Words you just can't pronounce.

[Phil Pascoe]

It constantly amazes me how many adults cant pronounce thirty thousand, or even something as simple as three.

It constantly amazes me how many adults can't put in an apostrophe when needed or are we on the slippery cant

And you can't beat a slippery cant.

 

[John Brown]

I have no desire to judge those who didn't have the benefit of a classical education, but I have to confess that I can spend literally minutes trying to work out what invisible rule people are applying when abusing apostrophes for pluralisation. All or none I can understand.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

It's not difficult - plurals don't take apostrophes, possessives and contractions do.
The misplaced ones are known as greengrocers' apostrophes, as the commonest place to find them is in greengrocers' windows - best apple's, pear's etc. here.
I'm one of those poor souls who had to learn what gerunds, pluperfect passive subjuctives and other horrible thing were.

 

[rafezetter]

My party trick is to say the name of that volcano in Iceland that blew up and caused the reporters (and air traffic) so much trouble - so I HAD to learn how to say it, just... because.

Eyjafjallajökull

See? easy.

(but I really can say it properly :lol: and also swear in almost a dozen different languages including chinese, afrikaans, and arabic.)

Handy for swearing in front of ppl who are none the wiser.

 

[rafezetter]

Say it in Geordie Andy. Easy.
Hwa waaay pet. :wink:

Not allowed to call anyone pet these days, bloody nitpickers! :roll:

We have an Indian acquaintance who named her daughter something unpronounceable, Hermiani or something like that I think, anyway sounded to me like "howsmahinny" which is what I called her and it stuck. :wink:

haha in a similar vein an Indian friend called his newborn daughter something that even other Indians had trouble with, 3 months later he's had to change it!

I also had a schoolfriend when I was about 12 who was Lithuanian by parentage but was born and raised in the UK who couldn't properly pronouce his OWN Lithuanian name, and he had to think hard how to spell it - "just call me Mat one t" haha I've not thought about that kid for over 30 years, odd the things you remember...

Oh and we had a Vietnamese girl living here who's boyfriends name was either a girls name or a boys name depending on the pronouciation - we had that conversation because I do try to get peoples names right and apparently I was pronouncing it the girls way - I couldn't tell the difference, but clearly the vietnamese can and he said he was quite used to it.

Honestly, why do people do that to thier kids?

 

[Sideways]

Could'a been Moon Unit ....

 

[Andy Kev.]

[
I assume you mean people that would say 'firty fousand' or 'free'?

In some cases it's mispronunciation (something they could change), in others it's more of a speech impediment (something they probably can't).

It's "mispronunciation" that leads to differences between languages, dialects and accents.

Consider a word which is different in at least three languages: Dorf in German, Thorpe in English and if I remember rightly, there's a variant in Dutch. Did a German start mispronouncing the initial "th" and the "p" on the end or was it the other way around.

Consider also German Tal, Norwegian Dal and English Dale. A much better word for the thing between hills than the probably Norman-French valley.

So fifty fousand or if you're from London even fifty fahzand doesn't look so wrong. In Salford kids would often be corrected for saying "bockles" and "keckles" instead of bottles and kettles. Is it "wrong" to drop the "t" in the middle "bo'l" "keh'l"? Hardly. That glottal stop appears to be something we got from the Vikings. Danish is full of it.

As you can imagine, I'm reluctant to criticise such things as being wrong. I tend to get upset with sloppiness, e.g. "like", "you know" etc.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Oh, come on .......... get off of your high horse, like.

 

[Yojevol]

My German friend, Monika, learnt her basic English in the post-war years when she had Canadian soldiers billeted in her house. She thus spoke with a Canadian accent and biscuits were cookies. Later in life she decided to study English and become an English teacher. Whilst at university her tutor was infuriated by her Canadian accent and gave her individual pronunciation training to get overcome it. She now speaks with a normal (to us) Gerrman English accent but she can put on the Canadian when she wants to.
We were talking about accents one day, saying that we can usually tell which country a speaker is from by their accent. She agreed, it's just the same for us. I then asked her what is about an English accent that makes it distinctive. Her answer was immediate - "You slur your words"

Brian

 

[Geoff_S]

Back in 1975 I had my first review with my manager at the bank I was a junior in. He very helpfully advised me that if I wanted to get on in the bank then I would need to take elocution lessons.

I didn't, I left and pursued another direction where my pronunciation of things like "south" weren't an issue. Innit.

