My buddy says “chasm” with a soft ch. We’ve tried to correct him. He doesn’t hear us. He also pronounces “tome” like “tomb”.
We play DnD together if anyone was wondering why these words would come up with any regularity.
I total believe you’re not in a weird magic cult winks
I’ve heard “chasm” pronounced as both “chaz-um” and “kaz-um”
The correct one is “kaz-um,” just like “chaos” isn’t “chay-oss.”
PTSD flashback to my ESL little self always mispronouncing choir after they told me to join to practice my English.
Another funny story! An ex of mine was an exchange student in Germany (from Canada) when she was a high schooler, and she attended a children’s choir concert where they sang “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”, and in the line “you say tomato, I say tomato”, they pronounced “tomato” the same way each time.
Does he say “chaos” with a soft “ch” as well?
He also pronounces “tome” like “tomb”
My roommate in college did that. Drove me nuts, but the worst was that he rhymed “epitome” with “tome.”
No, his chaos is thankfully chaos. It would be kind of fitting if it weren’t, though.
Social studies teacher in high school dinged me 5 points for pronouncing epitome as epi-tome. Ended up with 95/100 but it’s the principle of the matter.
I don’t agree with that decision. Unless you had been specifically taught the proper pronunciation previously and still mispronounced it, the teacher should have just corrected you and moved on.
“kazum” is acceptable in my book. “Toom” is strange for a book though.
I had the misfortune of pronouncing rapping as raping in front of the class when I was 13
Like the post I saw once where a woman wrote she raped her little sister to help her sleep (with a picture of a baby wrapped in a blanket).
I speak spanish and one of the first cultural shocks I had was when I as a kid saw an episode of some sitcom (can’t remember) and there where talks of a “spelling bee” a contest to see who could spell correctly, that was so alien to at the time because in spanish there are just a few words that are tricky, because they have some silent H or a P at the beginning but then I started to learn english and it all made sense.
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“English: if you can spell our words we’ll literally give you a fucking trophy and a scholarship”
We have bees, and we also have really long, ancient words that no one uses or remembers like pulchritudinous, which means physical beauty or Myrmecophilous which is fond of ants.
Just the fact that we can have a whole contest around the idea, and that there’s still room for words contestants haven’t seen before, illustrates just how insane English is.
English isn’t really a language. It’s at least three languages in a trench coat.
it’s wild to think that we embed miniature copies of Greek and Latin into English, for doing science and medicine. not just words, I mean a functional grammar fully stocked with roots and morphemes. we just make words like “holographic,” “isotope” and “synesthesia” (Greek), “accelerometer”, “prefabricated” and “refrigerator” (Latin), or hybrids (“television”, “microscope.”)
English is such a wonderful mutt of a language.
Fuck hybrids that mix greek and latin…
The worst offender: Decathlon, Greek sports in a Greek event (Olympics) and they use DECA! /s
Greetings from a Norwegian. (Some words of Norse origin, mostly those of pre Norman origin)
That’s what happens when you mash several languages together. A lot of English terms have a Latin-derived and Germanic-derived word meaning the same thing.
French spelling is a total shitshow too. what’s their excuse? Spanish and Italian turned out normal.
Just use the Free Dictionary
Press the little buttons on top:
Ahh, simplified and correct.
Conversely, just fucking go for it. Who even cares? Have a laugh about it!
I think mispronouncing weird words you’ve worked into your vocab is a nice middle ground between sounding insufferable and approachable. Yes I used ameliorate but I also mangled the hell out of it, so how smart could I really be?
how did you say it? Amelly-or-ate?
A-mealio-rate
Heh, ameliorate was a better example word. The real one that always comes to mind for me is debacle. I always read it as de-buckle (like unbuckling a belt) in my head until I heard someone on the news say it once. “Lol, that anchor pronounced debacle wrong … wait …”
Damn now debacle is a word I’m sure I’ve only ever read and never heard. Is it not “de-buckle”?
I feel like this is “awry” for me all over again
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/debacle
More like de-BAH-cle. Like a chicken, bawk bawk.
thanks, chicken man!
