Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Pro-nounce-iation
Pro-nunts-iation

even star trekkers can’t agree how to pronounce ‘sensors’ or ‘species’; no wonder we have problems too

yeah, i find it interesting, but there really should be another thread for this

> my sense of the british is they hate trying to pronounce loanwords correctly, cf. garridge, Quick-sote, Mar-kwiss, tay-co

Some egregious US examples of this too, such as “clique” and “niche”.

fillit of fish

Well, it is fillet and not filet surely? I'm assuming Americans pronounce those two words differently too?

well you know that gap in yer gut, a fillay doesn't fillit

The joke about the fishmonger's daughter just doesn't work otherwise.

as far as I'm aware Americans just have "filet" and find our "fillet" coarse and ugly, may be wrong though.

The word 'fillet' is used in other contexts, I wonder if they still use the French pronunciation then, I suspect not.

that when americans say entrée they mean the main course wtf

Quick-sote
Ee-da-pus

my sense of the british is they hate trying to pronounce loanwords

My anecdotal experience listening to the BBC on NPR some mornings is they they're more often than they should be egregiously bad with all sorts of non-English words and names, including proper names (like iirc pronouncing Jose as JOE-SAY), but it's gotten a bit better on that front. A few days ago, though, I heard the newscaster mispronounce Barack Obama's name, and I thought, come on, really? (BAY-RACK, is how they said it.)

The best known Jose in the UK is Jose Mourinho and he’s a Joe-say aiui (Portuguese, innit).

Which is not to say British people are not horrible at pronunciation non-English words, we surely are. Never heard a Bay-rack, mind.

it’s cause he’s all washed up

no American or English person has the upper hand in this discussion

Buoy is the funniest

lol yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an American say buoyant/buoyancy, presumably they say boo-ee-ant

(rob otm obv)

Buoyant is pronounced "boy-ant" and buoy is pronounced "boo-ey." Simple and straightforward.

lmao classic

(buoyed is pronounced the wacky way tho right? I’m sure I have heard that)

The best known Jose in the UK is Jose Mourinho and he’s a Joe-say aiui (Portuguese, innit).

Zho-zay

That is almost certainly what JiC heard yeah

Not that Brits are great on this in general, it just happens that mourinho is v famous here. The number of bonkers pronunciations of Jorge Luis Borges you hear - often getting the first name right but then inexplicably switching up so it’s bor-jizz or bor-ghez - and then try getting anyone to accept that the Jorge of Jorge Amado is not said the same way

(Pronunciation of words obv doesn’t matter but refusing to at least try to get names right is rude & kinda racist imo)

i have probably related this before but i had a film professor at university who pronounced jim jarmusch 'jim yarmusch'

all of us just nodded like 'yes, yes, of course, we knew that, that's totally normal and what we were expecting because we are smart'

Was English his first language?

Yumpin' Yiminy

the most pleasant way to learn how to pronounce Jorge in Portuguese is to listen to A História De Jorge by Jorge Ben

tbf to that professor, it is always funny to me that "Walter BenYamin" is for some reason the standard way to pronounce that name in academia

I should say "in American academia"

That’s correct tho no? (But it should be valter)

When I know how the name is supposed to be pronounced in the original language, I have a hard time anglicizing it even when the person was born in an English-speaking country and pronounces it 'wrongly' (not really). I catch myself saying 'Vayn-shtayn' and 'Ep-shtayn', for instance.

pom yes, he's American.

lol yeah, that's ludicrous.

Btw I'm somewhat ashamed of the fact that I do this.

it should be valter

yeah that was my point, like saying Mike Foo-coe...or Hore-hay Borcheese

Oh I see, yeah that is weird

If it's any comfort, I find anglophones are generally more careful and willing to learn than the French, who are often offended by the suggestion that a phonetic effort might be required.

I was in a restaurant in Prague once with a guy from LA called Chandler, he asked for Worcestershire sauce but came out with this bizarre mangled stream of consonants. I told him how it was pronounced and also that hey also did you know I am actually from Worcester and I used to walk past the factory every day on my way home from school. He was not impressed at all, in fact he was VERY offended to be corrected on the pronunciation of an English word and maintained that Woorshestershisheyre or w/e was a perfectly correct pronunciation.

lol what a dipshit.

Watching Stephen Bush and he's just pronounced albeit as ahl-be-it.

(Pronunciation of words obv doesn’t matter but refusing to at least try to get names right is rude & kinda racist imo)

Like English presenters pronouncing the 2020 Booker Prize winner as Shoogy Bain, for instance.

ooft

Sow crates

But that’s it, you don’t need to go to far-flung origins - even with idk colm tóibín or whoever there’s this sense of “oh it’s not worth bothering to learn Irish names”

Obviously there are sounds people will have trouble with like the guttural r (different ways of saying r in general) & I’m not saying everyone has to reproduce those but it’s clear when the attempt isn’t even being made or ppl just guess & im like you know you could just look this up? Or ask? Just v disrespectful

(We are way off shockingly old topic but we always are tbf)

Slight change of direction, Chris Bailey and Ed Kuepper of the Saints were both immigrants, Bailey from Northern Ireland and Kuepper from Germany.

So how do you pronounce the sauce that is Worcestershire?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcestershire

Believe there is an Abbott and Costello sketch about that. Will let those who care to search for it

woos-ter-sher sauce, or usually just woos-ter sauce, the spelling might look complicated but the pronunciation is not.