Uh, thanks for the heads up. I’ve been pronouncing epitome both correctly and incorrectly my entire adult life because for some reason I thought they were two different words.
I've been an avid reader since I was 6/7 and I hate reading dictionary listings with phonetic spellings as ironically they only make it harder for me to know how to pronounce a word. I'm also a native speaker.
It's like a hippopotamoo, but somewhat more existential and obsessed with arcana like boulders and mountains for exercise to discover happiness in life.
Para-dig-em checking in. The bulb that lit up when I connected the sound with the word was pretty bright, but made me feel awfully dim. It changed my whole paradigm.
Reading a new English word as a foreigner is super frustrating because you never know how to pronounce that.
Yes sure unanimous is not 'un-animous', it's 'you-nanimous'. Makes total sense.
Don't even get me started on the dozen different ways to pronounce 'ough'.
With words starting with "un" you can figure out pronunciation by removing the "un" and see if the rest of the word is it's own word which means the opposite. "animous" is not a word so you would use the long "u" sound in "unanimous". Same for uniform or university. But not unironic or unintentional.
Through that logic I'd always figured unanimous stems from "without animosity" and the word animous just got lost to time, which would make un-animous the more sensible pronunciation. But it seems that while they do share a common etymology, it's not "un" as in negation, but rather "un" from "unus" meaning one, with both sharing "animus" meaning mind.
I also found out that animous used to exist as a synonym for animus at one point.
Yes that may be the reason why that difference exists.
The usefulness of that tip is limited when encountering new words for the first time though.
If I don't know unanimous, chances are I don't know if animous exists either.
Edit: Also there is understand, which starts with un- although there is no 'derstand'.
Explanation: That’s both union-ized, for part of a union, or un-ionized, for not ionized
That said, that’s a really good way to describe the difference. If you’re a native speaker, you’ve got really good insight (your native language has a lot of blind spots, where you know what is right, but not why), and if you’re not, then your English is really good!
At least you can make an educated guess. I'm learning Chinese and if you don't know a word there, you're SOL. You can't know what it means or even guess how to pronounce it.
Yeah fuck English. Can we all just use Esperanto instead. Like not even kidding, I love the idea of Esperanto since it avoids situations like the one you described.
Like how the hell are you supposed to know how to pronounce "preface". It's obviously pre-face and it's before everything else so the prefix pre makes so much sense. No one ever uses that word in spoken conversation either.
Nah, more like has stupid rules because of loan words. Just English them or make up your own lmfao. It's almost 7/8 of the reasons for anything that makes you go, why?
This site is the epi-tome of people thinking they're smarter than everyone else, meaning they miss obvious jokes because they'd rather correct the person making the joke.
I pronounced hyperbole as it is spelled "hyper bowl" for decades and nobody corrected me! It wasn't until I finally saw someone say it in a TV show that I realized the error of my ways. Now I stumble over the word every time I try to say it because I have decades of habit to overcome. Sometimes when I think I might need to say it, I start mouthing it ahead of time so that I get it right on the first try. There are at least a dozen other words like this for me, and I'm sure dozens more that I'm not even aware of.
Edit: for those of you who have never heard it pronounced, hyperbole is pronounced "high-per-buh-lee".
Someone else replied and gave a better phonetic spelling of it. I updated mine too. "Hy-per-buh-lee".
What's funny is the first time I heard it, I knew immediately what it was, but I wasn't sure if that was the correct pronunciation, or if the speaker was being all high-born fancy-pants, so I had to ask my wife. English isn't even her first language and she knows everything about it. She's 10x better at speaking and writing English than I am. I do have other talents though! I think...
There are a lot of those prefixes that shift stress and/or pronunciation when going from nouns to adjectives or verbs, like supermarket vs superfluous. It's just especially annoying when they use spelling uncommon to other English words, such as Quixote vs quixotic (the x is silent in the first and voiced in the 2nd).
Generally it kind of retains the features of the pronunciation of the language it was borrowed from. In this case Greek, which generally pronounces every vowel in a word. Similar to Aphrodite (which one would expect to be pronounced Afro-dight).
I know that doesn't help much unless you have already built a guide in your head about how words of a certain language are pronounced and can guess what language that word originates from. You might need to consult a dictionary to find out what language it was borrowed from, at which point you'll also see the pronunciation.
What does not exactly help in some people's case, is that other Euro languages have adjusted Greek etc. words more to their own needs and actually do the "bowl" thing (even omit the e on the end, like in Dutch). I mean, I think that is what keeps me back.
Same here, but I knew the correct pronunciation of the word when spoken, I just didn't know they were the same damn word. When it finally clicked in my head, I about slapped myself.
