Got called out once for pronouncing epitome as Epi-tome.
That one stung more than Camus as Cah-mus instead of Cah-moo. At least thats just the French fucking with us.
It can happen with common words too! Like I didn’t know I was pronouncing Thai food wrong till that John Oliver episode
If anyone’s wondering and since it’s not clarified here…
Epitome is pronounced like this: ||UK|US| |phonetic|/ɪˈpɪt.ə.mi/|/ɪˈpɪt̬.ə.mi/| |non-phonetic|epittomee|epiddomee|
I’ve been an avid reader since I was 6/7 and I hate reading dictionary listings with phonetic spellings as ironically they only make it harder for me to know how to pronounce a word. I’m also a native speaker.
epiddomee
I know Americans pronounce Ts as Ds, but reading it explicitly written down is like being poked in the eye
It took seeing videos of Elden Ring lore before it clicked with me that “cuckoo” is “coo-coo” and not “cuck-oh,” like, the chickens in Zelda.
It’s like a hippopotamoo, but somewhat more existential and obsessed with arcana like boulders and mountains for exercise to discover happiness in life.
Reading a new English word as a foreigner is super frustrating because you never know how to pronounce that.
Yes sure unanimous is not ‘un-animous’, it’s ‘you-nanimous’. Makes total sense.
Don’t even get me started on the dozen different ways to pronounce ‘ough’.
English is tough, but it can be understood through thorough thought, though.
I’m learning Swedish slowly, and I was raised in the US south, so I am constantly corrected on pronunciation lol.
Skank right? Or rather “skänk” with the sharp exhale emphasis on the sk- pronounced as wh- (similar to “who”). Hard to describe phonetically. But still lol.
My favorite is the Swedish word for fast or quick
With words starting with “un” you can figure out pronunciation by removing the “un” and see if the rest of the word is it’s own word which means the opposite. “animous” is not a word so you would use the long “u” sound in “unanimous”. Same for uniform or university. But not unironic or unintentional.
Through that logic I’d always figured unanimous stems from “without animosity” and the word animous just got lost to time, which would make un-animous the more sensible pronunciation. But it seems that while they do share a common etymology, it’s not “un” as in negation, but rather “un” from “unus” meaning one, with both sharing “animus” meaning mind.
I also found out that animous used to exist as a synonym for animus at one point.
Yes that may be the reason why that difference exists.
The usefulness of that tip is limited when encountering new words for the first time though.
If I don’t know unanimous, chances are I don’t know if animous exists either.
Edit: Also there is understand, which starts with un- although there is no ‘derstand’.
Most radiology teachers want to be unionized.
Explanation: That’s both union-ized, for part of a union, or un-ionized, for not ionized
That said, that’s a really good way to describe the difference. If you’re a native speaker, you’ve got really good insight (your native language has a lot of blind spots, where you know what is right, but not why), and if you’re not, then your English is really good!
Thanks. I am a native English speaker. I just hate how inconsistent it is so I try to think up as many rules as I can to apply some kind of logic to it.
Mais oui.
Once you understand the rules, I find French pronunciation generally more reliable than English.
The French heavily curate their language too, which probably contributes to it’s reliability and overall clarity. There are official words with official pronunciations, gendering, etc. No willy-nilly adding words from colloquialisms or slang like in English.
Like how the hell are you supposed to know how to pronounce “preface”. It’s obviously pre-face and it’s before everything else so the prefix pre makes so much sense. No one ever uses that word in spoken conversation either.
Fucking English, dumb language held together by tape and desperation.
Most languages don’t need spelling lessons.
Nah, more like has stupid rules because of loan words. Just English them or make up your own lmfao. It’s almost 7/8 of the reasons for anything that makes you go, why?
Nah, more like has stupid rules because of loan words.
All languages loan words. Many languages don’t have a problem mapping spelling to pronunciation.
Right? Fuck their original spelling. Just translate to your alphabet appropriately and fuck the rest.
Nope. I thought I went way over the top but that joke but… not over the top enough apparently.
I pronounced hyperbole as it is spelled “hyper bowl” for decades and nobody corrected me! It wasn’t until I finally saw someone say it in a TV show that I realized the error of my ways. Now I stumble over the word every time I try to say it because I have decades of habit to overcome. Sometimes when I think I might need to say it, I start mouthing it ahead of time so that I get it right on the first try. There are at least a dozen other words like this for me, and I’m sure dozens more that I’m not even aware of.
Edit: for those of you who have never heard it pronounced, hyperbole is pronounced “high-per-buh-lee”.
Same here. Hyper bowl. Until i heard it on TV.
I just want to suggest that your pronunciation at the end of your message is not quite right still.
Wouldn’t it be closer to say “hi-per-ber-lee”? Or am i still getting it wrong?
Someone else replied and gave a better phonetic spelling of it. I updated mine too. “Hy-per-buh-lee”.
What’s funny is the first time I heard it, I knew immediately what it was, but I wasn’t sure if that was the correct pronunciation, or if the speaker was being all high-born fancy-pants, so I had to ask my wife. English isn’t even her first language and she knows everything about it. She’s 10x better at speaking and writing English than I am. I do have other talents though! I think…
This one is particularly annoying because of Hyperbolic, which is pronounced Hy-per-bol-ic. Which just makes Hy-per-bole seem more valid…
There are a lot of those prefixes that shift stress and/or pronunciation when going from nouns to adjectives or verbs, like supermarket vs superfluous. It’s just especially annoying when they use spelling uncommon to other English words, such as Quixote vs quixotic (the x is silent in the first and voiced in the 2nd).
Generally it kind of retains the features of the pronunciation of the language it was borrowed from. In this case Greek, which generally pronounces every vowel in a word. Similar to Aphrodite (which one would expect to be pronounced Afro-dight).
I know that doesn’t help much unless you have already built a guide in your head about how words of a certain language are pronounced and can guess what language that word originates from. You might need to consult a dictionary to find out what language it was borrowed from, at which point you’ll also see the pronunciation.
I was 17 when my friend pointed out to me that epitome is pronounced epi-tome-ey
Rather than how I was saying it Epi-Tome.
Same here, but I knew the correct pronunciation of the word when spoken, I just didn’t know they were the same damn word. When it finally clicked in my head, I about slapped myself.
Dude, that’s how I was with dachshund. I heard it spoken and assumed it was spelled something like “doxen”, and then in my head I pronounced dachshund as “dash-hund”
Ha, I remember reading Greek mythology when I was young and getting thrown off by Persephone. Seemed like it should rhyme with telephone…
Epitome was one of mine too. Also inventory, i thought emphasis was on the vent syllable not the in syllable
This unlocked the epitomous memory of me and my mom in the car and the radio show host trying to bust out his best vocab with epi-TOme. She bust out laughing. I feel like something similar is coming back 'round to me, just found out it’s epitomic. Not even sure how to pronounce
