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Got called out once for pronouncing epitome as Epi-tome.
That one stung more than Camus as Cah-mus instead of Cah-moo. At least thats just the French fucking with us.
It can happen with common words too! Like I didn’t know I was pronouncing Thai food wrong till that John Oliver episode
How were you pronouncing it?
Thigh food
You never heard anyone say Thailand? Or you just never made the connection?
I think it’s the former, I also think I maybe imagined the “Th” when someone else said it. I also may have been surrounded by others who mispronounced both.
So in short I blame society /s
So in short I blame society /s
Ha! Typical millennial
Edit: since it’s not always clear on the internet, I too am being sarcastic.
That’s adorable
Aw shucks
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
That’s how I refer to… never mind
If anyone’s wondering and since it’s not clarified here…
Epitome is pronounced like this: ||UK|US| |phonetic|/ɪˈpɪt.ə.mi/|/ɪˈpɪt̬.ə.mi/| |non-phonetic|epittomee|epiddomee|
I’ve been an avid reader since I was 6/7 and I hate reading dictionary listings with phonetic spellings as ironically they only make it harder for me to know how to pronounce a word. I’m also a native speaker.
Learning the IPA is quite good in that case
I can’t believe you don’t remember what an upside down e sounds like.
epiddomee
I know Americans pronounce Ts as Ds, but reading it explicitly written down is like being poked in the eye
Wait till you find out that they pronounce Ds as semi-trilled Rs!
I don’t know what that is but I’m intrigued and afraid!
They’re just like trilled Rs, but have only one trill, hence semi-trilled.
I’m trying this out with my own mouth and it’s weird
I’ll pronounce a T when you pronounce an R
That’s a new one, what’s wrong with Rs?
Most English people have a non-rhotic accent, meaning not pronouncing the r after vowels so words like “better” become “betta”.
This one seems like it’s very accent-dependent. A cockney geezer will definitely say “be’aah”, but a geordie would say "be’eh and someone from the west country would say “betterrrr”. I think the American pronunciation makes the R sound a lot longer (you can tell I don’t know all the property linguistics words!) so anything shorter probably sounds weird to you.
I’m sure it’s definitely regional, just like accents in the US. But generally in England at least it’s non-rhotic. I know Scotland is different, maybe Wales too
Uh, thanks for the heads up. I’ve been pronouncing epitome both correctly and incorrectly my entire adult life because for some reason I thought they were two different words.
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If it’s any consolation, I pronounced it the same way for years.
What the shit is a camus.
It’s like a hippopotamoo, but somewhat more existential and obsessed with arcana like boulders and mountains for exercise to discover happiness in life.
that’s the one ! 😁
Para-dig-em checking in. The bulb that lit up when I connected the sound with the word was pretty bright, but made me feel awfully dim. It changed my whole paradigm.
I was 17 when my friend pointed out to me that epitome is pronounced epi-tome-ey
Rather than how I was saying it Epi-Tome.
Same here, but I knew the correct pronunciation of the word when spoken, I just didn’t know they were the same damn word. When it finally clicked in my head, I about slapped myself.
Same here for “pique”.
I learned “piqued” when I was reading as a kid but I pronounced it “pee-khwhy”. So very wrong haha
…I don’t know how to pronounce that word either
Like peak . " My curiosity was piqued." In my example technically like peaked.
Gabriel Wyner talks about this phenomenon in the first chapter or two of Fluent Forever. Can’t remember what he called it but rest assured that you are not alone in experiencing this :)
Congrats, I was first corrected while meeting new people in college 😔
I even had it in a song I wrote and the whole thing was ruined because it didn’t rhyme anymore. Also it was ruined by my songwriting skills.
I’m having an anaphylactic shock, give me the Epi-Tome™! 😄
Don’t mean to make fun of you, just thought of a coincidentally similar sounding word
I went to a restaurant called Penelope’s… I thought it was pene-lopes. 🤦
Ha, I remember reading Greek mythology when I was young and getting thrown off by Persephone. Seemed like it should rhyme with telephone…
That would be telephony, which I didn’t know was even a word until I was in my 30s.
