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This is very cool. I looked up words that have always tripped me up, including banal, brood, indefatigable, preternatural, conch, niche. Indefatigable, banal,
by overthemoon 7y ago
This is very cool.
I looked up words that have always tripped me up, including banal, brood, indefatigable, preternatural, conch, niche. Indefatigable, banal, and conch had some conflicting ones but the "correct" one occurred enough times that I got the idea. ("Brood" probably isn't commonly mispronounced, I just got it mixed up early in life and never quite got it sorted it out. :)
The results for "niche" are consistently mixed up though, which means that word will continue to drive me insane. Neesh or nitch!? I mix it up when I use it without any rhyme or reason.
- RugnirViking 7y agoWhen english results are split in engish it is usually american english vs british english (which is often also spoken in australia and india) I can't say if that is the case here, but that is what I would suspect. As a british person I have usually heard it and used it as 'neesh'
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoIt only seems to be some Americans pronounce it nitch, so maybe regional there, though I couldn't guess where or which is most common. Here in the UK essentially always neesh. It is from French after all. Edit: American audiobooks on the other hand seem to go 100% with nitch for some unexplainable reason.
- jonfriese33 7y ago> It is from French after all. This is funny to me because I often see people on the internet mentioning how strange it is that Americans leave off the 'h' when pronouncing 'herb'.
- irrational 7y agoWait, some people pronounce herb with the 'h' not silent?
- jonfriese33 7y agoYeah, British people. Not sure about other English speaking nations.
- bencoder 7y agoBritish: https://youglish.com/search/herb/uk https://youglish.com/search/herb/uk?
- jeanmichelx 7y agoFunnily enough the result I got is completely irrelevant: the sentence is "welcome her back to stage".
- Itai_ 7y agoThe sentence does make sense. Its actually: "so please welcome Herb Kim back to stage."
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoIt is fairly unusual for American not to Anglicise pronunciations so it seems to stand as odd one out. Then again you kept the original "correct" pronunciation of herb - it was British English that changed for some reason. Even the poshest Brit will put the H in herb now.
- umanwizard 7y ago> It is fairly unusual for American not to Anglicise pronunciations Anecdotal, but I think this is only true for French. For example, I think U.S. Americans (even those with no Latin American ethnic background) are much more likely to pronounce Spanish loanwords in a way that's closer to the original than Brits are. If my anecdotal belief is correct, I suppose it's largely because of the very close contact between the U.K. and France on the one hand, and the U.S. and Latin America on the other.
- mr_toad 7y agoKind of weird considering how often British speakers will drop h in other words: “Allo, allo, what ave we ere,” said the stereotypical constable.
- 2038AD 7y agoTo add to the irony, I have a British accent which often drops (initial) Hs but I cringe whenever I hear 'erbal'.
- jjeaff 7y ago>It is from French after all. And yet the British say "filet" with a hard 't'? I have never heard anything but the French pronunciation in the US.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoThat's about 50:50 - probably along regional lines.
- hahamrfunnyguy 7y agoIn mechanical drawing terminology, we pronounce it with a hard "t". Fillets or rounds are placed features that round off or cap interior or exterior corners or features of a part.
- elliekelly 7y agoI wonder if our French-Canadian friends to the north might be the reason Americans pronounce it the French way instead of the British way?
- taejo 7y agoI believe BEng distinguishes "fillet" (with a final t) from "filet" (without), the former having been borrowed from French when it still had a /t/ at the end, and the latter being a later re-borrowing (usually in phrases like filet mignon). Something like "filet of fish sandwich" comes across as a humourously fancy name for a pretty ordinary meal.
- dspig 7y agoIt's hard to say "filleted" with the french pronunciation.
- naniwaduni 7y agoit's like being skinned with an epenthetic vowel
- lottin 7y agoAccording to the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary it is: niche niːʃ nɪtʃ ǁ nɪtʃ — Preference poll, British English: niːʃ 95%, nɪtʃ 5%. In American English only nɪtʃ.
- OkGoDoIt 7y agoI’m not familiar with that notation, can you provide some guidance on what those different pronunciations sound like in layman‘s terms?
- umanwizard 7y agoniːʃ is "neesh". nɪtʃ is "nitch". However, I'm American, and I anecdotally disagree that "nitch" is the only pronunciation. I exclusively use "neesh" and I regularly hear both pronunciations from other Americans.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- allochthon 7y agoHrm. American here. I always say "neesh," and I rarely hear "nitch" from other Americans. Wondering whether this is a regional thing.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mc32 7y agoWords which are derived or introduced from foreign languages (common in English) can have varying pronunciations. Some people tend to pronounce it close to how it sounds in the original language, others pronounce it with a more native English (be it American, Australian, British, etc.) accent. 'Croissant' 'Chic' 'Bouquet' 'Renaissance' etc. Then other words which are more native English words (even if they have Latin, Old French, Greek or proto Germanic roots) will have regional variations. For example 'Tuna' and 'Tuner' can have their pronunciations switched in some parts of the US.
