How Do You Pronounce...?

[Liam]

Not sure if we have a general thread on the subject where members can ask questions about certain words, English or otherwise, but here goes...

Like Janet Frame, who pronounced the word island as a child literally as IS-land, I myself have never heard the word Newfoundland said out loud.

All my life I said it exactly as you would say it phonetically (more or less): new-FOUND-land,
but was recently corrected that the actual pronounciation of it is something like NEW-fun-land.

Who'd've known?

[Eric]

As my mother was Dutch, the pronunciation of English-language names at home was not always reliable. I too started out childhood saying new-FOUND-land (etymologically legitimate), but also found out much later that it tends to be pronounced NEW-fund-lund. But with a "d" in the "fund" bit. Lots of fun, anyway. I haven't met a Canadian recently to ask. I may have even said Canadia as a kid. But I was warned off saying are-KAN-sas earlyish in life.

[Stiffelio]

Funny that you two native English speakers would encounter such pronunciation mishaps in your own language. More surprising in Liam than it is in Eric, as I imagine every American child would have heard the word Newfoundland in their geography class in their school days. I think I learned how to pronounce that word when I was reading The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (btw pronounced Pru). Another challenging Canadian toponymic is Saskatchewan. On the other hand, the Brits have hundreds of tricky name places. The latest one I learned is the London neighbourhood of Islington: I associated it to Island but I was mistaken; it is pronounced IS-Lington.

[Eric]

Stiffelio, there is nothing surprising about the fact that people in the USA and UK are unable to pronounce things in their own language. English is not Esperanto, and the spelling, as when you find place names on a map, has often been frozen to what the pronunciation was a thousand years ago, while the spoken pronunciation has evolved. You gave one example, Islington, but there are many.

In England alone there are dozens if not hundreds of placenames that you just have to know how to pronounce by having heard them, such as Shrewsbury, Gloucester, Worcester, Leicester, Warwick, Cambridge, Slough, Reading, Wymondham, Costessey, Scarborough, Morecambe, Carlisle, Masham, Norwich, Lowestoft, Keighley, and so on.

Then there are all those words such as through, though, slough, Slough, rough, bough, tough, lough, cough, dough, hough, enough, sough, although, etc., which you have to have heard said before you know. And the speaker must be a reliable, reasonably educated one.

There are also words where the stress or pronunciation differs either within UK or USA usage, or between them, such as controversy, aristocrat, contrary, herb, invalid, etc.

Stress differences between verb, adjective, and noun such as innovation and innovative, modernise and modernisation, principal and principality.

There's a lot for the native-speaker, let alone the foreign learner, to learn.

[Eric]

Here the checklist for the place names in my previous posting. See how many you got right (the ö represents a schwa; a double s is an ess sound, not a zed sound):

Shrewsbury (SHROHZ-bri; the locals say SHROOZ-bri), Gloucester (GLOSS-tö), Worcester (WOOSS-tö), Leicester (LESS-tö), Warwick (WORR-ick), Cambridge (KAYM-bridge), Slough (rhymes with how, now, cow; but a snake SLUFFs its skin), Reading (REDD-ing), Wymondham (WIND-öm), Costessey (KOSS-i), Scarborough (SKAA-brö), Morecambe (MAW-köm), Carlisle (kaa-LAYL, rhymes with 'while'), Masham (MASS-öm), Norwich (NORR-ich or NORR-idge), Lowestoft (trisyllabic: LOW-öss-toft), Keighley (KEETH-li).

There are also British surnames (sometimes of Norman French origin) such as Cholmondeley, Beauchamp, St John-Stevas, Le Fanu, Brazil, Onions, Rothschild, Szirtes, and many others that are not pronounced as expected, or as they would be in their languages of origin. Yet the late linguist Dennis Gotobed pronounced his surname as you would have expected: go-to-bed.

[Stevie B]

Growing up in Massachusetts, I'm familiar with many of these place names as New England cities and towns. Gloucester is a famous fishing town on the far north shore of Massachusetts (their high school mascot is a fisherman in a yellow raincoat). If you're from Gloucester, you pronounce it (GLOSS-tah). Being from western Massachusetts, I say GLOSS-ter. Worcester is located in central Massachusetts and is where the "eastern Massachusetts" accent ends. Worcester folk say "WISS-tah". People west of Worcester show due respect to the letter "R" when speaking. Cambridge and Reading are pronounced the same as Eric listed above. Norwich in Connecticut, however, has a different pronunciation (NORR-wich). And Scarborough takes three syllables to pronounce, not two.

[Loki]

Reading has become quite famous thanks to Oscar Wilde.
Another one that may prove tricky is Plymouth, which I thought was something like /'plaimauθ/, but instead I found out it's /ˈplɪməθ/.

