I’ve always had a bad opinion of people who try to chide little kids who use words like runned instead of ran. I’d always argued the kid successfully extrapolated past tense words end with a hard d sound and haven’t gotten to deeper English classes to learn the special scenarios for words like run or drink.
If you track how kids perform at this, you actually find a bathtub curve. When they are really young and just learning words, they are actually quite good at irregular conjunctions (for the few words they know). Then, as they get older and learn a bunch of other words, they start messing up the irregular ones they used to get right. Then, of course, they eventually learn the exceptions as exceptions.
Mine was “facade”.
Fuck Aid
As a Canadian … no doot aboot it
“Epitome”
Epy tome!
Hubris
Never thought of that one but yeah that would be tough.
Albeit was al-bite
Segue was si-gyou
Elegant
For some reason I said “eglant”
Harsh lesson to learn in a 8th grade class speech.
I said “Sortie” out loud for the first time the other day, and even though it was pronounced correctly I still interrupted my own story to repeat it with a look of disgust, thinking “Surely not!”
Fuschia is pronounced Fuck-tosia
Not to be confused with Fuck-Tasha
I learned epitome is not pronounced ep-e-tome but rather e-pit-toe-me
Me the first time I heard a guitarist pronounce the brand Epiphone as “Epiphany”.
Mine:
- adolescence = “a-doller-sanse”
- awry = “aww-reeee”
- banal = “banal”
The fact that banal and canal are so different is just another trap laid by the alphabet crew.
Awry is particularly relatable.
Aw-ry, aw-ry, aw-ry.
Awry was something I pronounced like you did forever until I heard it spoken. Sadly that was in some medieval show, so I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be an accent or if you actually pronounce it like that :D
Archipelago
Still don’t know the correct way.
I’ve heard both ark uh pella go and ark i pelli go. Probably just dialect difference.
English is just mispronounced French
Interesting history provided by Rob Words - https://youtu.be/TUL29y0vJ8Q
“The History of English Podcast” is really fun and gets into the weeds of why English is such a mess.
Not be be confused with “The History of England Podcast”, which is also really good.
Or indeed “The History of English Podcasts” which tragically doesn’t seem to exist.
My left eye twitches when niche rhymes with itch.
Why would you pronounce it “eesh”?
Because of the French.
every language pronunciation problem is because of the french
Or read it in a shitpost somewhere
I’m not sure. This seems to imply there aren’t even memes in the 33rd century. Back to paper books I guess.
True, though I don’t hold with the theory that reading automatically makes you smarter — Dan Brown exists.
To some degree you’re right, reading doesn’t make you intelligent in and of itself, but I do think constantly reading like that does make you to some degree smarter. Like even if you’re reading slop, you’re probably smarter than if you had been reading nothing.
It has also been proven that reading makes you more empathetic, because you are actively putting yourself in the character’s headspace.
Well, not necessarily a book nowadays. But this was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Ah. The Minellium falcon.
Solo and Greedo at the table
Solo, his arms wide
Audiobooks do the reverse.
“Wait, that’s how you spell that??”
I guess it’s usually with names, though.
A1 is coming for our jobs. It’s an evil cable of people.
I first saw “epoch” in Chrono Trigger and I thought it was pronounced like “E-Pock.” Years later, I found out it’s the same as “epic.” So I had probably actually heard it spoken before ever reading it, but thought they were saying “epic” and not “epoch” because, in the context, both words would absolutely work.
…
goddamnit
TIL
Um, not always.
(Points toward Trump trying to say anonymous.)
Acetaminophen was hilarious
Chimera, Chitin, and even Drow are a few that I got wrong because I read them in a book first.
how are you supposed to pronounce drow and chitin?
Drow = dr ow. Chitin = Kai tin.
Chitin can be somewhat dialect dependent kinda like solder, sometimes it’s pronounced correctly as soder sometimes they are wrong and pronounce it solder.
This joke doesn’t work for a normal language like spanish that has regular orthography, only languages like english or french that have broken spelling.
Klingonese is read the way it’s spoken so it also wouldn’t suffer from this problem.
a normal language like spanish that has regular orthography
que necesitas para entender que esto es algo falso? Un Casco?
Every letter in spanish is always pronounced with regular rules. You don’t have to guess. Things like “pingüino” and the u having the diaresis makes it obvious that you have to pronounce the u in the word vs “quitar” where you don’t pronounce the u.
Just because you can pronounce s and c the same and c and k the same doesn’t make it bad orthography.
Just because you can pronounce s and c the same and c and k the same doesn’t make it bad orthography.
yes it does
Source : Turkish speaker.
EDIT : It’s not just s c and k, q also gets involved. LL and Y and some variations having J and G enter into it, the constant H letters that don’t get pronounced, etc etc.
No romance language can say anything about being “regular” from an orthographic sense.
deleted by creator
M’cabe
Well if you can read IPA, it’s something like /məˈkɑːbrə/
Although I’d argue the ə can be silent.
It’s a word like “cuisine” that doesn’t just come from French, it’s literally a French word and properly still pronounced the French way, so silent “r” and silent “e” on the end.
I often start talking about a book I’m reading only to realise I have zero idea how to pronouce the names of half of the characters.
My sister recently blew my mind when she straight up pronounced “the Teixcalaanli Empire”, presumably correctly and without any hesitation. I haven’t heard it out loud before then. Hell, I didn’t even know it was possible to pronounce it in the first place.
None of the Dune audio works can agree on how “Tleilaxu” is pronounced. I’ve heard everything from “telly-axe-uh” to “t’lay-lax-you”
We were actually talking about A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. Can’t recommend it enough. It’s narrowly my favourite lesbian science fiction debut novel-turned-series about a galactic empire of 2019.
~Halfway through atm and enjoying it, reminds me a bit of Ancillary Justice. Didn’t know it was a series. What’s your runner up?
Gideon the Ninth. Very different, very fun.
I didn’t like Ancillary Justice that much. I loved some of the themes and how the world works, but narratively it felt like it was always pushing too hard to be dramatic. I think I’ll finish the rest of the series at some point, but it’s not quite for me.
I tried getting into gideon, but it just felt weird in the way it was written. Something about the narrative’s perspective and framing was hard to grab onto.
I just call it the Tex Mex empire
