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| | | Subject: New subject line...
Posted Jun 19, 2006 by  Gnomon: ciabatta and mortadella
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12421
  | | I'm loathe to use the term "mispronunciation" in general, as people are entitled to pronounce things any way they like. The "th" in the English "posthumously" and the "ron" in "iron" are caused by people reading the word and thinking it must be pronounced the way it is written. Illiterate people would not have made that mistake.
Iron was spelt "isern" in Old English. Gradually the "s" was dropped, hence the modern pronunciation of "eye urn". But somewhere along the way it was misspelled as "iron" so people started pronouncing it that way.
Mis-stressing is a different matter. Perfectly clear words can be made hard to understand by the redistribution of stress:
contro-VER-sial and cont-ROV-ersy
main-TAIN and MAIN-tenance
metre and kil-OM-etre
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| | | Subject: New subject line...
Posted Jun 19, 2006 by Edward the Bonobo - Gone.
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12423
| | Hmm. I'm fairly sure that most people *do* pronounce the th. I'll make a mental note to listen out.
Stress patterns seem to vary between BritEng and USEng. A while back, I had lunch at a conference with a (stunning!) Italian woman. Her English was decent, but not perfect. Her presentation was later in the afternoon, and so she quizzed me about the stress in 'Maintainability' (Italians find English stress difficult, and when they get it wrong they can be incomprehensible). I told her 'mainTAINability'. However...as we walked back to the venue, I thoroughly confused her by adding 'Or MAINTtainability' - which is how many USAnians pronounce it. Six of one, really...MainTAIN. MAINTtenance.
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| | | Subject: New subject line...
Posted Jun 19, 2006 by Researcher 173821
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12425
| | I'd have to agree with kelli. pos-tume is the way I've always heard it pronounced, although it is perhaps not that common a word.
This is why I don;t correct what I see as pismenunciations. I, for example, used to pronounce vehemently as ve-hem-ant-lea (short ve) but was corrected to pronounce it vea-mently (can;t really do that without the funny squiggly phonetic thingies that I don;t know). Anyway, when i said that on this thread someone came along and said no, it wasn;t wrong, that's how it was pronounced in their area.
So there is a lot of play in pronunciations and one of the odd things about text based comms is that we can all write the words down and then translate them in our heads, when in actual fact we could all be pronouncing them in completely different ways.
Bit like chinese (I think) in that the written form is set but the spoken forms can be completely unintelligible between different groups.
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| | | Subject: One for sorrow
Posted Jun 19, 2006 by ~ jwf ~
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12428
| | >> ...part black part Chinese and wholly gorgeous. <<
YES! The melting pot of Port of Spain has produced the most gorgeous human beings on the planet. God bless the Empire for its policy of transporting indentured servants from all over the world. I firmly believe that the unique Trinidadian mix of Africans, Indians and Orientals has somehow evolved the human species. Much for the better as you have seen; and they are so hard not to be bedazzled by.
~jwf~
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| | | Subject: One for sorrow
Posted Jun 20, 2006 by ~ jwf ~
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12434
| | TC said:
>>... "trebuchet"... we use it quite a bit at work in French <<
One wonders if one's leg is being pulled here. I cannot begin to imagine how a Brit ex-pat living in the Fodderland would ever need to talk about or utilise medieval French catapults at work. Is there some modern use of the word I don't know or something I've missed about your line of work?
~jwf~
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| | | Subject: One for sorrow
Posted Jun 20, 2006 by ~ jwf ~
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12435
| | TC also said:
>> .."trait" pronounced "tray". But, as JWF says, I'd be careful who I said it to. <<
No doubt, TC, as you worked forward in the backlog you saw that we were both wrong.
It seems most folks here say that the 'tray' pronunciation is considered pretentious.
Don't know about you, but I could claim that I say 'tray' only as a test to check out the pretention levels of people I'm talking to.
In any case I'd probably only use the word when talking to other pretentious people.
~jwf~
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| | | Subject: connecting the dotes
Posted Jun 27, 2006 by ~ jwf ~
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12439
| | So many subtle truths can be discerned by understanding the way so many words in English have morphed in meaning.
For example:
'dote' means to show excessive fondness or love: parents who dote on their only child,
while,
'dotage' refers to old age, specifically that time when one begins to behave in a foolish or senile way.
I point this out becasue it had never occurred to me (and it may never have occurred to you) that dote and dotage would have anything in common. But it seems they are from the same Middle English verb 'doter'.
And, perhaps most importantly, it seems that one can discern a cultural 'value judgement' has burdened one or both usages. It is revealing that 'excessive fondness and love' are somehow the equal of folly and senility.
~jwf~
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| | | Subject: connecting the dotes
Posted Jun 27, 2006 by KB
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12440
| | I'd sort of always taken that for granted - there are a lot of other phrases meaning to love something which are similar. "I'm crazy/mad/nuts about her", and so on. It's a bit like saying you're so emotional about something that you've stopped acting rationally. Which strong emotions can do to people.
Just thinking jwf, the verb 'to dote' is sometimes used to mean 'to be senile' - or is that just in Ireland? If so, maybe that's why I took the connection between 'dotage' and 'doting on someone' for granted.
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