Pronunciations you had to unlearn

[Pabappa]

Here's an interesting one from past me that I suddenly recently remembered. Around age 4-5, I used to think the word "jaguar" was /d͡ʒægwaɪɹ/, and I would misspell it as "jagwire."

Why? Because my mother has /aɪ/-monophthongization and I don't, so when I heard her say the word and heard the /a/-like vowel before the r there, I mapped it onto my /aɪ/. Jagwire, rhymes with fire.

that makes perfect sense, yeah.

my next one is no biggie, but .... i saw the word elixir in a Calvin comic strip and mentally read it as ell-ick-SER, ...sorry for not using IPA but you all know what I mean by this .... perhaps because the unusual VCVC(C)VC shape of the word made the first two syllables seem less likely to carry stress.

for maybe half an hour in a science class i thought derecho was pronounced IPA /'dɛ-rɛ-ko/, because i saw the term stacked right underneath "bow echo".

[Pabappa]

Here's an interesting one from past me that I suddenly recently remembered. Around age 4-5, I used to think the word "jaguar" was /d͡ʒægwaɪɹ/, and I would misspell it as "jagwire."

Why? Because my mother has /aɪ/-monophthongization and I don't, so when I heard her say the word and heard the /a/-like vowel before the r there, I mapped it onto my /aɪ/. Jagwire, rhymes with fire.

i think on Jeopardy last week the host actually said "jagwire", so maybe there's more to this ...

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I think I pronounced it that way before I learnt the spelling, probably at least partly by contamination with facetious children's media pronunciations (cf. Tigger saying it jaggular, which sounds like it ought to correspond to a "proper" word jagwire, orthographically possibly also jaguire, at least to my child mind; on this note, I thought hunny was the correct spelling of honey for a while, and had to get used to the "correct" spelling, from the same source).

[Nortaneous]

Hypercorrection seems plausible - cf. the merger of crayon into crown, which some of my schoolteachers had.

(A related regular process is ejə > æ, e.g. /græm/ crackers, /mænejz/.)

Don't the Brits have something like /dʒægjuːə/? Maybe the point is to avoid the sequence /war/, which was eliminated in native vocabulary?

[Sol717]

Don't the Brits have something like /dʒægjuːə/? Maybe the point is to avoid the sequence /war/, which was eliminated in native vocabulary?

The type /ˈdʒaɡjʊə/ is normal in BrE (as a speaker of New Zealand English, it's also what I'd use). I don't think a phonotactic explanation is plausible; it's probably simply a spelling pronunciation (compare BrE /ˌɪɡjʊˈɑːnə/ besides /ɪˈɡwɑːnə/).

[KathTheDragon]

BrE /ˌɪɡjʊˈɑːnə/

People say that?

[ratammer]

BrE /ˌɪɡjʊˈɑːnə/

People say that?

I do.

[Jonlang]

Don't the Brits have something like /dʒægjuːə/? Maybe the point is to avoid the sequence /war/, which was eliminated in native vocabulary?

The type /ˈdʒaɡjʊə/ is normal in BrE (as a speaker of New Zealand English, it's also what I'd use). I don't think a phonotactic explanation is plausible; it's probably simply a spelling pronunciation (compare BrE /ˌɪɡjʊˈɑːnə/ besides /ɪˈɡwɑːnə/).

I think the car manufacturer possibly has a fair bit to do with it, seeing as they have made the word 'jaguar' an everyday word in a location where the big cat is not native.

[jal]

I think the car manufacturer possibly has a fair bit to do with it, seeing as they have made the word 'jaguar' an everyday word in a location where the big cat is not native.

And it might be that that specific pronunciation has been spread over the world by a bunch of car-loving middle-aged men with a tv show...


JAL

[Nortaneous]

Don't the Brits have something like /dʒægjuːə/? Maybe the point is to avoid the sequence /war/, which was eliminated in native vocabulary?

The type /ˈdʒaɡjʊə/ is normal in BrE (as a speaker of New Zealand English, it's also what I'd use). I don't think a phonotactic explanation is plausible; it's probably simply a spelling pronunciation (compare BrE /ˌɪɡjʊˈɑːnə/ besides /ɪˈɡwɑːnə/).

I figured the spelling pronunciation could've been driven by avoidance of /wA:/, but if the same thing happens in "iguana" that's obv untenable lol i'm dumb "iguana" has START in BrE

[Sol717]

Interestingly enough, the first edition of the OED (the relevant fascicle was published in 1901) only mentions /ɪˈgwɑːnə/; the spelling pronunciation is presumably a later innovation (possibly when iguanas started being sold as pets and therefore established a presence in the public consciousness?).

For jaguar, both /ˈdʒægjuːɑː(ɹ)/ and /ˈdʒægwɑː(ɹ)/ are given; the pronunciation with /w/ is apparently obsolete in modern BrE.

Unsurprisingly, Walker lacks both iguana and jaguar.