Epitome was one of mine too. Also inventory, i thought emphasis was on the vent syllable not the in syllable
I know that, but I intentionally pronounce it epi-tome because it sounds better emphasized, it really bothers my mom
This unlocked the epitomous memory of me and my mom in the car and the radio show host trying to bust out his best vocab with epi-TOme. She bust out laughing. I feel like something similar is coming back 'round to me, just found out it’s epitomic. Not even sure how to pronounce
That one used to trip me up. It still “feels” wrong to me even today.
I pronounced hyperbole as it is spelled “hyper bowl” for decades and nobody corrected me! It wasn’t until I finally saw someone say it in a TV show that I realized the error of my ways. Now I stumble over the word every time I try to say it because I have decades of habit to overcome. Sometimes when I think I might need to say it, I start mouthing it ahead of time so that I get it right on the first try. There are at least a dozen other words like this for me, and I’m sure dozens more that I’m not even aware of.
Edit: for those of you who have never heard it pronounced, hyperbole is pronounced “high-per-buh-lee”.
This one is particularly annoying because of Hyperbolic, which is pronounced Hy-per-bol-ic. Which just makes Hy-per-bole seem more valid…
There are a lot of those prefixes that shift stress and/or pronunciation when going from nouns to adjectives or verbs, like supermarket vs superfluous. It’s just especially annoying when they use spelling uncommon to other English words, such as Quixote vs quixotic (the x is silent in the first and voiced in the 2nd).
Generally it kind of retains the features of the pronunciation of the language it was borrowed from. In this case Greek, which generally pronounces every vowel in a word. Similar to Aphrodite (which one would expect to be pronounced Afro-dight).
I know that doesn’t help much unless you have already built a guide in your head about how words of a certain language are pronounced and can guess what language that word originates from. You might need to consult a dictionary to find out what language it was borrowed from, at which point you’ll also see the pronunciation.
Same here. Hyper bowl. Until i heard it on TV.
I just want to suggest that your pronunciation at the end of your message is not quite right still.
Wouldn’t it be closer to say “hi-per-ber-lee”? Or am i still getting it wrong?
Someone else replied and gave a better phonetic spelling of it. I updated mine too. “Hy-per-buh-lee”.
What’s funny is the first time I heard it, I knew immediately what it was, but I wasn’t sure if that was the correct pronunciation, or if the speaker was being all high-born fancy-pants, so I had to ask my wife. English isn’t even her first language and she knows everything about it. She’s 10x better at speaking and writing English than I am. I do have other talents though! I think…
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Hy-per-buh-lee
Yours makes more phonetic sense! I will update mine.
What does not exactly help in some people’s case, is that other Euro languages have adjusted Greek etc. words more to their own needs and actually do the “bowl” thing (even omit the e on the end, like in Dutch). I mean, I think that is what keeps me back.
I thought Harry Potter’s friend was pronounced her-mee-ohn for the first three books.
I’m the same vein, epitome.
I still pronounce that wrong in my head when I read it.
The Hyperb Owl, the less known relative of the Superb Owl.
I’m almost 50 and recently learned I’ve been pronouncing two words wrong.
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“Template” as ‘tem’ + ‘plate’ (like a dish) instead of ‘tem’ + ‘plet’ (like ‘let’)
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“Opacity” saying the middle ‘a’ like ‘hay’ instead of like ‘math’.
That one I was SURE I was right when my wife told me, so I asked my Google home mini: “Hey Google, how do you pronounce the word ‘opacity’?” (Pronouncing it my way), and to prove that Google has a mean sense of humor, (and I swear this is true) responded with “Guacamole”. My wife has not let me live that down.
At least for template I think both pronunciations are correct. Or at least I feel like I hear temPLATE as often as I hear tempLET.
Template is sometimes pronounced template.
‘Tem’ + ‘plate’ is the British pronunciation.
Today I learned I’m British apparently.
It’s listed as the first pronunciation in Merriam Webster, which is an American dictionary
Holy opacimole!
Siri, set guacamole to 50%. Hmmm, that’s better. Now zoom in on that reflection. Enhance. Add some oignons. Theeeere we are. Our murderer, ladies and gentlemen
I’m not changing how I say either of those words.
