Pronunciations you had to unlearn

[Travis B.]

I just bought Highly Irregular - Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme And Other Oddities of the English Language by Arika Okrent (illustrated by Sean O'Neill).

I'm now at the point in the book where it tells me that the l in salmon is silent. Wut?

This varies idiolectally. Although hypercorrected pronunciation with /l/ doesn't appear in normative guides, it's common enough in the USA these days that I no longer consider it a speech error. (See also catalpa.)

Salmon with /l/ seems plain wrong to me whereas catalpa with /l/ does not, even though it is a spelling pronunciation, probably because catalpa is not a native word in the dialect here.

[Nortaneous]

i've never heard "salmon" with an /l/ or "catalpa" in general (evidently some botanist's misspelling of "catawba"?)

[Pabappa]

catalpa makes sense to me considering it was in the 1700s ... the person may have heard something like [kata:pa] and needed some way to transcribe the lengthened vowel .... not too many English words have a stressed "aw" in that position, but at least a fair number have "al" which is usually pronounced in a similar way, with the L sound barely there .... the person likely also knew Italian since he had an Italian surname, and that is another language without vowel length but with the sequence /al/. that said, the pronunciation we have today uses the TRAP vowel, not the PALM vowel.

some people say /holp/ for "hope" because apparently the sound of the nearly elided L and that of the final part of the diphthong are close enough to make people merge in favor of the L.

i could see the same thing happening with salmon, but it appears we put the L in there even before people started to pronounce it.

[HourouMusuko]

I taught myself to stop pronouncing "February" as /ˈfɛb.juˌɛɹi/, which I grew up saying. I now say /ˈfɛb.ɹuˌɛɹi/ without thinking and when I hear /ˈfɛb.juˌɛɹi/ it sounds wrong to me. That was personal preference for me; I recognize that /ˈfɛb.juˌɛɹi/ is perfectly common and accepted. I just didn't like it.

I also read "myopic" as /maɪˈoʊpɪk/ in my head before I heard someone say it and learned that /maɪˈɑpɪk/ is preferred. Again, /maɪˈoʊpɪk/ isn't wrong exactly, at least in the U.S., but I've taught myself to no longer say or think it that way when I read the word.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I think I found myself shifting from the same pronunciation of february almost subconsciously, though I know the [fɛbjʊwɛɹi] pronunciation isn't technically incorrect. Apparently, there was a Middle English pronunciation whose modern reflex would probably have been feaverel (probably [fɛvəɹəɫ] or [fɛvɹəɫ] ) also existed, so that's a what-could-have-been, I suppose.

[aliensdrinktea]

I taught myself to stop pronouncing "February" as /ˈfɛb.juˌɛɹi/, which I grew up saying. I now say /ˈfɛb.ɹuˌɛɹi/ without thinking and when I hear /ˈfɛb.juˌɛɹi/ it sounds wrong to me.

Is this a regional thing? This is the second time I've seen someone talk about saying /ˈfɛb.ɹuˌɛɹi/ online, but I honestly don't think I've heard it irl.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I've just had it pointed out that r tends to drop out of certain unstressed syllables, even in otherwise-rhotic English — I often pronounce surprise, paraphernalia, caterpillar, and particular as [sʊ'pʰɹaiz], [pʰɛ.ɹə.fə.neɪɫ.jə], ['cʰæ.dəˌpɪ.ɫəɹ], and [pʰɪ'tʰɪkʰ.jʊ.ɫəɹ], but having them drop out in an onset rather than a coda (cf. library pronounced ['laiˌbɛ.ɹi]) is perceived as unprestigious; the sequence [ɹj] being now broadly invalid in English (I consequently get called [ɹai'jʊw.dʒi] a lot), it isn't surprising that a few would end up with the [j] rather than the [ɹ].

[Pabappa]

I have the /r/ in all of those words, including February, and always have.

Though I admit that when I first heard the word paraphernalia, I thought it was a mockingly hypercorrected form of a word *paraphanalia even when I saw it in writing.

