7 ms·
This is really interesting! Instead of "here's how you are SUPPOSED to pronounce" any given word or phrase, you show how a bunch of native English speakers actu
by teach 3y ago
This is really interesting! Instead of "here's how you are SUPPOSED to pronounce" any given word or phrase, you show how a bunch of native English speakers actually pronounce it.
Maybe everyone is wrong, but if your goal is to be understood then you'd be better mimicking what they do than just being technically correct. :)
For example, there's a street in the city I live in spelled "Guadalupe". Natives pretty much uniformly pronounce it GWAD-uh-LOOP.
- gnicholas 3y agoSame for Hermosa Beach, Los Gatos, and many other CA towns. Even though I speak Spanish, I'm always caught off-guard when someone pronounces these places the Spanish way.
- toast0 3y agoThe one that weirds me out is San Pedro, CA vs San Pedro Square in San Jose, CA. The first one is pronounced peedrow, nearly always. The second one is pronounced paydrow (as it would be in Spanish, or for a person), most of the time. San is optional for San Pedro, but not for San Pedro Square.
- gnicholas 3y agoVery interesting! My grandfather had a store in San Pedro, and I always heard it pronounced the way you describe. I live in the Bay Area but have never heard of San Pedro Square. I wonder if it's pronounced more authentically because of (1) the time period in which it was built/popularized, or (2) the local population. I assume that geographic areas named these days are somewhat more likely to be pronounced authentically (at least Spanish-language ones, in areas like CA that now have large Spanish-speaking populations). Also, from a look at Google Maps, it appears there are a lot of Spanish-language businesses in the area. If the area is largely Spanish-speaking, there's a much better chance it would be pronounced authentically.
- narag 3y agoThat's not an English name. It's the name of a spanish river. Wad is river in Arabic. They pronounce it correctly. It's common that foreign words are adopted and adapted to the host language, but sometimes, specially if they're names, the original pronounciation lingers.
- camoufleur 3y agoI think that's their point. I think the proper (Spanish) pronunciation is gwah-dah-loo-peh.
- narag 3y agoIsn't that the same? I mean for a native English speaker. Both seem good aproximations (from a native Spanish speaker pov).
- renewiltord 3y agoLoop vs Lu-peh. One has two syllables on the ending and the other has one. Surely that sounds noticeable different. Not saying it's right or wrong, but the two are different.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vintermann 3y agoI notice English speakers have a tendency to assume final e's are silent.
- shiroiuma 3y agoThere's a good reason for that: in English, a trailing e tends to be silent, but also to indicate that the previous vowel is different (long vs. short usually). So, to an English speaker, "lupe" looks like LOOP, which is different from "lup" which would be LUPP. Those aren't real words of course, so some similar words with this effect might be "flute", "lute", and "glute". "flut" and "lut" aren't words AFAIK (but "flutter" is), but "glut" definitely is, and has the short-u vowel sound as opposed to the long-u that "glute" has. The pronunciation rules in English aren't very good and are full of exceptions, but speakers are still just trying to apply the rules they know, based on other words they know, to foreign names.
- gilleain 3y agoYeah I jut looked up some examples from this list <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-49813249 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-49813249> starting with 'Frome'. The first video hit had someone pronouncing it rhyming with 'home' when it's meant to be "Froom". Ok, so it got 'Ballachulish' from a video specifically about Scottish Gaelic. (As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult?)
- Scarblac 3y ago> As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult? Same way as every other English word - the spelling seems unrelated to the pronunciation. I've never heard this word. Is the 'gh' part pronounced as in though or as in tough?
- messe 3y agoThe gh is silent.
- pja 3y agoNeither!
- gilleain 3y ago> English word Oops! Hah. It's a town in Northern Ireland. Actually it had not occurred to me that the gh is silent. Guess when you know how to say a word it's 'obvious' when of course it's not
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoPronounce as follows: say "Oh mah gawd" then elide the "gawd".
- ehnto 3y agoUnless you are in my city, where it is Frome like home. It's probable the whole city is wrong, since the namesake is British, but no one will recognize a Froom street.
- GuB-42 3y agoThat's similar to the technique I sometime use when I hesitate between two spellings or expressions. I do a Google search of both, the one with the most results wins. There is a website called Googlefight that does that for you, but it doesn't seem to work anymore. It may not be correct by the book (though it usually is), but it is what people use.
- shadowgovt 3y agoLanguage (especially spoken language, most especially English) doesn't really have a "right" or "wrong." It has "likely to be understood by receiver" and "unlikely to be understood by receiver." The real correct answer to anyone's "what's the right way to say...?" question is a probability distribution.
- blackoil 3y agoLanguage do have right and wrong pronunciation and, in many cases, it is also tied to the script. e.g. in Hindi position of tongue, lips and sound from vocal cord is defined for every phoneme. That's why games like spelling bee make no sense because if you can hear the word, you can write it there is no ambiguity. Some may pronounce words it differently, but they are mostly different dialects. Or in some cases it is accepted as wrong but common pronunciation.
- ozzmotik 3y agodon't forget the manchaca (now menchaca as it should have been the whole time!) being said as "man-CHAK". that or the one from the other major city, good ol kuykendahl aka "kir-KEN-doll"
- kwk1 3y agoThe Pedernales River: PUR-də-NAL-iss
- ozzmotik 3y agoi've always heard it said as PED-er-NAL-iss other honorable mentions: puyallup, washington (PYOO-al-ip) koenig ln, austin, tx (KAY-nig) - though admittedly this one is likely originally german König, and what texan is going to pronounce German words like Germans? aqui bleiben wir with Stolz, y'all
- kwk1 3y agoI've heard it that way too, but the pronunciation I posted is "canonical", or at least copy-pasted from Wikipedia.
- Affric 3y agoI agree with you but nativised nouns are an edge case that you likely can never stamp out without a huge amount of context that would neuter any usefulness the tool has. Like any tool for language learning its big limitation is the fact that it appears to be writing based.
- m463 3y agothat's a perfect example. reminds me of that "what would a 5th grader say" skit where the "which president" answer was something like benjamin franklin...
- sltkr 3y agoNucular. It's pronounced nucular.
- DontchaKnowit 3y agoNah its pronounced nuclear. A lot of people mess it up but most people pronounce it correctly. Its sorta like library -> libary. Its a common mispronounciation but it is pretty universally recognized as wrong.
- paimoe 3y agoIt was a Simpsons reference I'm pretty sure :)
- ehnto 3y agoThat's a big part of immersion learning techniques, which even go as far as having you pick a "parent" to binge watch as you will naturally imitate their accent and cadence. That's the theory there too, if you wamt to speak like a native, let your brain bathe in native speaking and it will be absorbing all the nuance that won't be in textbooks or classrooms.
- DontchaKnowit 3y agoOh man, one of the worst examples of this. Versailles missouri. They pronounce it "ver-sail-ees"
- Brajeshwar 3y agoWhen I first landed up in Austin, Texas that's what I look around the street and went hmmmm, perhaps, I need to learn a tad bit of Spanish -- at-least swear words.