“Dearest creature in creation,
study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse,
sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.”
Thanks so much for this to Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité, (1870-1946), a Dutch observer of the wonderfully quirky and diverse English language with all its pronunciation anomalies. Well, we like to make things interesting. And impossible to learn. Don’t we?
At least I’ve managed to spell pronunciation correctly. (No, it is NOT pronounciation, as I’ve seen too many times to count).
My blog this time was inspired, if that’s the right word, by a childhood recollection. One of those family stories which has endured for decades. It still slightly embarrasses me. I was ridiculed as a child, in the nicest possible way.
Why? …Because I always had my nose stuck in a book. No, I wasn’t ridiculed because of that, but I WAS ridiculed because I then went on to use words in speech which I had no idea at all how to pronounce.
Here are the pronunciation blunders that will live in family history (thanks, sister Jane for reminding me of a few!) and even now cause me to cringe. I was going to say ‘faux pas’ but, as you will see, using French phrases can be fraught with danger.
This is not me expressing my fear at revealing my shameful past, it’s the first example.
Anxiety: pronunciation by Young Caroline – Anx-itty.
In fairness, I did grow up in the 1960s when ITA was in fashion – a phonemic alphabet designed to help young children to take their first steps in reading before transferring to regular letters. Yeah, right.
Answers on a postcard. (I know what it says…)
Example Number Two:
Of course – Grand (not with the French pronunciation) Pricks.
Example Number Three:
I was a great reader of James Bond from a very early age. The female protagonist in Dr. No…
Honeychile Rider: pronunciation by Young Caroline – Honeychilly Rider. Chile like the South American country, you see. There was logic in my mistakes.
Well, most of them…
For the life of me, I’ll never understand why an…
was pronounced by Young Caroline as an Orange Outing
But it was. And still is, if I let my concentration slip.
I think I’ll learn Georgian or another Caucasian language with what seem to be unpronounceable consonant clusters like like brt’q’eli, mc’vrtneli, or prčkvna.
Pronunciation? Easy peasy.