jtr7 on 1/12/2012 at 06:13
I've been writing this off and on for three hours, now, so I repeat some things already covered, and the editing is minimal, having nearly lost it, rewritten it, and been brought back with the autosave feature, for good or ill. It's tl;dr anyway, so Vernon would be happy, if he were around. :p
Here where I work at Northern Arizona University, I've spent time in two neighboring buildings where there is both a 1st Floor and a Ground Floor, set into north and south sides of a hill. In both cases the Ground Floor is the bottommost and is half surrounded by earth, with two adjacent sides, one facing the parking lot, and the other facing a footpath. The First Floor is above, with the other two adjacent sides facing footpaths with entrances, and no access elsewhere. A newer building erected nearby sticks with the simpler convention of just having Floors 1 through 5, even though it also has the same general configuration with the terrain. Instructing people how to navigate the building to find a room was often a pain, having to make sure the other person didn't assume I was using synonyms, and that I knew which direction they were going to approach the building. The elevators/lifts weren't standardized/standardised either, with 1 or 1L or 1F and G or GL or GF.
I still get a lot of people throughout the year who don't know, or need reminding, that in a building with more than one story/storey/floor/level the room numbers starting with 1 are on the 1st floor, 2 the 2nd, 3 the 3rd, and so on, and exceptions are uncommon enough to keep that in mind as a starting point.
People who think the way one person pronounces words is representative of their whole region is a pet-peeve of mine. Before the Internet exploded the numbers of instances I witness, the first time I saw someone going off on accents (you aren't correct, dumbass!), was in a letter to an editor over how young and grown Forrest Gump spoke in the film, wherein the angry writer was appalled at how wrong the filmmakers got the accent, and being a student and teacher of dialects for the region, she knew for a fact it was way off. Shortly thereafter, the behind-the-scenes featurettes on HBO (or Showtime, or whatever) demonstrated that the accent was the child actor's own accent, and Tom just imitated him. People in one region, in one family, will pronounce some words differently than each other, or have word preferences for the same subject. Generalization/generalisation needs checks and balances.
Aluminum/aluminium. Unless what I've read isn't true, the same guy who coined "aluminium" is the guy who later revised it to "aluminum." The first term was the first one to travel the globe throughout the scientific community, and thus, officially adopted, while the originator changed his mind and those around him went with the changes. Aluminum is what the coiner decided was what he wanted it called, so he gets that respect, never mind that, like all words, people speak and spell what they are taught and hear, minus other stubborn factors.
-saur: As in Dinosaur, pronounced as sore vs. sour (as if it's Germanic saur-). Who still thinks the Brontosaurs were real, not a brachiosaurus skeleton with the wrong head?
Cookie, biscuit, digestive, truck, lorry, pavement (in reference to asphalt), boot, trunk, wheel, tire/tyre, gym/gymn, teacher/instructor (it's not either or, but both, here)...
Canadian "about" as nearly "aboot" which seems to my ears to borrow more from the Scots, not the French, and "sorry" like lorry.
I won't pronounce herbs as "Herbs" because it sounds short for "Herbert's" that way, and as with many words people pronounce, I was around for a long time hearing 'erbs the great majority of the time, and always that way in the home, and with other words, like "hours", having a silent "h" it didn't feel wrong.
Some regional choices for how letters are pronounced are the same in the mind for terms used, like soda vs. pop vs. "coke". I'm quite annoyed that my parents never corrected me on some things while giving me a hard time on others, and I had to reach adulthood to correct myself, feeling embarrassed about those times I didn't know what the funny looks were about.
nickie, I hear words spoken with an "r" sound at the end, but I wonder what thought the added phoneme implies, especially if it's not noticed. Just yesterday, I was listening to Stephen Fry talking as part of a panel, and he said "Americur", but I notice it's not his usual choice, and when he uses that particular one, it's only at the end of a clause, so there's a finishing touch about it.
John Lennon sang "I sawr a film today, oh boy," and though it's not his usual way, and with him it's more an affectation, echoing the cover they did of "Till/'Til There Was You", singing, with strong emphasis and even a chuckle before the Queen's audience (making me think the pronunciation had something to do with the chuckle, but it could've been anything, giddy as they were), "...but I never sawr them winging. No I never sawr them at all, 'til there was you." They also pointedly emphasized/emphasised the "t" in "at all", but perhaps it had to do with the American composer and Broadway production of the song, making it mildly amusing.
There are American regional dialects that add an "r" in some words, like Warshington, go warsh your hands. There's a lot of mixing of "b" with "v" in some places, that aren't influenced by Mexican, and it even gets into the spelling of words.
There's a lot of switching long vowel sounds for short, and vice-versa, across English in general, and flatly mispronounced words are carried right into adulthood until getting corrected finally gets tiresome enough to change.
The accurate or decent guesses for the etymology of words really clears up a lot of confusion, or sheds new light on the cultural heritage. It makes a lot of sense to have two or more cultures mingling without any understanding of each others' languages, where you get these hybrid or bastard forms.
There are words that just sound more correct to me to pronounce one way over another in a given context, and I use both, for instance: route. I will say Route 66--like boot--, or a package is "enroot" to you, but I will say "router"--out--or take this route. Which reminds me of a Canadian dialect where they will nearly say "aboot", almost Scots-like, or sorry--lorry--while we in the U.S. will say the first sound like "car."