Wait until you find out that primer, as in a small tutorial or short teaching material, is pronounced with a short i sound like is found in “fin,” “mix,” and “fringe.”
Primmer.
That one really boiled my noodle recently.
that’s an american thing, i don’t think it’s standard in UK english to pronounce “primer” as in an introductory text differently from “primer” as in a substance used to prime explosives or prime materials for painting
Same here in Canada, I’ve never heard “primmer” in my life, they are all pry-mer.
The fun one here on the Prairies is the name for the black and white sheepdog. Some say call-ie and some say coal-ie. I code switch them depending who I’m talking to, and though I grew up with call-ies I now live in a coal-ie area and that’s become my main pronunciation.
It applies to many similar words, however I will never strain my pasta with a coal-ander as that just sounds ridiculous to me.
in french we usually say “border” for collies. It’s possible because “border” doesn’t mean anything else
That’s okay. I know how to pronounce famine yet whenever i want to pronounce it it comes out as fa-Mayn. It really adds to my illusion of intelligence 🙄
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It is about 15 years ago now but I had to call my ISP for something. Part of the support guys scrips was to ask me if I had an apple or windows machine. I responded that it was a Linux box. To which he told me he wasn’t sure if “their” Internet was compatible with Linux.
I recently moved to a fairly rural area in the midst of them setting up fiber throughout the area. For some reason, the ISP is something like halfway across the country from me. I asked them to setup port forwarding; the first few tech support people I talked to didn’t even know what that is. Eventually they relayed the question to an engineer who was familiar with the concept but still had a lot of irrelevant questions, many of which were about the operating system I used. It was … Frustrating.
I did finally get port forwarding, but it took literally a month and a half, figuratively a million calls, and ten to twenty of their staff over at least three departments. I’m happy now, though.
Edit: sorry about the initially irrelevant and probably boring post. I accidentally pressed post prematurely.
As someone who WORKED for a rural dial-up ISP. We ran our whole data center ON Debian… because we were poor 😭
You my dear sir or madam are a GOD for introducing me to that particular day’s panel.
I thought ‘segue’ was pronounced ‘seg’ and ‘Segway’ was ‘Segway’. I blame the mall cop transportation.
I’d blame the guy who thought pronouncing “vague” as /veɪɡ/ (or better who decided to write /veɪɡ/ as vague.).
we didn’t have the vegwayest idea how that would work out in the future
It’s pronounced pretty much the same in French, except with a soft ‘a’ and French uses a lot of silent letters, so that’s probably why.
/veɪɡ/
As somebody that doesn’t speak English natively… WTF?! I would never imagine this pronunciation. If you are going to corrupt the way it’s spoken, why not go and change the writing too?
The answer to that question involves talking about the French and what happened in 1066!
Tbf though, Webster tried simplifying some words for American English. He just didn’t manage to get them all.
I am just now learning from this comment that it is not pronounced seg and that what I thought were two different words (segue and segway) actually are not different words.
I feel lied to.
For years I thought segue was pronounced “seg-you”
TIFL
Unless they have a father with a PhD in English who acts like an English teacher with them their whole childhood.
I loved my dad, but boy did it suck when I showed him some piece of creative writing I wrote and he got out the red pen.
So did you pass?
He could always find something.
But also, if I ever pronounced something incorrectly or used improper grammar, I would be swiftly corrected. It’s really hard not to do the same with my own kid.
Segue - Seg? Segyoo? No, it’s Segway.
segooey
Imagine my surprise when I found out how hors d’oeuvres was pronounced.
French ppl be like “you’re saying the silent letters wrong”
English ppl be like “you’re saying the silent letters wrong”
Whores duvres?
Whores devours, baby.
I mean, some of them do
It’s horses overies, duh
Funny thing is, and someone French please correct me if I’m wrong, a French person learning that expression from a book would be able to just pronounce it correctly. The problem outlined by OP is mainly with the English language
I can confirm. But most of us are enable to pronounce correctly the many words that come from English like hamburger, youtube or even New York. Imo the problem is a fairly classic one of lacking the oral reference frame for other languages.
A lot of us were surprised
They actually use the transliteration of that in Japanese with a similar meaning, but as you might expect the French sounds change a lot when they end up in Japanese pronunciation. Imagine my surprise when I found out that oh-dohburu wasn’t actually a Japanese word originally.
