Hullo. 'ullo?
Here's something from last week that may be interesting to some and may even bring a couple of laughs and/or raise some eyebrows - both the article and the video-clip. The boy on the right in the blue shirt reminds me of someone I know and the woman is priceless. The clip and the news story brought my own mongrel pronunciation home to me.
In the third school that I went to (and remember of) as a kid - I'm almost absolutely sure that "h" was pronounced "haitch". I used "haitch" in my head, dropped it after a point and then forgot all about it, and at some point I started raising my eyebrows when people said "Haitch" instead of "aitch". "H" is never pronounced in "history". This I learnt very late - sometime in middle-school. I always see the Wren and Martin when I read something to the effect of - "an historical examination of some of the theories demonstrate...wugga-wugga-wugga". Back then I'd chewed on the pencil and stared at the example on the left page of the book until I realised why the example used "an" instead of "a". (Even after "history" had been sorted out satisfactorily, I used an 'an' for "iron is a useful metal" for a class-test). How on earth is the pronunciation of "harass" changing though ? It can't be "arass"...!
I've got to say I don't remember ever hearing "ate" being pronounced as 'et'. Whoever's heard of "I et a biscuit?" Whoever says that apart from the very propah gentleman in the little clip? I can hallucinate "ate" rhyming with "bet" in "I 'et' an egg with toast" but I don't think I would ever say "et", and if I did I'd quickly correct it to ryhme with "bait". "Says", in my book, should rhyme with fez, and as the gentleman points out "there is no 'i' in mischievous" (between the v and the o, that is)! I'd have gotten all the pronunciations from 1928 incorrect apart from "pristine" (only because I know I used to pronounce it otherwise just a decade ago). I remember though a friend telling me in school that "house-wife" was actually pronounced "huzzif". I used that for a bit but I never could get used to it. And "cumbat"? It can't be "cumbat"! And why "respit"? Respite should rhyme with despite, shouldn't it?
I had assumed that "wrath" was pronounced the same way as "cloth"...But I'm not sure what "off" and "north" and "wharf" are supposed to rhyme with. Is there something missing in the sentence or is it me who's missing something.
I am reminded of my squabbles with Beth (a friend who is now a proper professor). She pronounced "soot" as rhyming with "foot" while I rhymed "soot" with "boot". I'm reminded of Bean who used to growl every time he heard someone say "or'njyoos". "It's not one word." He would say. "There are two words. Orange-juice." And then there was the little incident when a student from Greece told Bean, who was from the U.K, that Bean was mispronouncing words.
Grammar, pronunciation, spelling - at some point in school - became one garbled heap. I had a sense for idiomatic English and I had a sense for grammar - I'll give myself that....but for the latter - my senses weren't always right. I didn't know any grammar and I never did learn much of grammar while going to Carmel. I taught myself the fundamentals of grammar - including subject-verb agreement - when I was 24. I never quite understood punctuation or the phrase-and-clause bit...I still make subject-verb errors and dangling modifiers are sometimes left to dangle if I'm not carefully re-reading what I'm writing and re-writing, and I can't even quite spot the problem with the clause and phrase bit even when I sense that a sentence does not quite sound right.
And what of words which I didn't know how to pronounce? I simply pronounced them how I thought fit or "bleeped" over them, and went on reading. This reminds me of a lovely little cartoon that I found on the net but wasn't able to download. There's a boy who's snuggled up in his bed with a book, and he looks all comfy but he has a bemused look on his face, and he's looking up from his book. There is a blaring "announcement" from within the pages of the book: "Alert: you mispronounced a word in your head. Would you like to hear the correct pronunciation now or hear it later?"....
It would have been nice to to carry a pronunciation-perfect guide in the head even if one didn't have the luck to meet a Mr. Higgins everyday.
P.S: November 7th - and here's a link that Beth sent me....
2 comments:
Beth was right about foot, just as you are right about says.
respite ought to be pronounced as respit, is it? You're right, I just checked. Learnt something new at my age! Many thanks indeed...
I wish more people would muse on this vein. As a teacher of English, I despair of people who, with 'English-medium' backgrounds, still pronounce evening as three syllables, and who don't have the foggiest about how Mozart and renaissance ought to be pronounced.
Look up housewife in the dictionary. It can be pronounced two different ways, to mean two different things!
We squabbled over soot though - not foot. How do you pronounce soot? Foot rhymes with put, right? - but what about soot? Beth said (and still says) soot rhymes with foot...I say soot rhymes with boot.
Ooops...it's a good thing that I stopped saying 'huzzif' when I meant the woman and not the box. Many thanks to you too. I hadn't even known that housewife also meant a box of sewing items...
Do you pronounce ate as 'et'?...
Oh dear. Yes, I can hear all those words being mangled...but the one that always gongs is the one that you mentioned in an orkut post: something about the 'loin being a ferocious animal'...
A humongous thank you for commenting!
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