[Richard W]

Interestingly enough, the first edition of the OED (the relevant fascicle was published in 1901) only mentions /ɪˈgwɑːnə/; the spelling pronunciation is presumably a later innovation (possibly when iguanas started being sold as pets and therefore established a presence in the public consciousness?).

A more salient beastie in public consciousness is (or was?) the iguanodon. I dug out the pronunciation in one of my children's books (written in the 1960's), and lo and behold it gave 'ig-u-AHN-o-don'. Back-formation to the exotic iguana yields /ˌɪɡjʊˈɑːnə/.

[Sol717]

Interestingly enough, the first edition of the OED (the relevant fascicle was published in 1901) only mentions /ɪˈgwɑːnə/; the spelling pronunciation is presumably a later innovation (possibly when iguanas started being sold as pets and therefore established a presence in the public consciousness?).

A more salient beastie in public consciousness is (or was?) the iguanodon. I dug out the pronunciation in one of my children's books (written in the 1960's), and lo and behold it gave 'ig-u-AHN-o-don'. Back-formation to the exotic iguana yields /ˌɪɡjʊˈɑːnə/.

The OED1 gives only /ɪˈgwænədɒn/, though that might be a erroneous editorial guess, a minority learnèd form, or only one of several competing forms (it's conceivable that the editors queried a paleontologist, failing to realise that others might've pronounced it differently). /ɪˈgwænədɒn/, /ɪˈgwɑːnədɒn/, and /ɪˈgjʊˈɑːnədɒn/ are all apparently acceptable in current BrE; all three forms may well be (relatively) old.

[Linguoboy]

TIL I should be saying "Lëtzebuergesch" with [j] instead of [g]. Also, the <er> is apparently just [ə], not [ɐ] as in Standard German and most southwestern varieties.

[Jonlang]

TIL that lackadaisy and its derivatives are not pronounced with an [s], i.e. not pronounced laxa-. I've actually never heard it pronounced without the [s] though

[Ryusenshi]

For a long time, I didn't know or notice that Americans drop the yod after dental consonants. So, I didn't realize that Looney Tunes was a pun with Toons. Or that noob was just the beginning of newbie.

Not exactly something I had to unlearn (I use a British accent so I still don't do yod-dropping), so much as an alternative I had to learn.

----------------

Words beginning with wr- were a puzzle for me. I remember a level in Super Metroid named "Wrecked Ship", that my brothers and I first misread as *"Weckred Ship" (look, our English was fairly basic) and pronounced *[wɛ kʁɛd] accordingly. Then we realized our error... but how the hell do you pronounce a /wr-/ cluster?? Like, it's impossible with a French /r/, so with an English /r/ instead... uh, something like [wuɹɛkt]? or [ɹʷwɛkt]? Of course, in modern English this cluster is impossible and it's just a regular /r-/.

People still struggle with this cluster: nobody knows how to pronounce wrap (a loanword only used for wrap sandwiches). I think most people have settled on [vʁap].

[jal]

Like, it's impossible with a French /r/

I think "roi" comes close though, as far as rounding the r goes :).


JAL

[Linguoboy]

For a long time, I didn't know or notice that Americans drop the yod after dental consonants. So, I didn't realize that Looney Tunes was a pun with Toons. Or that noob was just the beginning of newbie.

I had the opposite problem. As my native dialect is yod-dropping, I didn't know what its occurrence was in other dialects[*]. "Love's Great Adventure" by Ultravox has the line "They rang around my head / Like empty tuneless harmonies", but because of the yodation and resulting affrication (plus other peculiarities of Midge Ure's pronunciation) I always heard this as "...empty Jewish harmonies...".

[*] One of my linguistics teachers in college used this as an example of hypercorrection. He once heard a USAmerican announcer on a classical station trying so hard to sound plummy that he ended up pronouncing "noon" [ˈnjʉʊ̯n].

----

I came across "Croesus" in Vonnegut yesterday and that reminded me how I used to transpose this to "Croseus", which I pronounced /'kroːsiːəs/.

[Travis B.]

Words beginning with wr- were a puzzle for me. I remember a level in Super Metroid named "Wrecked Ship", that my brothers and I first misread as *"Weckred Ship" (look, our English was fairly basic) and pronounced *[wɛ kʁɛd] accordingly. Then we realized our error... but how the hell do you pronounce a /wr-/ cluster?? Like, it's impossible with a French /r/, so with an English /r/ instead... uh, something like [wuɹɛkt]? or [ɹʷwɛkt]? Of course, in modern English this cluster is impossible and it's just a regular /r-/.

People still struggle with this cluster: nobody knows how to pronounce wrap (a loanword only used for wrap sandwiches). I think most people have settled on [vʁap].

Actually, in English initial /r/ and /wr/ merged, not by loss of the /w/, but by both coming to be realized as [ɹʷ], so in Standard English initial /r/ is by default rounded.

[Ryusenshi]

I think "roi" comes close though, as far as rounding the r goes .

[ʁwɛ] is easy, but that's /rw-/, not /wr-/.