To understand certain English words in katakana sometimes you just have to put yourself in the mindset of a racist 💀
Don’t think I ever heard a non-French person pronounce this even remotely close to the real thing, same goes for croissant.
Because croissant is an English word, a loan word yes, but still an English word. Are you going to say a Japanese person is wrong for pronouncing computer コンピューター?
Are culinary exports really “loan words”? Like the whole world calls a fajita a fajita (with various pronunciations), does that make it a loan word and part of the language or are we just using the original name for it? You see what I mean? I’m genuinely asking I have no idea.
I don’t know for computer in Japanese but in french it’s got it’s own word (ordinateur), a good example of this would be “weekend” which is integral part of french vocabulary, that I would call a loan word, not sure about the food stuff though.
Are culinary exports really “loan words”?
Why not?
does that make it a loan word and part of the language or are we just using the original name for it?
I mean, computer like I wrote, is just computer in Japanese. Similarly Tsunami and Honcho are japanese words, loan words, they still refer to their original meaning
While we are being pedantic, it’s «hors d’œuvres». But it’s ok, since most people wouldn’t even know where to begin to type such a character.
It also reminds me the many creative ways English speaking journalists have mangled the name of Denis Villeneuve.
Hyperbole
“Hyper-bole”
So I thought :(
Some of these words are just setting people up for failure!
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My pet theory is that spoken English and written English are two different languages that kinda translate between them.
In spoken English, “I read books.” doesn’t have ambiguous tense.
You’re not exactly wrong. Spoken english was shaped by mostly the use of common people while writing was exclusively the domain of the clergy and nobility for a very long time.
Noah Webster didn’t go far enuf
Is not shibboleth just phonetic?
Shibboleth is pronounced just like it is spelled, but some languages do not have an “sh” phoneme. In the story, soldiers used the word shibboleth to identify foreigners trying to sneak into their territory. If they pronounced it “sibboleth,” then the person was exposed as a foreigner.
Modern Greek is one such language. I introduced my friend Sharon to some Greek relatives, and they called her “Saron” so we all started calling her “Sauron.”
How do they shush in greek?
Not kidding, they hiss. It’s fucking surreal if you’re not expecting it.
I think so, but now I’m worried I might be wrong.
Depends on where you’re from. Judges 12:5-6.
Basically one group of ancient middle easterners had the sh sound in their dialect, and another group didn’t. That first group used the word shibboleth as a way of testing which group someone was from. Nowadays, the word shibboleth just refers to that kind of test in general. Like someone from Massachusetts figuring out whether you’re a local based on how you pronounce scallop, or someone from Kansas asking you to pronounce “Arkansas”
Although I have no idea how local that pronunciation is. It might be Wichita exclusive for all I know
Dayum, what are the options with scallop? Is that the a you can pronounce as in that, hot or must? Which is the right one?
Most Americans pronounce the a as in “at” or “as,” Massholes (and some other new englanders) pronounce the a as in “awe” or “awl”
The right one is the one that people in your region are used to. As a descriptivist, I believe that as long as people understand what you’re saying, there’s no wrong way to pronounce a word
I am so with you. I’m not a native speaker. I learned most of my English from reading books - thousands of books, actually. So written English is absolutely no problem.
My pronounciation sucks, and my listening comprehension is horrible, on the other hand.
I somehow didn’t realise that “retry” was literally “re-try” and not “ret-ree” until I was in my 20s
I remember this one from video games as a kid. How are you with reedit? ;)
A lot of those prefix words used to be hyphenated until people got used to them, even things like to-morrow way back in the day. Some of the stodgier publications (like the New Yorker) still use things like diaeresis (two dots about a letter) to mark words like coördination, whereas it’s all but fallen out of use otherwise except possibly occasionally showing up in noël.
i still can’t pronounce thesaurus correctly
I think this is pretty useful in general: https://www.vocabulary.com/resources/ipa-pronunciation/
For thesaurus specifically https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thesaurus
But whatever pronounce how you like and just pretend to have an accent lol
Thu-sore-us is where i go there. The-soar-us also works pretty well.