The New York Public Library has Dial 917-ASK-NYPL (917-275-6975) to connect with librarians via phone Monday through Saturday from 10 AM to 6 PM. Available in English and español.
In fact I would wager almost any library would work for this. Librarians are by and large the most helpful and I judgmental people I have ever met. Every single interaction I’ve ever had with them has been positive.
When we were teenagers, my sister had obviously read the phrase “faux pas” and used it (correctly) in a sentence but pronouncing it “fox pass”.
It was perfect. Like a Mike Myers “what the french call… I don’t know what”.
Can’t you just type a word into merriam webster and get an audio pronouciation?
Typing requires thumbs; something only primates have.
…another thing that (some) primates have is an island where rich people go to molest children.
Some of these primates are greedy and/or terrible primates, and they don’t want you to look up any connection between a primate named Trump and a primate named Epstein (spoiler alert, those primates rape underaged primates and brag about it to each other).
Mate… This post is about a funny meme about word pronunciation. There is no need to bring us politics here (or any other nation politics for that matter). There are other places you can go to to talk about it.
Folks like you are gonna tell me that I’m doing too much, meanwhile others say we aren’t doing enough.
My secret is; I know what to do and when.
Edit: checks notes, amemds notes: microblogs on Lemmy are probably apologetic fascists, or I am very drunk.
Double edit: Lady butterfly!? We were just talking about pulling hair together! I feel betrayed in a small box.
I’m just doing my part. Sorry luv.
Or…
Benefit of living in Australia is that every word is pronounced wrong so it doesn’t matter how you say it.
Can’t even pronounce our second largest city right lol. Melbourne became Melbin
Does that mean the game on PS4 is Bloodbin in Australia?
No because that would be logically consistent
English needs a spelling reform badly. Like the whole point of writing is to put speech in writing. It makes no sense to have spelling be this detached from pronunciation.
busy should be bizy for example
English has the problem of taking words literally from other languages including the pronunciation.
Kindergarden - > German. The I gets pronounced differently.
Tibia - > Latin. Fuck who knows how it is pronounced, just do what you want.
Bureaucracy - > French. Yeah well the French hate people who want to learn their language, I guess. Nothing is written like it is pronounced
You call French inconsistent, I call you ignorant of its rules. They are many, they are complex, they don’t make sense (but, surprisingly, languages don’t ever make sense, they just are), but are for the most part consistent. Especially compared to English.
In French, “eau” is pronounced like “o”. It’s dumb. But it’s always true. Meanwhile, the “i” in “alive” and “live” are pronounced differently for no good reason.
The I in alive and live are pronounced the same, but the I in alive and live are different. English is fascinating, but I do not envy those learning it as a second language.
Most French comment ever made that doesn’t include cheese and wine, in that it admits it’s basically the exact same as English but must pretend it is superior nonetheless.
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Kindergarden - > German. The I gets pronounced differently.
Tinder.
This is a non-trivial task, and not simply because people will refuse to change their habits as they always do.
You say that “busy” should be “bizy”, but are you sure about that? If we decide that Y should always have an “ee” sound, what do you do with words that start with Y? Or are we going to make it the rule that it always has a Y sound at the beginning of a word and an ee sound at the end? What about a word like “ripe”? That’s a different-sounding I than the one you have in “bizy”, so would that be “ryp”? In that case, you have to have 3 pronunciations for Y: one each for when it occurs at the beginning, ending, and inside a word.
Perfect is the enemy of good and all that
In Germany the spelling reform was adapted pretty broadly, there are few people who stick with the old spelling and that is of course their right
Nah, we just need to go back to the old pronunciation.*
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oFX1nbD3dV0
“Knight” used to be pronounced as it’s spelt. “Outside” used to said like oot-si-deh.
*I am actually just kidding about that first part, but I do find it fascinating how much the spoken word has moved away from the originally phonetic spelling.
Over time, that is what normally happens to language (even French, yeah looking at you Gauls).
But, English and especially North American English is so predominate in the world, that may stop its otherwise natural development.
/not a linguist just friends with some.
English just needs a new orthography. Languages change in many ways, and phonetic drift is natural, it’s just that there hasn’t been a spelling reform to accommodate them, and at this point it’s gotten out of hand.
