hexagon789
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Hard 't' like in test.
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Pronunciation question -- spin-off of " 'a' and 'an' " thread
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Hard 't' like in test.
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A public school in Portugal or Britain though?
In Britain public schools are a subset of private schools (the term independent school rather than private school is preferred though by the sector!), and publicly funded schools are state schools!
Giugiaro
Member
Public School in Portugal. As we refer to them as such, are state owned and operated schools.
Private schools (or colleges [colégios]) have a tendency to have their own institutional take on the study programme.
Private schools (or colleges [colégios]) have a tendency to have their own institutional take on the study programme.
Yes. The American-style 'bedder' for better sounds lazy to my ears.
Either is always 'eye-ther' for me, been is 'bean' not 'bin' and paracetamol is 'para-set-uh-mol'. How about harassment? I pronounce it with the stress on the first syllable, which is definitely dying out.
hexagon789
Veteran Member
Either - 'eye-thur'
Been - 'bean', though occasionally I'll say 'haz-bin' for has been
Harassment - harrus-mnt, stress on the first syllable, harass similarly is 'harrus' not 'ha-rass'
In a similar vein - controversy, for me I say - 'CON-truh-versy' not 'con-TRO-vursy'.
Busaholic
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Yet controversial is almost always pronounced one way only!
DynamicSpirit
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Haha! Brilliant! I was so fixated on thinking about your sentences that I scarcely noticed your following question. And yes, you're right, saying 'more better' is totally wrong and completely jarred as soon as I noticed it.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
As an aside, I wonder what the reason is for the different stress positions on controvERsial and conTROversy?
I recently discovered, by chance, an interesting theory on why "we say 'shed' and they say 'sked' ". The word "schedule" comes originally from the late Latin "schedula", a slip of paper. Many centuries back, the Latin word was in common and regular use by the Catholic Church, which used the "sh" pronunciation -- this became Old French "cedule" (the "c" pronounced as "sh"), which passed into late Middle English as "schedule", with British English always holding to the "sh" pronunciation. The new country of the USA -- using the English language, but less wedded than Europe to tradition or "Catholic / Latin-related stuff", took to pronouncing "schedule" more "as spelt", with a "k" sound; this maybe part of deliberate efforts made in the US in the early-ish part of its history, to distinguish itself from Britain by choosing to use English in different ways from British linguistic practice.
Never heard controversy said that way in my life before about 20 years ago, and never by cultured types since. It's one of those ones that happened because they started giving normal people a 15 minute course on sounding uppity and then letting them read the news
hexagon789
Veteran Member
People with regional accents have read news bulletins for decades, it's hardly a recent thing.
Historically it was mostly a case of using the regional accent, but avoiding dialect words. There was more of a thing in the 80s for taking people and making them sound fake posh, combined with less resort to the pronunciation team, which led to one or two actual horror-shows of pronunciation coming to be regarded as "correct" by people who hadn't encountered the word before. The result is a bit like the god-awful attempted posh that a lot of BA cabin crew seem to do.
ControVersy is definitely in that bucket
Worth noting on word stress though that while English often keeps the stress in the same place across different variations of a word, that isn't the case in lots of languages. Looking at polish for example there can be dozens of possible endings for almost any word depending on case, number, gender or tense etc, but the emphasis is usually still on the second last syllable, so the same word can sound really very different
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DelW
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If anything, that sounds more like Scouse (Liverpudlian) to me, as when the late Cilla Black used to refer to feeling " a lorra, lorra, love". Cockney and its supposed derivative Estuary English, just omit the middle consonant completely (the previously mentioned glottal stop).
Islineclear3_1
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The verb "to eat" is irregular.
The past simple tense is (simply) "ate" pronounced like "late" without the "l"
The past perfect tense is "eaten"
Busaholic
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Thank you, that's very interesting. I'm not sure my old Schedules Superintendent would have been able to quote any of that!
A few years ago I was in a Wholefoods supermarket in Charlestown, (a part of Boston, Ma). I asked a young assistant there where their bottles of water was. After two repeat asks he still didn't understand what I was asking for, so I changed the pronunciation to 'wudder', which upon hearing it he directed me straight to the correct shelves. That part of Boston was hardly skid row so I wonder how children are actually taught to pronounce words in what is recognised a the least phonetically americanised region of the US.
(My bolding) -- With respect -- so you assert: but in fact (as raised in my OP) many people spell it "ate", but pronounce it "et"; and often, regard that as the correct way to pronounce it. I count in this thread so far, three posters who lay claim to saying "et"; two, including myself, who say "ate ('late' without the 'l'); and two who use sometimes one pronunciation and sometimes the other.
Was rather tickled by this having happened in Boston -- as you say, the US's "least phonetically americanised region"; its citizens getting a lot of (mostly affectionate) "stick" from their fellow-Americans for their unusual, rather "like with a plum in their mouths" accent: the Bostonian announcing that he'll "pahk his cah in Hahvahd Yahd". That maybe most characteristic of the city's "upper crust"? -- from your wording, you were in an area which was "neither Mayfair nor Old Kent Road".