One day I looked up "Cajun", and was surprised to find it was a softening of "Acadian," a word rarely used anymore, but it made instant sense. The mingling of peoples of two different languages and the difficulty for one group to make the correct sound spoken by the other, is fundamental to language evolution and breakdown. And if the word being spoken is incorrect and/or the result of a lack of education or language skill, it will really get a spin on it from the second group learning it mangled and sharing it to another party who might get it even more wrongly. Factor in having dozens of very different languages and sounds mingling, with little English between them, where the natives speak like none found across the oceans on either side and have no written language, introducing tongue-fumbling new phonemes, and new hybrids, and no corrective English speakers around at all times and places, and no one should be surprised.
When I went into the Navy, and not being one who was ever really fascinated or in love with the sea, always looking to space and the sky above, I wasn't too familiar with the traditional vocabulary of sailors, so I was struck by how words were spelt/spelled compared to how they were pronounced. So relaxed and filtered through old world dialect. Seeing the spelling tells me what the thing is, but not hearing it at first: Forecastle vs. foc's'l, Boatswain vs. bos'n, for examples. I hadn't seen too many movies involving the sea, where the action didn't speak louder than the words, things weren't spoon-fed, or I was too young to know what the grownups were saying, or they were pyrates and seemed to rebel against schoolin'.
Like most of us, I pronounce things the way the people around me pronounce it until I discover it's wrong, and then I decide which version I'd rather use, so it's not always about stupidity, but ignorance, and sometimes stubborn pride, and reading a book won't help in those situations unless the book provides an example of pronunciation, whether a character is teaching the word, there's a glossary for whatever reason, or there's a lyric or poem that reveals it. There's been a disconnect with how words are spelled and and how they are spoken, and it's almost been a weekly occurrence since childhood that the subjectivity of it all comes into play.
The last word I looked up along the lines of this thread was disoriented/disorientated. I didn't find a satisfying reason to impose one over the other except for economy. Disoriented was a word I was introduced as a kid to when TRON came out, so "disorientated" sounds clunky and emphatic.
As an American, when I say "c" or "z", I hear a distinct and not-at-all subtle difference between the two, unless the speaker is naturally or artificially muted or filtered. One's a relatively loud voiceless hiss and one's a soft buzz over a voiced hum. If the voice weren't there, than it would be subtler to me. In many situations and environments, where I can hardly hear what's being said by people across a room or in another room nearby, the "s" sounds are the most distinctive and even piercing sound, while a "z" is just a part of the murmur, even quieter than the vocal component. It's as distinct as a hard "g" vs. a soft "g", a hard "s" vs. a soft "s", and only once in a great while to I struggle to differentiate a "b" from a "v", an "l" from an "r", or a hard "th" from an "f", or a soft "th" from a "v".
It takes new words, strong dialects, a language that utilizes phonemes I never do in my own, or hybridization, or mispronunciation to confuse me when the speaker is actually enunciating well. I'll tend to have more trouble, of course, if the person is slurring, way too relaxed for me to pick up on what symbols the sounds refer to, or has another natural or induced impediment. I've never heard "zed" so much in all my life as hearing Stephen Fry talk the last couple of months, especially in QI. As an American, I'd be using it, if I'd been taught it in school, if the people around me were, the people in entertainment media were, but they mostly don't, and it sounds like code, not the letter's name.
It shouldn't be a head-scratcher, and it shouldn't be hard to get an answer, but the ego, and even jingoism, often muck understanding up, heh heh.
The difference in how "sch" and "ch" is pronounced kinda reminds me of how Latin and Greek differ with "c" and "k" for the same words. Hearing some stuffy aristocrat say "Reich" with a soft and mushy "sh" sound at the end makes it seem like it's done with purposeful disrespect rather than ignorance of correct usage. Choosing the soft sound instead of a plain English "k" , is an odd choice.
I always pronounced Moscow, as Moss-koe, since that's how everybody I heard say it, 'cept the one occasional guy (who was right, but one out of dozens is more likely to be perceived as the incorrect, if they don't hail from the land whence the word came) would. I had to get out of school and start educating myself in order to learn how odd that is, along with a great deal of terms. I see how other countries take words invented here and fit them to themselves, but in both of these cases, I have to wonder why the "original" wasn't held to when it's not hard to pronounce. I could understand if it was difficult, so I have to believe it's a side-effect of only reading the words, and rarely if ever hearing it spoken. I love getting audio books read by the authors themselves (except int he case of George Lucas, where he writes some letters down and can't pronounce them as words as well as his actors), so I can hear how they pronounce their words, which really adds to the musicality of their choices, rather than bogs down the tongue when wrongly guessed at by another reader.
How many people were taught, and still believe, that the letter "Q" is a symbol for a sound like "kwa", instead of a "k" sound often followed by a "u" providing the "w" sound? Bringing it up gets more defensive and embarrassed reaction than eye-opening surprise or realization, which is related to why incorrect sounds in speech aren't corrected most of the time, locking regions into a dialect.
And again, as always with these regional things viewed from afar, before asking why a single country's people drive on the other side of the road than yours, consider:
(
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/32/Countries_driving_on_the_left_or_right.svg/800px-Countries_driving_on_the_left_or_right.svg.png)
...and also realize things like most people being right-handed and how the defter and stronger right hands were needed for difficult gear-shifting, but that's not as important as the how roads, delivery methods, and horse-drawn transportation were designed for the needs of the people in the region and their occupation, and other precursors.
