Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, amateur linguist and professional slacker. And this week, we're learning how to say words again.
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If you're anything like me, you grew up knowing all kinds of big, multi-syllabic words that you found in interesting little books that were way too grown-up for you. The trouble was, you - I - we, knew how the words looked and could suss out the meanings from context, but you could never be quite sure you knew what it sounded like.
And then came that inevitable day when you said something and someone else, some more learned than you, gave you a quizzical little smile and said, "Do you mean..." and then proceeded to say your word with an altogether different sound. Maybe they rolled a vowel a little differently, or split the syllable count just a bit off from the way you did. Maybe they put an international spin on a double-l or a ci, the smug fucks. Because, for whatever reason, and for whichever set of pronunciation rules, they said the word right.
This Banksy copy was listed under mournful. Photo by Karim MANJRA on Unsplash
Like all the most humiliating things in life, time-wrought perspective lessens the shame and makes the facilitating idea an object of study. Over the years I've had this scenario play out a number of ways - most rarely but most satisfyingly, the smug schmuck was wrong and my pronunciation was the right one. As I said, not often, but it has happened. No, most often it's someone with an alternate pronunciation. In fact, this has grown only more common as my circle of non-American English speaking friends has grown. Leaving aside the major differences between less-widely-spoken forms of English like Bostonian or New Zealander, just sorting out the difference between /skedule/ and /shedule/ in a given region of London can be a lot of work.
All that said, it still happens. A lot. And, a lot of the time, I'm the one that's been saying something wrong. There are a few reasons for this. Namely, even though I've been an avid reader all my life, I've rarely taken the time to look words up. (That's actually one of the impetuses behind this newsletter - to make me take the time to verify what I think I know.) But, a less-studied phenomenon is one brought one by introducing kids to foreign languages when they're young, especially when it's a language that uses the same (or similar) alphabet but with different sounds.
From now, this is my go to definition of irascible. Photo by Ingo Stiller on Unsplash
For me, this meant that, because I read a lot of fantasy and science-fiction, I was introduced to a lot of Greek and Latin derived pseudo-scientific words while also being introduced, through school, to the very real words of Spanish. Which meant that when I encountered a new word, if it looked at all non-English-y, I tended to throw whichever set of phonics at it that made it easy to say in my head if nowhere else. As an example, let's say I found a word that used /che/ somewhere. How would you pronounce that? Would you give it an /s/ sound as in the word chef? Or a hard /c/ like check? Or...well, let's be honest, depending on the context, that particular phoneme could have a whole lot of pronunciations.
But. My point is, it still happens. Including during this past week, when I came across two different people saying two different words differently than I had been. So, let's play a game. I haven't looked these words up yet. I'm going to post them with the pronunciations I heard and the ones that I normally use. Then I'll check the dictionary and we'll see what's what. Here we go:
elegiac
I heard /el-e-jiak/
I say /e-li-ji-ak/
irascible
I heard /ir-ash-i-ble/
I say /ir-as-i-ble
Now, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, both my source and myself have been saying elegiac correctly. The split in sounds is from different areas of the U.S. but both are considered common. Irascible, on the other hand, well, I was...more right but not completely right. All three pronunciations given in the OED use the soft /c/ (as in the word science) but the leading vowel sound can be quite different. My pronunciation of the /ir/ (as in irritating) is included in the OED as a US pronunciation, but it is the less common one. The British pronunciation uses either a softer /i/ sound or an /ai/ (as in air) sound. Huh. Did not know that.
At the end of the day, there really is no "right" pronunciation of any given word. Most of English is spoken with an entire dictionary's worth of elided consonants and blended sounds and every accent brings its own unique flavor to every word in that same dictionary. The only real consideration is, as ever, how clearly are you communicating?
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Stay safe, stay curious. Learn something.
Joel