I respect it when I hear someone clearly attempting a word they've only seen written

Ahahhahhahahaaha that's actually amazing

There was an '80s cop show called Hill Street Blues that had a recurring latino character named Jesus. All I heard as a kid was "Hey, Zeus" so I thought his actual name was Zeus and everybody just said "hey" to him when addressing him.

I thought Yosemite Sam had pretty much taught all English speakers the correct pronunciation. I remember my parents saying their Swedish relatives pronounced it "Yohsmeet."

I say it that way sometimes for fun. I live nearish so sometimes, when visitors hear me say if, they ask if that’s how it’s actually pronounced

are you Donald Trump by chance

You're not alone, brother.

Wait how do you phonetically say this?

I have been pronouncing it like this since my buddy fucked it up in grade school lmao

Les Nessman comes to mind.

That dog died over a decade ago. Do younger kids know what that is?

Me whenever someone can't pronounce a word

Was that pronounced like red-ing?

Which by the way is a town name that very often gets mispronounced by people who only *read* it in books.

Brian Regan presents: Epi-tome of hyper bowl.

Have some Worcestershire sauce on me!

Words go brrrr.

In your defense, "Segway" is a real brand of some kind of transport thingy, which might be where you picked it up.

segue puts me straight into a fugue state

Bro let me tell you how recently I realized...

👆

Yeah, that’s very much an English thing. Many other languages use reasonably consistent spelling and pronunciation, so memorizing the handful of exceptions isn’t really a problem.

However, with English it’s the other way around. You need to memorize the handful of words that are actually pronounced the way they are written. Everything else is just pure chaos. If you read a word, you can’t pronounce it. If you hear a word, you can’t find it in a dictionary.

The one that wakes me up in the middle of the night is albeït. I thought it was fancy foreign speak pronounced “all bait”, but it is just a short form of “all be it”, is pronounced exactly like that, and is a synonym for “all though it be”.

When I was learning Japanese, I came across a sentence along the lines of "lets buy stuff at the [HTML_REMOVED]", I could understand most of it fine, but didn't recognize bracketed word, which was conveniently written in a script that denotes loan words (and I have trancscribed phonetically above). I probably spent at least half an hour trying to look up "shoppingumouru" simce I couldn't find it in my dictionary. Eventually, I turned to Google translate and immediately facepalmed when I saw the answer.

https://youtu.be/Nrk8sqZfsgI

Jjjjjifff

Me as a grown-ass Spaniard right now: wait, it's not pre-face? Is it pre-fis?

Same with pre-dator for me xD

Ha - and yet "quay" can be pronounced as "kway", or "kay" or "key" - and mean the same thing - depending on context. Mostly if it's part of a name, and who named it.

Also sometimes it's spelled "key" instead.

Every time.

Nah I learned words reading memes and take out menus

My sister and I did this intentionally to be funny as kids. We took my son there last year and he did the same thing without hearing the story. Pretty funny for me.

That's how we pronounce it in Spain! Actually the H has no sound, so she's just "er-me-on"

So how is it pronounced?

Oh man, there must be dozens of examples like this you have. It's such a weird language, with so many words and spellings and pronunciations from so many sources.

I'm from American south, I've always said and heard "kwest-chen" - now I'm sitting here saying it over and over wondering how much is regional accent

Ugh, as a young child I thought train was spelled "Chrain" for the same reason. People getting lazy and softening a T sound to a CH sound is fine, but can't we update the spelling too?

I pronounced hyperbole as hyper-bowl until my mid 40's when I finally heard it used in a movie, and had to ask everyone around me if that's how hyperbole is pronounced. I knew the word genre, but didn't know that when I read "genre", it was the same word. I said gen-ree when using genre in a statement well into my late 20's.

As a kid I thought it was just "entreeee".

Turns out Nginx is not N-jinx

I kept saying Ah-zoore instead of Azure for too long

Don't count on last names for that stuff.

You'll find duboise or dubois pronounced dubose which is horrifically wrong.

I had an English teacher correct me on that, except I said hyperbola which is a math concept and is pronounced hyper bowl a.

Mine is sidereal... I always said side real. Then, I learned it was (roughly) Sid air heal.

Though I did use to say Copernicus as copper knickers too.

