Lots of good hikes there. I hope you had a good time.
It was awesome. Best vacation ever. We went to Glenisla for their comparatively small highland games. They had dancing competitions, bag pipe competitions and of course various sport competitions. Apparently one of the competitors was the reigning shot putting or hammer throwing or so world champion. Every time he threw something the judges went back extra far and still he managed to go beyond the field. He was huge. My father and I dubbed him Monster.
Wow, I’m certain I would’ve done the same. Think I’d make myself a cheat sheet for Scotland and Wales when I get around to visit. Knowing that Cymru is pronounced “com-ree” gave me anxiety about butchering names there if ever I’ll need to ask for directions.
We’ll usually understand if you get it wrong. There’s a lot of extremely counterintuitive ones. If you’re American, the most likely trap is Edinburgh - it’s not EE-den-berg, it’s EDD-in-buh-ruh or EDD-im-bruh.
I’ll also just have to ask that the same grace is returned when I inevitably fuck up basically any place name based on anything Native American, because I don’t know how any of those languages work
I went to school and now live outside Pittsburgh and it’s such a mishmash of Native American place names (Monongahela, Allegheny, Youghagheny; which is Ma-nahn-guh-hey-la, Al-uh-gain-ee, and yaack-uh-gain-ee), French (Duquesne, Versailles; Doo-cain, Ver-sales), and English. Combine that with the Pittsburghese dialect and then mash that with not pronouncing foreign words anything like how they natively would be (but only sometimes) and it’ll make your head spin.
My SO’s family all like to pronounce “mauve” in a weird way, so I say it every chance I get to perturb them.
I’m Dutch. I pronounce the -en at de ends of words, including the n. If you don’t know, that’s like 10% of all Dutch words
I’m German. One day my house was being renovated and they were working with jackhammers to remove parts of the facade. It was incredibly loud and I couldn’t bear it. I lived close to university and had recently stopped working in one of the institutes. I knew though that my former colleagues had couches in some of their offices so I thought I’d give them a visit. I walked over to the institute and greeted my Australian former coworker. I explained about the noise in my house and said I was “looking for asylum”. Knowing the word “asylum” only from written language, I had no idea it was not actually pronounced “ay suh lum”. He asked “you’re looking for what?” as he obviously hadn’t understood. I repeated “ay suh lum” confidently and he politely said “ah”. Not long after, I learned the correct pronunciation of asylum and that memory has haunted me ever since. It’s been almost 10 years but I still cringe about it.
I understand the feeling, but that fear of being wrong is a plague, it prevents learning altogether. Especially languages ! we should be brave enough to proudly make mistakes and learn from them. Proudly. With pride
English is a bastard language without phonetics so you’ve just got to memorise every word, every phrase, and of course every idiom since half the language is just archaic expressions cobbled together without rhyme or reason (e.g. “rhyme or reason”)
That being said, German has a lot of traps to. The pronunciation of “ee” in himbeere and beerdigung, and guessing the spelling of words using “e” vs “ä” is a nightmare
Two immediately come to mind.
First is “Comfortable”. I pronounce each part of the word: “COME-for-tuh-bull”. Many people give me weird looks and insist on “Comf-turr-bull”.
The other is more niche and has to do with League of Legends.
There is a champion whose theme is moonlight. His backstory is that he belongs to a moon cult who opposes a group that is am Order of the Sun type group. This character is an edgelord whose whole thing is darkness and midnight etc etc.
His name is a combination of the Greek “Ap” meaning “furthest from” and “Helios” meaning the sun. His name is Greek for “the one furthest from the sun” in this moon cult.
In Greek, “ph” does not make the “fuh” sound. His name should rightly be pronounced “App-Hee-lee-ose”
But all the casters and developers call him “Uhh-fell-ee-ose” and it drives me absolutely insane.
Living in Los Angeles as a white person, I refuse to pronounce street and city names that are Spanish the English-speaking way. Knowing Spanish since I was a kid from school and using it on a daily basis, my brain simply doesn’t butcher the pronunciation by default.
It’s caused confusion though for sure. I used to live near a street called La Tijera, but Americans pronounced it almost like Spanish “la tierra” which is a completely different word, and I couldn’t figure out where this street was that everyone was talking about.
So, do you call it “Loss Anjeless” or “Lōs On-hay-lays?”
Loss An-hell-ess.
Low’ En’hee-lews
There was a street in the town I grew up in that everyone called “Awkwee-estahh” . It was Aqui Esta, which is a cute street name, but if you pronounced it correctly no one knew what you were talking about lol
That is a hilarious street name, omg
Does that translate to It’s Here Street??
Yeah, something like “it’s here” or “here it is.” With the proper accents the phrase is “aquí está.”
Houston, Texas has a street called Kuykendahl (or something similar). People kept mentioning this ‘kirkendall’ street and I could never find it.
But that’s one where they’re leaning much closer to the Dutch pronunciation
Maybe there’s some vestige there but I asked upwards of 20 people and no one could explain it. Texas did historically have german-speaking communities and even cities, but I wasn’t aware of any Dutch nor had I heard anyone mention it. It’s interesting?
Everything’s bigger in Texas, including linguistic confusion