Even French? a lot of the horribly spelled words in English are their fault!
Or you can look up how to pronounce it. The IPA and often audio pronunciations aren’t that hard to find, unless you speak a more obscure language
So many of the audio pronunciations are computer generated, I used to like IPA but then I stopped drinking so it doesn’t really help any more.
International phonetic alphabet :3… though trying to pronounce some of the sounds in it does make you want the other kind of IPA lol
Let me drop this on fleek resource: www.forvo.com The Pronunciation Dictionary. Longtime user. Ya just search the word, and get results from people all over the world saying it in their native tongue with country specified. It’s great. Hearing Americans say Gouda (a Dutch town famous for the cheese) is like taking a cheese grater to my balls. No, it is not “Goo-dah” of you. Repent!
When I check the dictionary, it says in the US it’s pronounced goo-dah.
It is, because we butchered it. Like how Lohss On-heh-lace is pronounced “Loss An-juh-less.”
Yep, same thing
Looks like we pronounce it like the Swede’s do, and German is halfway to English pronunciation. I would probably blame the Germanic parts of English along with significant Swedish settlement in US cheese producing regions.
Well … what is it then? If you don’t tell me I’m gonna keep pronouncing it with my Minnesotan accent!
According to the website (and Wikipedia) it’s supposed to sound more like “How-da” with the “how” sounding like you’re gearing up to spit on someone. And then other-non English speaking countries do pronounce the g very distinctly, but they still relatively follow the vowel pronunciation and sound like “Go-dah” as in “Go dad” (but if dad changed to dah)
Basically Americans are the only ones who say Gouda like “Goo-dah”
In the interest of not being bullied by my friends, I’m gonna continue to say it the American way because I don’t wanna be bullied. My Filipino friends still make fun of how I said “Pancit” incorrectly ONE TIME.
They say it that way because in the US that’s how it’s pronounced. The argument that it’s pronounced differently in other countries, so the US way is wrong, is stupid. Even within a language/country, there are regional dialects.
I grew up in the US, but my dad was from England. There were lots of times I said a word the way I had always heard my dad say it, only to have people correct my mispronunciation. The one that pops into my head was capillaries (the little blood vessels). My dad always said ca-PILL-ah-rees, not CA-puh-lar-rees. Neither is wrong, it’s just pronounced differently here and there.
Like the episode of Family Guy when Ian McKellen says “con-TRAH-versy” and Stewie says, “Oh, a CON-tra-versy!” in his fake British accent, to which he replies, “Apologies. Those of us with British accents pronounce it ‘con-TRAH-versy.’ But how would you know that?”
I am American and I said “Gowda”.
That right?
SAY IT RIGHT DUTCHIE“Gow-deh! Gow-deh!”
Guess he is a clumsy Clouseau-esque waiter!
Well…im my country there actually is :D You can call them, they are very nice and for bonus points you can also ask them about any questions you have regarding grammar rules and how you would correctly use them in you specific context
Then can we force SciFi audiobook narrators to use it?
Ray Porter, I love you to fucking death, but you kill me sometimes…
I loved The Expanse, and Jefferson Mays is amazing
But “jimbals” drove me crazy
For Ray Porter, his inability to pronounce “Archimedes” was bad enough they made him go back and re-record a book.
Oh god yes the jimbles on Mays, I had forgotten about that, every time he would say that my brain would go “the what?” It would suck me right out of immersion every damn time.
Having not read this (yet! It’s planned) what is the word and how is supposed to be pronounced?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/gimbal
There’s audio for us and UK here.
Hard-g; “gimbals” see “gimbal lock”
Is this one of those gif - jiff type situations?
I don’t know what the etymology of “gimbal” is…
Looks like the precursor words all use soft-g, and wiktionary even says soft-g is an allowed pronunciation.
So, yes, I think.
The news department in our national public television has such a service. They have a list of people they can call whenever needed. If e.g. a disaster happens in Eiuýrzbüicuzboßébeor city, they call a native speaker of that country to learn the correct pronunciation of the place or name for the news.