Dude, that's how I was with dachshund. I heard it spoken and assumed it was spelled something like "doxen", and then in my head I pronounced dachshund as "dash-hund"
Gabriel Wyner talks about this phenomenon in the first chapter or two of Fluent Forever. Can't remember what he called it but rest assured that you are not alone in experiencing this :)
This unlocked the epitomous memory of me and my mom in the car and the radio show host trying to bust out his best vocab with epi-TOme. She bust out laughing. I feel like something similar is coming back 'round to me, just found out it's epitomic. Not even sure how to pronounce
I'm almost 50 and recently learned I've been pronouncing two words wrong.
"Template" as 'tem' + 'plate' (like a dish) instead of 'tem' + 'plet' (like 'let')
"Opacity" saying the middle 'a' like 'hay' instead of like 'math'.
That one I was SURE I was right when my wife told me, so I asked my Google home mini: "Hey Google, how do you pronounce the word 'opacity'?" (Pronouncing it my way), and to prove that Google has a mean sense of humor, (and I swear this is true) responded with "Guacamole". My wife has not let me live that down.
Siri, set guacamole to 50%. Hmmm, that's better. Now zoom in on that reflection. Enhance. Add some oignons. Theeeere we are. Our murderer, ladies and gentlemen
Wait until you find out that primer, as in a small tutorial or short teaching material, is pronounced with a short i sound like is found in "fin," "mix," and "fringe."
that's an american thing, i don't think it's standard in UK english to pronounce "primer" as in an introductory text differently from "primer" as in a substance used to prime explosives or prime materials for painting
That's okay. I know how to pronounce famine yet whenever i want to pronounce it it comes out as fa-Mayn. It really adds to my illusion of intelligence 🙄
It is about 15 years ago now but I had to call my ISP for something. Part of the support guys scrips was to ask me if I had an apple or windows machine. I responded that it was a Linux box. To which he told me he wasn't sure if "their" Internet was compatible with Linux.
I recently moved to a fairly rural area in the midst of them setting up fiber throughout the area. For some reason, the ISP is something like halfway across the country from me. I asked them to setup port forwarding; the first few tech support people I talked to didn't even know what that is. Eventually they relayed the question to an engineer who was familiar with the concept but still had a lot of irrelevant questions, many of which were about the operating system I used. It was ... Frustrating.
I did finally get port forwarding, but it took literally a month and a half, figuratively a million calls, and ten to twenty of their staff over at least three departments. I'm happy now, though.
Edit: sorry about the initially irrelevant and probably boring post. I accidentally pressed post prematurely.
As somebody that doesn't speak English natively... WTF?! I would never imagine this pronunciation. If you are going to corrupt the way it's spoken, why not go and change the writing too?
I am just now learning from this comment that it is not pronounced seg and that what I thought were two different words (segue and segway) actually are not different words.
It is even more funny if the reading isn't in your native language. I can write in English at a C1-C2 level but I am at the B level when speaking as I have no clue how to pronounce most of my regular vocabulary that I use when writing.
They didn't teach pronunciation when you learned to read English? That's one of the very first parts of instruction when teaching it to native speakers. That's also how instruction went when I learned Spanish. Granted, those are both Latin based languages, so I have no idea how it would work for something like Chinese to English.
We learned some general pronunciation rules but that was just for the vocabulary we had to learn for the lessons. The problem is that there are so many exceptions to the rules of pronunciation in English that you have to guess with like every third word if you didn't hear it before somehow. I mean, look at this
Probably depends on how much formal education you had and how much is from reading books and stuff on the Internet.
The Problem with English pronunciation is, that it's completely arbitrary, depending from which language the word is originally. I don't know about Spanish but in French you can usually derive a words pronunciation from it's spelling and vice versa.
They do teach pronunciation in ESL courses, but there is so much nuance to any language that I think most people need some degree of exposure to native speakers to be able to pick up on all of the subtlety that they have had the benefit of hearing from birth. I took years of Spanish myself but my verbal skills never developed nearly as far as my ability to read and write because I didn't take the opportunity to put them into practice.
But also, if I ever pronounced something incorrectly or used improper grammar, I would be swiftly corrected. It's really hard not to do the same with my own kid.
You're not exactly wrong. Spoken english was shaped by mostly the use of common people while writing was exclusively the domain of the clergy and nobility for a very long time.
I remember this one from video games as a kid. How are you with reedit? ;)
A lot of those prefix words used to be hyphenated until people got used to them, even things like to-morrow way back in the day. Some of the stodgier publications (like the New Yorker) still use things like diaeresis (two dots about a letter) to mark words like coördination, whereas it's all but fallen out of use otherwise except possibly occasionally showing up in noël.
