The Pronunciation Thread

i say it missyle (or miss aisle, if you will) but every one else seems to say miss ull (or at very best miss ill). i just generally assume that "ull" or "ill" is the american pronunciation (like pronouncing mobile "mo bull") and therefore incorrect (sorry).

so which is it? are there brits and others who say miss ull and mo bull and americans who say miss aisle and mo byle?

I say hou/z/es. Who says hou/s/es?

she says "moun-ten"

what is wrong with this you ask

if you are an american you will be LAUGHED AT if you pronounce the "t"

this is not the classic "substitute 'd' for 't' rule" as in the word "water", this is a peculiarly american habit of actually swallowing the "t" whole, in the back of one's throat

made famous and exaggerated by a certain sitcom wherein characters would yell to all parts of the house after discovering some particularly ruinous situation: "maaaaar! iiiin!!!!!!!!" ("martin") and the increasingly popular / decreasingly hilarious "no you DI-INT!!"

anyway i am told that i am wrecking her accent, teaching her wrong: but THIS IS THE ONLY RIGHT PRONUNCIATION on this continent, which is WHERE SHE LIVES

Gi-llanders not Gillon-does!

yeah ... but that's the RIGHT way to say it.

spanakopita

figure that out.

σπανακοριτα

with the stress on span and kop - how else?

sand-widges or sand-witches orsand-ha-witches ?
Eeeeeasy: "sang-witches"

bury: rhymes with "worry" or sounds like "berry"?
roof: rewf or ruf?

my favorite: footballers play DEE-fense. Do brits ever say DEE-fense?

Why do some midwesterners say EYE-talian? I doubt they say EYE-tal-y. They likely do say EYE-ran and EYE-raq.

Congratulate me I'm the Andy f'ing Rooney of ILX.

"rhymes with 'worry'" is only plausible if you pronounce "worry" so it rhymes with "furry" rather than "lorry".

But when I say "bury" it sounds like "berry". I grew up in the American Midwest and I don't think my accent was affected much by eleven years, college through grad school, spent in New York, or by seven years, through the present, living in Northern California.

I want to point out that I'm amused that you chose "ph" rather than "f" to represent that sound.

This sentence is wrong in more ways that I can count.

Though down the country, furry rhymes with worry rhymes with lorry.

So what do you rhyme furry with, Sam?

Similarly: glass, grass, bath?

I should have pointed out that down the country furry and worry stay mostly the same, but lorry becomes lurry.

However, I don't extend this to places overseas - I don't call Paris "Pa-ree".

When I lived in Manchester, I asked for clarification of the pronunciation of Bury. People from Bury say Buh-ry rather than Berry, but the consensus was that this was considered ridiculous to everyone else and not to be followed.

Shrewsbury = Shrewsbury to the working class and Shrovesbury to poshos, whether or not one is local.

Like the ou in cough

As a provincial American, I've often heard it pronounced cone-yack. As a person who tries, with varying success, to figure out how French people would say a word in French, I lean more toward cun-yack. But as a provincial American who most often converses with other provincial Americans, I will lapse into cone-yack as often as not.

Whats with yack?

Its guhnak

As a person who tries, with varying success, to figure out how French people would say a word in French, I lean more toward cun-yack.

Here you go:

https://forvo.com/word/cognac/#fr

Ha, I went to Forvo after I posted. I pronounce it mostly like the English speaker TopQuark, although maybe I have been saying something like Khan-yak or Kayn(e)-ak. I started thinking about this because I got hit with a cone-yack today.

And I just now enjoyed listening to the way this borrowed word is pronounced by speakers of different languages.

Just noticed Forvo has the pronunciation written out as well. For that sound it has ɒ, the open back rounded vowel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_back_rounded_vowel

Whereas for French it has the neighboring ɔ sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_back_rounded_vowel

Also see: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cognac

Kog-knack

In any case, this seems like a classic case of trying to approximate a vowel sound that we don't have in English and getting on either side of it. Also now comparing saying it in English versus saying it in French, or even saying the Spanish version coñac. For those two I feel my lips pursing a bit.

Hey, Wiktionary led me to what seems to be a pretty nice French dictionary I never came across before. https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/cognac

Dutch version uses the same vowel sound but the "gn' is pronounced a little differently and there is a strong accent on the second sylllable.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

i say Cone-Yak and Khan-Yak depending on the moment but more often hear it colloquially referred to as "yak" or by brand.
i also do not drink so it's less of an issue but i did tend bar for a year or two.

I recently heard someone use the word "epoch", pronouncing it somewhat close to "epic". It struck me that I'd never heard this word spoken out loud as I'd always imagined it would be "ee-pok".

That's how I'd say it.

I said “epock” in my head until taking a course where a teacher said “epic” thousands of times

"eepock" is "standard" Brit pron

Think in US it is eh-puck

But yes I see U.K. pronunciation is as you say

TS Khans vs. Yaks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGO-SldLrNA

just call it brandy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTqTE7aNjZQ

In Japanese cognac and konjac are not only homophones but share identical katakana which makes menu misreading interesting sometimes.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/86/Conrack1974.jpg

Ha!

just call it brandy

― mahb, Tuesday, March 16, 2021 5:51 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i once asked for a pint of guinness and a cognac in a glasgow pub and the bartender said "you can have a pint of guinness and a brandy

If it's not an appellation d'origine contrôlée, sure.

Just heard a shitty, soppy old '50s song where the singer pronounced 'fingers' as if the break between the syllables came after the 'g'. 'FING-ers'. I pretty much barfed all over myself when that happened.

Is .wav wave or wav?

I have never thought of it as wav.

I think i know it's wave, but the pronunciation of a schoolmate from 20 odd years ago (southwest UK) has left me unable to move forward. I don't think this is like gif/jif where there was debate - and settlement? it's gif, right? - but curious if this is regional or just me and that one dude

i've never heard anything other than a "wave" file. gif vs jif is a fight where if you care you lose

Didn't the inventor of the GIF format publicly announce it's jif?

jif is the correct pronunciation of GIF, which is the acronym for Giraffe Information File.

Giraffe Interchange Format, surely.

Who interchanges giraffes?!

Didn't the inventor of the GIF format publicly announce it's jif?

yes. then many years passed, and a lot of people who were born after the format were invented pronounced it in a different way. at this point, many people began losing by fighting about which way was best

I would say 'wav', fwiw.

i always used to say wav. I think I knew it was probably "wave" but I read things phonetically

Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave"[8])

waff, or gtfo

like "suave"? Have never heard anyone ever say that.

i say it, but only as i use their products every morning.

*looks in peepcam*

"suave"

In the UK at least, Wav, like suave, never heard it called a 'Wave' file by anyone that has to actually deal with them in almost 30 years in audio.

What is it called? A wavv? New to me but seems good

Yeah, like 'have' with a w

my problem is i'm thinking of sin waves and triangle and square waves

just basic building block components of sound. i know that's different than the filetype and all of that. i just associate them that way, may be alone in that