I'm kinda the same here, except worse. I'm stuck saying Hyper-Bowl, and the "proper" pronunciation breakes down as hyperbally in my head. Sounding like an adverb trips me up so much, I just refuse to use the word now.

Mine was Ganymede. I read so much scifi but didn't really ever see any scifi shows referencing the planet, and it never came up in conversation. I thought it was supposed to be pronounced gani-mee-dee, as if it was a Greek philosopher.

English is a garbage language anyway tbh you say words the way you like ‼️

Etoba koh is probably the closest I can get to it for ya lol

English fails hard at conveying phonetics through written language. In Brazilian portuguese (my native language) those words would be written as:

• parenquimal (from “parênquima”);
• taquipnéico;
• bradipnéico;

The lack of diacritics (and several other characteristics) makes English really easy to learn but in contrast you get those kinds of problems. I’ve never seen anyone get those words wrong in my field (I’m a vet)

“Tachypneic” is pronounced like “TA-KIP-NIK”,

I’m clearly not qualified to lecture you, but deriving from words like pneumonia, and consulting merriam-webster, are you sure the “p” isn’t silent here, and that the “e” is?

Correct

(wondering what's especially weird about it)

Edit: like, if you think it's weird that "scrup" isn't pronounced with a "u" as in "cup", there's like 48 thousand other examples in other words.

It might help if you spell it correctly. Unscrupulous

Is it meem or mehmeh? I use mehmeh.

It's spelt "Poutine".

I only pronounced that right the first time because I saw it spelt with a œ, which I misread as æ, like encyclopædia. So three cheers for "right for the wrong reason".

Your achills heel?

My parents had a dictionary of foreign words and I didn't always use them correctly

How's it actually pronounced???

It's Διάδοχοι so rather Dee-AH-Do-(c)hee with accent on A, actually more like thee-AH-do-hee but that might sound a bit weird if you don't have a feel for greek pronounciation. A small tip is that "i" is never pronounced as in "die" in greek but as "ee" (or as in "tin" if short).

Dee-AH-doh-kee like in ancient greek is probably what you want to use. Sorry for the confusion.

Wikipedia has the phonetic as daɪˈædəkaɪ/ dy-AD-ə-ky.
Which with their pronunciation guide would come out as Die-Add-A(h)-Ki(te).
I think.
I might be wrong (and if I am, I'm sure someone will be along to correct me directly)

Chaos, pronounced like multiple "ciao" in Italian. 🤌

And on your jalapeño comment: I spent 6 months sending my coworker "hola" in morning greetings until he told me that he thought "hola" was just me saying "Holler [holla] at a player [playa]". To his credit, he took German on high school. To his discredit, we had been working in Spain for 2 weeks when we had this conversation.

I used to think “chaos” had the same “ch” as “church” when I was a kid.

The chao of Sonic Adventure (1998)?

paper-ka

I read a book with a Chloe and I thought it was shlow

"[...] I still pronounce [...] Smaug as smog."

Wait, what? I can't remember when it was pronounced in the movies and I also (mentally) pronounce it as 'Smog.' It has never come up in IRL conversation so I don't know how it's actually pronounced.

Does anyone have a clip/timestamp on a video to show how it's actually pronounced? It's been a long time since I've seen the movies.

Pronounced "Yes, Mate". It was named by Australians.

They invented the language, the least they could do is spell and pronounce it right.

And their wacky spellings.

Seriously though, I know there is no right or wrong, just cultures but "vit-a-min" (vit rhyming with bit) for vitamin , "al-loo-minium" for aluminum and "let-toos" for lettuce is like fingernails on a chalkboard. lol

I studied Malayalam (the language of Kerala state in southern India) and the script was fucking awesome. It's purely syllabic and it's impossible to pronounce a written word wrong - you just sound out the syllables and you've got it. Everything else about the language was impossibly alien to me as a native English speaker (like you can't just say yes or no, you can only negate or affirm other words), but at least the script was easy.

Definitely. We hates them.

That depends. Which type of media has a denser word count, and goes into deeper detail? Which format requires active attention to consume? Which format enables side by side comparison with other works? Which formats sacrifice accuracy to try and grab attention with dazzle and drama? Which format uses more varied vocabulary and sentence structure?

But it isn't saying someone is smarter. It may be more accurate to ask which person is better informed; a reader or a watcher / listener?