Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 August 3

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

August 3

Pronunciation

Have you ever come across a word you know extremely well—have probably read 100s of times—but when you first hear someone say it you suddenly realize you may have only ever read it and never have heard it said out loud, and aren't sure your mind's eye pronunciation is the "real" way it's pronounced? I just heard the word internecine in an NPR story and what I've just described is in play for me here. The announcer pronounced it inter-knee-sign. I've always pronounced (in my head) inter-neh-scene. From the perspective of an American generic accent (to the extent that exists), what is the normal pronunciation? Please note that I do not understand IPA at all.--71.183.174.242 (talk) 20:59, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

For that matter, how do you pronounce cornucopia? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:06, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

KORN-uh-KO-pee-uh —Akrabbim^talk 12:14, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

KORN-you-KO-pee-uh. How do you pronounce acupuncture? AKKA-... or AK-YOU-...? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 12:53, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Hmm, I say ACK-you and KORN-uh—it seems I (and those around me) exert much less effort on the 'u' in 'cornucopia' than in 'acupuncture'. BTW, I live in Central New York and speak with a general American accent, as do most of the people I associate with. —Akrabbim^talk 13:32, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

(ec) Merriam-Webster lists your preferred pronunciation first (and that would be my preferred version as well), but they also list the NPR version (third choice), with three more option for good measure. --LarryMac | Talk 21:08, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

The OP doesn't indicate where the stress lies. Is it in-TER-nuh-seen or IN-tuh-nuh-seen? Fwiw, I've only ever heard it as inter-NEE-sign. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:15, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

The first pronunciation in the dictionary LarryMac cited above is IHNT-ur-NEHS-EEN. Deor (talk) 21:23, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

To quote Garrison Keillor: "I was a reader, not a talker." That line gets a lot of play in a house full of writers and reviewers. --Orange Mike | Talk 21:16, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

To answer the OP's first (rhetorical) question, for a long time I was unsure of the pronunciation of Andalusia, putting the stress on a "luze" syllable which doesn't exist. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 21:18, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Webster's New World Collegiate prefers "in tur NEE sin", with "in tur NEE seen" as a second choice. It lists "in tur NEE sign" as "chiefly British". For what it's worth, I, as an educated American native speaker, have always thought it was "in tur NESS een". Marco polo (talk) 21:31, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

As a child, I was always being misled by the appearance of misled, which I took to be the past tense of the non-existent verb "to misle" (pron. MY-zuhl). -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:39, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

... and I recall reading it as the past tense of the (then) common dialect verb to "mizzle" (disappear), so I always keep the hyphen in mis-led. Dbfirs 07:58, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

When I was younger, I used to misread infrared as the past-tense of the word "to infrare" (pronounced "in-FRAY-erd"). It was a weird thing, since I also knew the word "infra-red" spoken, but for some reason I never put two-and-two together to recognize that infra-red was the same as infrared. --Jayron32 21:45, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Jayron, thanks! I made the exact same mistake until someone laughed at me about it. Pfly (talk) 08:41, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

I had a seventh-grade science teacher who (seriously) used your "misreading" pronunciation in class, to the amusement of his students (when it dawned on them what he was talking about). Deor (talk) 21:55, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

To this day, whenever I see "coworker", my first image is of a cow, and of someone doing something nasty to it called "orking". I'm amazed by the people who go to the trouble of unnecessarily inserting apostrophes into plurals of certain nouns (but not others), and into possessive "its". but feel that it's not necessary to hyphenate "co-worker". Weird. -- 21:52, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

You're not a fan of Scott Adams are you? --Jayron32 22:28, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

I wasn't aware that I am, but apparently I am. I do like Dilbert. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 22:52, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

I remember being surprised to learn that "lapel" is not pronounced like "label" with a "p." More recently, I was surprised to hear "Josephus" pronounced "Joe-SEE-fus" on a documentary. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 22:34, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

I've always heard it that way. Do you say JO-suhf-uhs? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 22:52, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

I mean I had never heard it pronounced before and was only familiar with the name from texts. I would have thought "JOE-se-fus." -- Mwalcoff (talk) 01:44, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

The one that got me was "finite". I was familiar with "infinite" (pronounced like "in-fin-nit"), so presumed that "finite" should be pronounced like "fin-nit". I was quite miffed at my elementary school teacher who insisted (as it turns out, correctly) that "finite" is pronounced like "fine-nite". (Although that pales in comparison to the story I heard about the medical student who insisted that "pneumonia" (pronounced as "puh-neumonia") and "neumonia" (spoken but not written) were different things.) -- 140.142.20.229 (talk) 23:41, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Rational people will sometimes believe the most absurd things. My co-worker and I had a discussion recently about one of my office's clients, who identifies as an aboriginal. My friend suspected it was a false claim, made solely in order to qualify for some special funding available only to aboriginal people - because the client has no obvious visual aboriginal features. I explained that it's all a matter of self-identification, and it's not for others to deny people's claimed membership of that or any other race. She said that they still had to satisfy a government-set "minimum blood" requirement, specifically, one-seventeenth. How did she know this? She was told it at a party about 10 years ago, by a woman whose first name she quickly forgot and whose surname she never knew at all, but who claimed to have worked a lot with aboriginal people. Well, you can imagine what that did to my brain. Try as I might, I could not get her to accept that it's impossible to have 1/17 aboriginal or any other blood, and there's no way the government would ever have set that specific figure as any sort of benchmark. But would she listen? Oh no, the anonymous person she met casually at a party a decade ago was somehow clearly more credible than simple logic. And my friend is not a stupid woman, generally speaking. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 01:24, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