[Stiffelio]

Ironically, as a foreign student of English (granted, I lived for years in a few English speaking countries and we have quite strong Anglo influence in Argentina as well) I took special care to learn how to pronounce ambiguous place names. But I thought it would have come more naturally to natives, the likelihood of having been exposed to such names being much higher if you live in the same country.

Here the checklist for the place names in my previous posting. See how many you got right (the ö represents a schwa; a double s is an ess sound, not a zed sound):

Shrewsbury (SHROHZ-bri; the locals say SHROOZ-bri), Gloucester (GLOSS-tö), Worcester (WOOSS-tö), Leicester (LESS-tö), Warwick (WORR-ick), Cambridge (KAYM-bridge), Slough (rhymes with how, now, cow; but a snake SLUFFs its skin), Reading (REDD-ing), Wymondham (WIND-öm), Costessey (KOSS-i), Scarborough (SKAA-brö), Morecambe (MAW-köm), Carlisle (kaa-LAYL, rhymes with 'while'), Masham (MASS-öm), Norwich (NORR-ich or NORR-idge), Lowestoft (trisyllabic: LOW-öss-toft), Keighley (KEETH-li).

There are also British surnames (sometimes of Norman French origin) such as Cholmondeley, Beauchamp, St John-Stevas, Le Fanu, Brazil, Onions, Rothschild, Szirtes, and many others that are not pronounced as expected, or as they would be in their languages of origin. Yet the late linguist Dennis Gotobed pronounced his surname as you would have expected: go-to-bed.

Actually, I did pretty well: I only got wrong the ones I marked in bold.

[Stiffelio]

There are also words where the stress or pronunciation differs either within UK or USA usage, or between them, such as controversy, aristocrat, contrary, herb, invalid, etc.

Stress differences between verb, adjective, and noun such as innovation and innovative, modernise and modernisation, principal and principality.

How about envelope and clerk! The word Americans pronounce differently from the Brits that sounded funniest to me is buoy. Brits say boy but Americans say booee.

[Liam]

Americans say booee

Hmm, dunno, I'va always said boy, boyed up, etc--

[Stevie B]

Hmm, dunno, I'va always said boy, boyed up, etc--

Perhaps this has less to do with linguistics and more to do with your fondness of boys?

[Galatea92]

When I was a kid, and almost until I was an adult, I saw the word 'misled' as 'MY-zuld', imagining it as the past tense of a verb 'to misle' (MY-zul), meaning to trick or mislead.

I still have to correct my internal pronunciation of the word every time I read it :-).

[Eric]

Interesting what Stevie B says in #6 about Mass o' Chew Sits, as it sounds to us Brits when said on the box. Some of the pronunciations seem to have kept a more British form, probably by tradition. We Brits always assume that the letter "r" is clearly pronounced in most brands of American English, while in the UK, only the Scots and people in the West Country tend to pronounce the "r" in many positions in a word.

Most of the placenames I picked out are tricky, so Stiff Ale E O did pretty well. I didn't know that Mass 'em one until a friend pointed it out, years agio. Costessey and Wymondham are near Norwich, where I went to university, hence the cluster of East Anglian names in my list.

Maybe Loki can tell us where we can cut & paste IPA symbols from, because they are more accurate than my homespun pronunciation guide.

In Britain everyone knows how to pronounce Morecambe, because there was a famous comedy duo called Morecambe & Wise. And the placename is pronounced the same.

In Britain, about half of people say OMM-vö-loap, the other half ENN-vö-loap. I use the latter. But I don't think anyone says KLÖRRK in the UK. We say KLAAK.

Talking of buoys and boys (we Brits pronounce them the same), I believe the Reggae people have got into hot water recently for being homophobic. Am I right in thinking that the Reggaespeak for a gay is a "bwoy"?

"Myzled" is like one or two other words. I used to think that the word "awry" was pronounced AW-ri. You just can't tell if you've never heard it.

[Eric]

In #5, I gave a number of surnames with rather exotic pronunciation. They are:

Cholmondeley (CHUM-li), Beauchamp (BEE-chum), St John-Stevas (SIN-jön STEE-vöss), Le Fanu (LEH-fön-oo), Brazil (BRAZZ-öl), Onions (O'NY-önz, rhymes with Brian's), Rothschild (ROTHS-child), Szirtes (SUR-teez). There must be many more. For instance, there is a British trade union leader of Polish origin called Serwotka. I wonder if they pronounce his name "Sir Vodka" (I don't actually know). But most people who have names of Polish origin, and there were many refugees after WWII, may have dual-pronunciation, i.e. one pronunciation for those who know Polish, another for other Brits. So if you're called Szczepanski or Peterkiewicz, people may have trouble with your name.