Shibboleth is pronounced just like it is spelled, but some languages do not have an "sh" phoneme. In the story, soldiers used the word shibboleth to identify foreigners trying to sneak into their territory. If they pronounced it "sibboleth," then the person was exposed as a foreigner.
Modern Greek is one such language. I introduced my friend Sharon to some Greek relatives, and they called her "Saron" so we all started calling her "Sauron."
Basically one group of ancient middle easterners had the sh sound in their dialect, and another group didn't. That first group used the word shibboleth as a way of testing which group someone was from. Nowadays, the word shibboleth just refers to that kind of test in general. Like someone from Massachusetts figuring out whether you're a local based on how you pronounce scallop, or someone from Kansas asking you to pronounce "Arkansas"
Although I have no idea how local that pronunciation is. It might be Wichita exclusive for all I know
I am so with you. I'm not a native speaker. I learned most of my English from reading books - thousands of books, actually. So written English is absolutely no problem.
My pronounciation sucks, and my listening comprehension is horrible, on the other hand.
I still can't get my head around the fact Hegemony isn't pronounced like Ceremony, "Hedge-eh-moany".
I was horrified to find out it's "heg" like "leg" and "emony" like "lemony". Such an uncomfortable word to say, it still trips me up every time I say it.
It wasn't until I was about 20 when I realised I was saying militia wrong. I knew the correct pronunciation because it was always on the news. I just thought they were two different words.
Looks like Irish also has varying pronunciations with the same spelling, because the shillelagh -lagh sounds like lee, but in the name Shelagh (or Sheelagh) it's lah.
The confusion probably arose because the authors spelled it as «facade» rather than «façade» as if the cedilha were just decoration in the french word.
You can tell someone grew up reading amongst troglodytes this way.
No one only family read, I was forty years of age having a very Oscar from The Office discussion about ISIS and mispronounced “apostasy”. I still lie awake cringing over that sometimes.
Mispronouncing words isn’t really a big deal, just blame it on English being a tricky language (it is). Tbh no one would even remember such a thing, so I don’t recommend being sleepless about it :)
I grew up reading and mispronouncing a lot of words. But my family is pretty smart. Both parents are CPAs, one brother is a lawyer, another works in benefits, two sisters are teachers, and I'm a Financial Analyst.
I think this is more attributed to how the people around you spoke rather than strictly reading.
My college roommate and I both grew up reading. My family also read books and one parent was college educated. Her family only read the local paper (6th grade reading level). She was the only reader in her family.
So we both grew up reading, but I could pronounce words she couldn't simply because the people around me also knew and used them.
It genuinely is hard to master more obscure English pronunciation because so much of it is made up of loan words from very different languages, but this will help as a general principle to follow.
One of my buddies is in his fifties. He's been an avid reader his entire life. He pronounces "chasm" with the ch of "chicken" no matter how much we correct him. I've known him long enough for that word to actually have shown up in conversation a not-insignificant number of times.
Well, if we don’t know what someone means then what’s the point of language? You’d just be talking past one another…tho yeah, some “mistakes” are easy enough to reconcile in your head and you get what the other person is trying to convey
There is no better way to come off as a pretentious asshat in my mind than to stubbornly stomp a foot and declare "my way of pronouncing this word is correct and everyone else is wrong."
Chaos was mine, I still grit my teeth when I remember first saying to others how I thought it was pronounced and that was almost 3 and a half decades ago...
Instance of this I remember, was genre. I had seen the word, knew what it meant, 0 clue how to say it. At work one day in my teen days and someone asks "What kind of genres do you like" (in context, we were talking about video games). I clearly had a confused look on my face and the guy that asked me that switched to insulting me for not knowing a word. It took me maybe 30 seconds to figure out the word he said and the word I knew were the same thing, but apparently that was "too long".
The story is people from one area pronounced it one way, and it was used to identify them, or something. As in, the word shibboleth, Hebrew for... I've literally no idea, but that's the reason this word means something like "tacitly recognised in-group identifier" nowadays.
I want to embellish the story with murder and stuff but I'd be winging it, I can't remember the details properly.
Edit: it means grain, apparently, or more specifically the "ear" of the plant in the context of grains. But that's not important now.
Oh... Then the pronunciation guide from my search engine is saying it the wrong way. I guess so many people have pronounced it incorrectly that now it's kinda acceptable. It's "foyer" all over again. Say it the right way and people just think you're pretentious.