 

[sammy.se]

My German friend, Monika, learnt her basic English in the post-war years when she had Canadian soldiers billeted in her house. She thus spoke with a Canadian accent and biscuits were cookies. Later in life she decided to study English and become an English teacher. Whilst at university her tutor was infuriated by her Canadian accent and gave her individual pronunciation training to get overcome it. She now speaks with a normal (to us) Gerrman English accent but she can put on the Canadian when she wants to.
We were talking about accents one day, saying that we can usually tell which country a speaker is from by their accent. She agreed, it's just the same for us. I then asked her what is about an English accent that makes it distinctive. Her answer was immediate - "You slur your words"

Brian

Is she saying everyone is drunk all the time?

Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk

 

[Phil Pascoe]

My lad has great difficulty pronouncing "thank you".

 

[Nigel Burden]

It's not difficult - plurals don't take apostrophes, possessives and contractions do.
The misplaced ones are known as greengrocers' apostrophes, as the commonest place to find them is in greengrocers' windows - best apple's, pear's etc. here.
I'm one of those poor souls who had to learn what gerunds, pluperfect passive subjuctives and other horrible thing were.

I'm having to learn it now. I'll be honest, I've largely forgotten most of those horrible things.

A friend of mine, a retired schoolteacher, gets quite hung up about the weather presenters when they present a picture sent in by a weather watcher, or is it a weatherwatcher. :?
It's apparently in the way they say it.

Nigel.

 

[whiskywill]

Could'a been Moon Unit ....

On the radio recently, I heard somebody "famous", though I didn't catch who, refer to his two sons Charlie Ocean and River Joe. Presumably they are a bit wet but, hopefully, not stupid like their parents.

 

[AES]

No sammy.se, Jojevol's friend Monika isn't suggesting that all English speakers are constantly drunk!

My (Swiss) wife put much the same idea in a rather more descriptive way - "Most English speakers seem to have eaten and already digested half of every 2nd word before it leaves their mouths as a sound".

She further compounded her insult when we visited UK once on holiday. While visiting Scotland (I think that's somewhere up above Watford!) she claimed that all the local speakers were much easier for her to understand than people who originate from "darn sowf ". Comparing my own "impeccable" accent with all the "och aye dern noos" etc, etc, one hears up there, I was even more offended as, of course, I originate from "darn sowf". Thank goodness we didn't go to Geordie-land too .

 

[Bm101]

Oh, come on .......... get off of your high horse, like.

Funny enough, talking of horses.
Correct use of language is the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off his horse and .... Well.....

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Could'a been Moon Unit ....

On the radio recently, I heard somebody "famous", though I didn't catch who, refer to his two sons Charlie Ocean and River Joe. Presumably they are a bit wet but, hopefully, not stupid like their parents.

How's about
Poppy Honey Rosie, Daisy Boo Pamela, Petal Blossom Rainbow, Buddy Bear Maurice and River Rocket Blue Dallas?
That really takes some beating for child cruelty.

 

[Student]

On the subject of accents, my MiL and her family escaped Belgium in 1940 as did quite a number of her relatives, uncles, aunts and the like. They all ended up in different parts of GB. My MiL and her parents and sisters ended up in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. Some ended up in Dewsbury, some in Wales and some in Yorkshire. They all had to learn English during their 5 years of enforced absence although in the case of my MiL and a cousin in Dewsbury they married and stayed in England. My FiL always said that, when he went back to Belgium and they had a family reunion, it was quite amusing to hear all the different accents when they spoke to him, his Flemish being virtually non-existent. My MiL was often mistaken for a Scot when talking on the phone.

 

[MikeG.]

......swear in almost a dozen different languages including......afrikaans.......

The most expressive language on the planet when it comes to swearing. There isn't the slightest doubt when an Afrikaaner is swearing, even if you don't understand a single word of the language. Ek praat 'n bietjie afrikaans, maar verstaan nogal baie.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

In the early '70s my family had a property in Portugal. A dictatorship at the time, you had trouble getting phone messages out without the exchange at Setubal cutting you off. The lady who looked after many of the houses when they were empty was Belgian, and spoke Flemish ...... and Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and some Russian and Arabic. She was a clever lady, a highly decorated war hero who had met Dr. Mengele and lived to tell the tale. If a message was really important she would speak in say Spanish and ring her sister in Belgium. As soon as the call got through she would revert to Flemish, and as they didn't have Flemish translator at the telephone exchange it was minutes before they realised they couldn't understand her and cut her off, her sister then forwarding the message to the person for whom it was intended. By the bye.