I get the impression that a lot of the "Boston accent is odd" business, has to do with the "rhotic / non-rhotic" thing: whereby mostly, Americans are at pains to actually sound out the letter "r" virtually whenever and wherever it appears in a word as spelt -- while as regards "r"s in the word in a supplementary capacity to vowels, Brits usually don't.
hexagon789
Veteran Member
From what I understand the Boston accent used to share a number of features with British English, particularly southern England. It used to have the broad A of bath for instance in words including: after, ask, aunt, bath, can't, glass, half, laugh, path, aunt, and pass though this feature has declined significantly since the Second World War rather as the prestige Mid-Atlantic accent declined.
Strat-tastic
Established Member
On the radio cricket news, pronouncing it Parkistarn is just wrong 
No no no!
No no no!Your mention of "aunt" here -- I discovered recently, to my surprise, that the majority of Americans (if they're not from Boston
), pronounce this word "ant", like the insect. I'd just taken it for granted that everyone pronounced it "ahnt", the same way as myself and, I think, everyone I know. Not so, I find; and moreover, apparently often people in the north of England also say it as "ant" (I'm middle-class southern).Re the word's general American pronunciation here: learning of it has, at least, shed light for me on a little verse by Ogden Nash which I discovered in childhood, and long just thought of as a bit of random silliness on the part of that comic-verse exponent:
"The anteater
Is an uncle-beater.
On the other hand, the skunk'll
Beat his aunt and eat his uncle."
I now get the pun with the third word of the final line, which previously I didn't.
scotrail158713
Established Member
I think it’s a case of the further north you go the more likely it’ll be said “ant” - anyone I know in Scotland pronounces it this way.Your mention of "aunt" here -- I discovered recently, to my surprise, that the majority of Americans (if they're not from Boston
US English changed less (and would have favoured scholarly Latin pronounciations over French, despite early alliances and large parts of the country being French-settled - eg De troit, whose name had a shift away from French pronouniation, ditto references to Louis in place names) - British English underwent an extra shift (though both have more than one), the one that inserted the spelling differences. The UK has a u in color to be more French-esque (as the perennial upper/upper-middle class love affair with everything French bloomed again), and softened various C's from Latin hard c sounds into more French-sounding soft c sounds (eg Boadicea rather than the more correct Boudicca).
hexagon789
Veteran Member
Your mention of "aunt" here -- I discovered recently, to my surprise, that the majority of Americans (if they're not from Boston
Re the word's general American pronunciation here: learning of it has, at least, shed light for me on a little verse by Ogden Nash which I discovered in childhood, and long just thought of as a bit of random silliness on the part of that comic-verse exponent:
"The anteater
Is an uncle-beater.
On the other hand, the skunk'll
Beat his aunt and eat his uncle."
I now get the pun with the third word of the final line, which previously I didn't.
A little something called the trap-bath split affects Southern England speakers but not most of the rest.
Exactly, because the trap-bath split doesn't affect Scottish English ordinarily.
Does anyone on here pronounce horse and hoarse slightly differently? It's a distinction very much on the decline these days where the latter word would have an extra, unstressed, syllable. Other examples include war and wore, morning and mourning, paw and pore/pour (there is also poor, often different again).
hexagon789
Veteran Member
I believe the horse/hoarse merger affects most non-rhotic accents. Certainly in RP the distinction is now quite rare being retained only by the more conservative variants of the accent.
(My bolding) -- I've always gathered that the colour / colour, splendour / splendor etc., British / US thing, is largely owed to the American lexicographer and writer on a wide range of subjects, Noah Webster (1758 - 1843). Webster had no use for the former colonial masters; and in the spelling-books which he produced, and his 1828 Dictionary -- the first such to be an entirely US enterprise -- he modified many spellings from the British convention. He claimed (perhaps with some sense to the claim) that he was making things simpler and "more phonetic"; but to a fair extent, he can be seen to have been scoring points against the Britishness which he despised -- he saw the British aristocracy as having a stranglehold on the English language in their country, corrupting it unnecessarily with classical Greek and Latin (and, yes, French) features. He was also big on spelling alteration for words ending in an "-er" sound -- center not centre, theater not theatre: the "re" spellings, Froggy nonsense with which he'd have no truck. Also, on cutting out needlessly repeated letters -- e.g. traveler instead of traveller. Many of Webster's spelling changes have taken permanent hold in the USA; but, I gather, not all.
As regards the warrior queen: I've always had, merely as a non-linguistics-student gut feeling, a dislike for the name "Boadicea" -- it's struck me as not sounding fierce or formidable; just ridiculous.
On the whole -- no, I've never added the extra, unstressed syllable, or thought of doing so. I do pronounce "mourning" a little differently from "morning" -- with the former, a hint of the "moor" / "poor" vowel sound, as opposed to the straight "more" sound. I suppose doing that might be seen as a sort of slight or "quasi"-, extra syllable.
hexagon789
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You're 4th option is roughly how I say it. The OED gives two options itself.
scotrail158713
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