You can't have 1/17 aboriginal blood (assuming that there is some finite n such that all your n-great grandparents were either fully aboriginal or not at all, which is perhaps a slightly risky assumption). However, you can have either more or less than 1/17. So it is not impossible that the standard could indeed be 1/17. It's a little hard to figure out why that figure would be chosen, but it is at least meaningful. Speculation: Maybe they wanted to make it completely clear that a person with 1/16 blood definitely qualifies, rather than being on the borderline? --Trovatore (talk) 01:32, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

First nontrivial case where you would qualify under the 1/17 standard but not the (inclusive) 1/16 standard: You have, counting repetitions, 512 great^7-grandparents. If 31 of them (counting repetitions) were pure-blooded aboriginal, and the rest had no aboriginal blood, you're in. Under the 1/16 standard, you'd need 32. --Trovatore (talk) 01:46, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

The definition preferred by the Australian High Court is (from memory) (1) any sort of descent (no mention of 1/17th), (2) self identification as one, (3) and co-identification by other Aborigines. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 02:08, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

My words, as a "reader, not a talker", were: victuals ("VIC-tu-als" to me, until I heard an Englishman say "vittles" sometime in my early 20s); gazebo ("GAZE-bo"lasted until late high school when a friend had one in her garden and it became "gaz-EE-bo"; and clerestory (which I still prefer as "clair-ES-tory", all dictionary guides notwithstanding.) Bielle (talk) 01:48, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

And then there's language change. What used to be SERR-uh-muh-nee and MATR-uh-muh-nee are now SERR-uh-MOAN-ee and MATR-uh-MOAN-ee; what used to be a SEM-uh-tree is now a SEM-uh-TAIR-ee; what used to be SED-uhn-tree is now suh-DENT-uh-ree. And so on. There's a PLE-thuh-ruh --> pluh-THORA of these things. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 02:07, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

SED-uhn-tree? Surely you mean SED-uhn-tair-ee.  :) The Mark of the Beast (talk) 18:15, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

No, I mean SED-uhn-tree. Just like MI-luh-tree, not MI-luh-tair-ee. You may say these words differently. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 19:33, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Well, going from hearing to seeing I was shocked to read that someone who ferments rebellion actually foments it, and that the Uninted States are olnly actually ewe-knighted, and not uninted. As for reading then hearing, there is that gangster movie, Sgarfacci.μηδείς (talk) 03:52, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

My word of this sort was Hades which I thought was pronounced hAdz to rhyme with fades or shades. Only after giving a five minute speech about Hades in front of my high school English class (we were reading some mythology at the time) and being ruthlessly made fun of by my friends did I find out that it is correctly pronounced HAY-deez. Dismas|^(talk) 04:34, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Did you also mention So-crates? AndrewWTaylor (talk) 08:32, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Not sure if it's deliberate or not, but I've recently noticed some Australian sports commentators using the American style deee-fence when describing basketball, and the traditional Australian d'fence for most other sports. Versatile. HiLo48 (talk) 08:45, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Not sure I'd ever noticed this before — here, the military is deFENSE, but in all sports I can think of, the defending side is the DEfense. Couldn't say why. --Trovatore (talk) 08:51, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

But spelt wrongly either way. Sorry. Couldn't help myself ;-) HiLo48 (talk) 08:56, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Once you learn how to spell the word spelled, then you can criticize. --Trovatore (talk) 08:58, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

And when you learn how to spell "spelt", then you can criticise! --ColinFine (talk) 09:27, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Now that's just not original; figure out something better than just copying. --Trovatore (talk) 09:33, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

But at least his spelling of criticise was correct! HiLo48 (talk) 10:19, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

I know Spelt. It's a grain. The Mark of the Beast (talk) 18:15, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

I still refuse to pronounce panacea the "proper" way; just too ugly - and four syllables? I don't have all day. I say it's a "pan-AY-shuh" dammit. Not entirely unrelatedly, I went a long time pronouncing Hecate as two syllables: "HEK-uht". Pronouncing that one correctly doesn't seem so painful though. Matt Deres (talk) 04:12, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Good /GRAY-see-us/! Pronouncing "panacea" with only 3 syllables is the /EP-i-tohm/ of silliness, Matt.  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 04:45, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

I read Harry Potter before I saw any movies. Could have sworn that girl was called Her-mee-own. HiLo48 (talk) 05:02, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Didn't we all? That's why Rowling added a few moments in later books where people struggle to get Hermione's name right, and have it carefully pronounced for them. Until this thread, I pronounced internecine with a hard 'c'. This appears to be a completely imaginary, unattested pronunciation. 86.163.0.19 (talk) 10:30, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Snap. I still pronounce it that way ("-neck-") in my mind when I see it, though if ever I had to speak it I would probably edit. --ColinFine (talk) 20:29, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

This really surprises me (particularly from an old fogey like Hilo48 - :) . Hermione is not exactly the most popular name these days. It never was. But it's still well known from actresses like Hermione Baddeley (who was in Mary Poppins) and Hermione Gingold (who was in Gigi). They were famously arch-rivals, so much so that in their day they were often mentioned in the same breath as "The Two Hermiones", despite hardly ever appearing together (the exact opposite situation from The Two Ronnies). While they generally kept their careers separate, they did agree to appear together in a Noël Coward play in 1947 [1], and in 2 movies in the early 1950s.[2] -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 22:31, 6 August 2011 (UTC)