Pronunciations you had to unlearn

[jal]

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

I was under the impression that it's more like [ʁʷ]? Which is close enough to the [ɹʷ] of <wr>. As far as I know, <wr> has never been /wr/.


JAL

[Ryusenshi]

I was under the impression that it's more like [ʁʷ]? Which is close enough to the [ɹʷ] of <wr>. As far as I know, <wr> has never been /wr/.

Well, present-day me knows all of that. You should be saying this to 14-year-old me.

[Ares Land]

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.

It's pretty amusing really. We're all doing our best to pronounce a cluster that isn't there in the first place.
In fact you can't use the English pronunciation because nobody would understand you.

It's weird because I know how to pronounce, say, 'writer' but 'wr' trips me up every single time. Last week I looked up the pronunciation of 'wren' and felt extremely stupid afterwards.

[jal]

Last week I looked up the pronunciation of 'wren' and felt extremely stupid afterwards.

You felt stupid looking something up? Why? TBH I probably have a spelling pronunciation there as well...


JAL

[Ares Land]

Stupid is perhaps not the right word here. It felt very anticlimatic, maybe? What went through my mind was something like, 'well, duh, that was exceptionally straightforward.'

Off-topic, but still of linguistic interest: the wren has a good old-fashioned, Anglo Saxon name in English, but in French, it's called a Troglodyte mignon, which sounds like a binomial name, but isn't the actual binomial name of the bird. I don't know why: they're very common birds in French as well. (Doubtless the name is different in regional languages.)

[Linguoboy]

Off-topic, but still of linguistic interest: the wren has a good old-fashioned, Anglo Saxon name in English, but in French, it's called a Troglodyte mignon, which sounds like a binomial name, but isn't the actual binomial name of the bird. I don't know why: they're very common birds in French as well. (Doubtless the name is different in regional languages.)

In Louisiana French, the most common name is “roi Bertaud” or “roitelet”.

[Ares Land]

Off-topic, but still of linguistic interest: the wren has a good old-fashioned, Anglo Saxon name in English, but in French, it's called a Troglodyte mignon, which sounds like a binomial name, but isn't the actual binomial name of the bird. I don't know why: they're very common birds in French as well. (Doubtless the name is different in regional languages.)

In Louisiana French, the most common name is “roi Bertaud” or “roitelet”.

Ah, thanks! That clears up things a bit. I don't use 'roi Bertaud', but 'roitelet' is what I call a crest. It seems likely people just used the same name from both birds. (They're easily confused anyway.)

[Raphael]

It took me a while to figure out that "UFO" is pronounced as an acronym, with each letter pronounced individually, in English. In German it's pronounced as if it were an ordinary noun spelled something like "Ufo", and for a while, I thought that was the case in English, too.

[Pabappa]

in New York City it's traditionally pronounced /'ju.fo/, ...I only know that because I saw someone say "...whofos?" in a comic book as if that were an ordinary rhyme.

[Linguoboy]

Cetacean. I used to rhyme it with Caribbean rather than Eustachian.

[Vijay]

One time, my family and I took a plane to Norfolk, and when I learned how Norfolk was pronounced, I said, "Are we allowed to say that word on the plane?"

[Linguoboy]

One time, my family and I took a plane to Norfolk, and when I learned how Norfolk was pronounced, I said, "Are we allowed to say that word on the plane?"

I take it you mean Norfolk in East Anglia? Because the city in Virginia is pronounced "Norfook".

[Vijay]

One time, my family and I took a plane to Norfolk, and when I learned how Norfolk was pronounced, I said, "Are we allowed to say that word on the plane?"

I take it you mean Norfolk in East Anglia? Because the city in Virginia is pronounced "Norfook".

That's news to my family and me then because I never heard it pronounced that way.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I've always pronounced both as roughly [nɔɹ.fək], but I guess the [ə] does waffle around with [ʊ] a bit, which feels like the "underlying" vowel rather than [ou] or [ɒ~ɑ].

[anteallach]

One time, my family and I took a plane to Norfolk, and when I learned how Norfolk was pronounced, I said, "Are we allowed to say that word on the plane?"

I take it you mean Norfolk in East Anglia? Because the city in Virginia is pronounced "Norfook".

In this part of the world that would make the situation worse.

[Linguoboy]

I checked with my friend who's from there. He also doesn't recall that pronunciation being used locally. He did, however, list out five other variants:

• NORfick "my sister and I"
• NAWfuck "my mother and grandmother"
• NOFfuck "my dad"
• NORfoke "my ex...[who] grew up there same as I did"
• NAHfuck "even more of a transplant alert than NORfoke"

I assume I got the "NORfook" pronunciation from my dad, who grew up in and near Baltimore. I can't imagine my mother using it or talking about the city much, for that matter.

[Nortaneous]

Isn't there a Norfolk somewhere that's pronounced Norfork?

As far as I know, <wr> has never been /wr/.

English <wr> was /wr/ until the /w/ was lost. There are papers arguing that <wr wl> always just represented /rˠ lˠ/ with velarization, but those papers are wrong - some dialects have (had?) wr > /vr/, there's no reason not to reconstruct *wr in PIE (e.g. 'write' < *wrey-), and /wl wr/ are attested in other languages.

[Travis B.]

As far as I know, <wr> has never been /wr/.

English <wr> was /wr/ until the /w/ was lost. There are papers arguing that <wr wl> always just represented /rˠ lˠ/ with velarization, but those papers are wrong - some dialects have (had?) wr > /vr/, there's no reason not to reconstruct *wr in PIE (e.g. 'write' < *wrey-), and /wl wr/ are attested in other languages.

The /w/ was never lost in <wr>. Rather, it turned into a rounded rhotic, and then merged with /r/ when it too became rounded.

[Travis B.]

I checked with my friend who's from there. He also doesn't recall that pronunciation being used locally. He did, however, list out five other variants:

• NORfick "my sister and I"
• NAWfuck "my mother and grandmother"
• NOFfuck "my dad"
• NORfoke "my ex...[who] grew up there same as I did"
• NAHfuck "even more of a transplant alert than NORfoke"

I assume I got the "NORfook" pronunciation from my dad, who grew up in and near Baltimore. I can't imagine my mother using it or talking about the city much, for that matter.

My uneducated intuition as someone who has never heard the word said aloud is to pronounce it as "NORfoke".

[Richard W]

Isn't there a Norfolk somewhere that's pronounced Norfork?

As one of the dumplings, my natural inclination would be to pronounce the latter as /ˈnɔːfək/ as well. However, I never went so far as to pronounce <Southfork> /ˈsɐfək/.