I never mastered the pronunciation of /rʲ/ and so I would also use a disyllabic pronunciation for "ryu" and anything that contains it.

edit: also, Im not sure February ever had the sequence /rj/ ... it seems that what happened is a substitution of /j/ for /r/, not a shift from /rj/ > /j/.

[Travis B.]

I consistently pronounce February as [ˈfɜːbjʉːˌɛːʁˤi(ː)], pronouncing it with two /r/'s just sounds overly careful to me.

[Linguoboy]

I still find pronouncing the l in salmon a bit jarring, though I've encountered it a few times.

My nephew (b. 2004) was staying with me last weekend and when I asked him what fish he liked to eat he spontaneously produced “salmon” with /l/.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Is that with [æ], or some regionally-dependant back vowel?

[geltreo]

I used to mispronounce the word "colonel" as /'kolonel/ but it's actually pronounced as /ˈkɜːnəl/~/ˈkɝnəl/.

[Linguoboy]

Is that with [æ], or some regionally-dependant back vowel?

With /æ/. (Contemporary St Louis doesn't have much raising or backing, so I think his is pretty close to actual [æ].)

I've just had it pointed out that r tends to drop out of certain unstressed syllables, even in otherwise-rhotic English — I often pronounce surprise, paraphernalia, caterpillar, and particular as [sʊ'pʰɹaiz], [pʰɛ.ɹə.fə.neɪɫ.jə], ['cʰæ.dəˌpɪ.ɫəɹ], and [pʰɪ'tʰɪkʰ.jʊ.ɫəɹ]

I was really supprised[*] to learn how often I do this. I think it may have been due to the ubiquity of spellcheckers, since I'd apparently been misspelling several of these words without realising it. I often bring up to folks who stigmatise "liberry", "Febuary", etc. that they're dropping a lot of r's too without being aware of it.

[*] Or even "s'prised".

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Some with a reading pronunciation I've encountered have [ɒ~ɑ], though l-inserts with [æ] are (in my experience) the more common.

[Travis B.]

I've just had it pointed out that r tends to drop out of certain unstressed syllables, even in otherwise-rhotic English — I often pronounce surprise, paraphernalia, caterpillar, and particular as [sʊ'pʰɹaiz], [pʰɛ.ɹə.fə.neɪɫ.jə], ['cʰæ.dəˌpɪ.ɫəɹ], and [pʰɪ'tʰɪkʰ.jʊ.ɫəɹ]

I was really supprised[*] to learn how often I do this. I think it may have been due to the ubiquity of spellcheckers, since I'd apparently been misspelling several of these words without realising it. I often bring up to folks who stigmatise "liberry", "Febuary", etc. that they're dropping a lot of r's too without being aware of it.

[*] Or even "s'prised".

I frequently drop /r/'s in all of these words except for library, though I don't perceive my pronunciation of February as a "dropping" but rather a "replacement".

[Rounin Ryuuji]

This reminds me that I used to find the word library without it's first-r amusing, as it makes me think of dishonest fruits (a lie berry).

[Nortaneous]

I often bring up to folks who stigmatise "liberry", "Febuary", etc.

"Febuary" as opposed to what, [ˈfɛbruːeri]? I don't think I've ever heard that.

[Travis B.]

I often bring up to folks who stigmatise "liberry", "Febuary", etc.

"Febuary" as opposed to what, [ˈfɛbruːeri]? I don't think I've ever heard that.

I only hear the two /r/ pronunciation of February from the most conservative speakers here.

[jal]

Yesterday, watching Languagefocus's latest YouTube video about Guarani, I learned that "stative" is pronounced like "state" (which, in retrospect, is kinda obvious). I've always used /æ/, so "active/stative language" had an /æ/ in "active" and in "stative".


JAL

[Rounin Ryuuji]

WAIT, WHAT?

I'd always pronounced it with [æ] as in "status".