- jjeaff 7y agoI find it interesting that British English speakers are much more likely to pronounce the english sounding version rather than close to how it sounds in the original language. For example, pretty much across the board I hear "filet" pronounced with the 't' in British English. But Americans almost always a silent 't' like the French.
- Vinnl 7y agoYour comment led me to check: although there's just a few British persons saying filet, they all pronounce it the "English way", except when it precedes "mignon". Which makes sense, I guess.
- buckminster 7y agoThe only place I've ever seen filet separated from mignon is McDonald's. Everything else is fillet.
- graphpapa 7y agoas a brit, I would say 'tuna' and 'tuner' exactly the same
- mc32 7y agoHearing 'piano \tuna\' and '\tuna\ sandwich' is not odd. Hearing 'piano \tuna\' and '\tuner\ sandwich' sounds different. It exists.
- hathawsh 7y agoGIF is another curiously undecided word. I'm also reminded of "gigawatt", which was widely mispronounced following "Back to the Future" in 1985, but is now generally pronounced correctly. I attribute the change to the introduction of gigabyte hard drives.
- monktastic1 7y ago"Giga" can be pronounced both ways, AFAIK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga-#Pronunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga-#Pronunciation
- hathawsh 7y agoGood catch! Among my friends, though, "1.21 jigawatts" is still a funny joke.
- josteink 7y ago> Neesh or nitch I’ve literally only ever heard one person saying nitch. And he was ridiculed for it. So yeah, for me that pronouncitation seems fairly niche.
- jjeaff 7y agoWhere are you from? I have noticed that U.S. west coast seems to usually say "neesh" but I almost always hear "nitch" in the mid-west and south. Not sure about east coast.
- josteink 7y agoI’m from Europe, consume both US and UK English content and I’ve only ever heard one single youtuber from Wisconsin say “nitch”. That’s it. So to me it seems most mainstream, non-regional variants of English sticks to the obvious pronunciation.
- jjeaff 7y agoThere is no such thing as non-regional variants of English. And YouTube is not going to give you a very diverse sampling of English pronunciation. Content creators for YouTube are heavily, heavily coastal. Mostly west coast.
- johnnycab 7y ago>Neesh or nitch!? I only heard the latter pronunciation fairly recently via a YouTuber, who would say "There are riches in nitches" as a mantra. At first, I put it down to a form of colloquialism and it took me a while to figure out, that he meant 'niches'.
- jgtrosh 7y agoThe pronunciation of niche has to do with french not pronouncing ch differently from sh. This is somewhat problematic for french people pronouncing Asian words transliterated in Latin alphabets; they will consistently pronounce ch exactly like sh (« konishiwa », …) (Pikachu is mostly pronounced correctly though.)
- williamdclt 7y ago> The results for "niche" are consistently mixed up though, which means that word will continue to drive me insane. Neesh or nitch Pretty sure it comes from French, so "neesh"
- learnstats2 7y agosee also: "clique" The first four pronounce it like I think it is pronounced then the following five pronounce it as "click" (ignoring mis-subtitled cases of cliché and claque) It doesn't seem to be consistent in either British or American pronunciations.
- 333c 7y agoHow would you pronounce it? "Cleek"? I'm American and would pronounce it like "click."
- learnstats2 7y agoYes, "cleek" I was going to say I pronounce it as if it were a French word, but realistically it's more like I pronounce it as if you were learning high school French as taught in England.
- justnotworthit 7y agoWhen you get inconsistent answers, there might be a deeper reason. Banal was pronounced like anal, but people got embarassed sometime in the 20th century and started starting saying canal. I like anal. Variations of indefatigable and preternatural are probably from people who have read it but never heard it pronounced (a. The funny/common example is hyperbole/hyperbolic. It's the stress that is most butchered, which cascades into vowels being pronounced differently. Heurstics in this matter can be internalized and improved. Niche is one possible outcome of anglicization, which is complex and has different results, mostly depending on how common the word ends up. The more foreign-like (French) is neesh. The more anglicized is nich. Neither are worthy of ridicule (which usually comes from the ignorant, and is another topic altogether). Just avoid mixing the two: Never "neech" (like Nietchze) or "nish", which will make me laugh.