Mine was Pil-ates.
Hey, it’s not our fault English just borrows and never adapts the spelling. Or updates spelling as pronunciations change.
English spelling is atrocious.
I was 12 and believed chaos was ‘cha-os’ because I’d only ever seen it written.
I still have the irrepressible urge to pronounce the s at the end of “chaos” because I more or less learnt the word through warhammer 40k. Except in French the s is silent. But now I’ve moved to the south where the locals have a habit of pronouncing many silent s !
My poor brain is so confused…That’s probably closer to the original latin than the current English butchery.
It’s “kaos” in (“classic”) latin bcs it’s copypasta from Greek.
Wait, what is the current English butchery? Non-native speaker here.
Oh, just in general. English is the cronenburg monster of languages and pronunciation. We will steal your words, pronounce them weirdly, use them wrongly, and claim they’ve always been ours.
Behold, the original Kronenbourg monster.
Had a classmate that thought the same. 20 years later, still amused by how funny we thought that was.
Similar to me, I used to believe chaos was pronounced ‘caus’
At university a college pronounced ‘machine’ a bit like ‘ma-shayna’ (almost a bit Slavic? but totally on accident whatever it was). I loved it so much it stuck with me all these years, basically became headcanon.
I’m going to pronounce colleague as college now thank you.
Fuck, lol, well now I have to as well, since I was so committed.
Then again, I always pronounce whale-cum, cock-a-ccino, etc, what’s one more
collagecollege.
Phonetic transcription exists for a reason. The comments here are full of “this is pronounced as this”. Which isn’t very helpful.
Well of course it’s not very helpful, “this” is quite frankly wrong. Use “this” instead of “this”.
My father had a terrific sense of humour and would deliberately mispronounce certain words to wind up his fancy-pants daughters. “Patio” became “pay-tio”, that kind of thing. But one word in particular has entered the family lexicon: “gnome”, pronounced “ganOmee”. Not meaning a garden ornament, but a young man of dubious moral/intellectual qualities. Our boyfriends were almost always declared gnomes.
I do this all the time. My son used to roll his eyes, but now he joins in, asking his grandmother for a “fork and ka-nife” or saying “I can do that, it’s my pierogi-tive”
Funniest thing for me as a bilingual French is people
butcheringpronouncing French words like hors d’oeuvre or whatever. I mean it’s funny but okay, that’s both no big deal and you can always educate someone and give them the real French pronunciation if they absolutely wanna sound posh.But then I’m always so torn when somebody has a clearly French name but again, their pronunciation is atrocious. Like, I try to just ignore it, but sometimes I can just imagine myself jumping at them and screaming how they are pronouncing it wrooooooong, hahaha!
swim away fugu fish, swim away!
Omg it’s from 2008. Half my lifetime ago.
Look over there Charlie! It’s a magical leoplurodon!
holy shit, there’s a part 5 and it’s 40 minutes long and
omg
how did I not know about this??
Fyoog is just so wrong
*Sad Fyoog noises*
I don’t overreact to things I can tell are regional dialects and whatnot. But I recently watched a movie review where the guy pronounced linear as “li-nEAR” and I was the personification of the double take white guy meme. Never heard that one before. And he kept using it throughout, so, somehow, this 30ish year old man has never been corrected. I think everyone that knows him might be playing a cruel joke.
Just looking at the word I would definetly read ir as fugu.
Looking at the Wikipedia article, it says it’s pronounced fjug. Like what happened to the u and e.
Same as what happened to “league”. Forget it, Jack - it’s Englishtown.
I’ma start saying leegu now, especially if it’s of legends.
It’s usually an etymological thing.
I know fugue in french is said similarly and I wouldn’t be surprised if fugue is a french loanword.
entomological
Entomology is the scientific study of insects, a branch of zoology. source: Wikipedia
There corrected, good catch. Early morning posts are the worst.
Pretty mainstream. When I was a kid most people struggled to learn how to laugh these things off. These days if you speak on any platform it’s a good idea to have some mispronunciations because it catches peoples attention. Even if it’s the only thing they’ll talk about as long as you’re good natured about it you’ve made progress.
Perhaps an accidental positive of engagement bait
I keep accidentally saying innuendo and having to apologize because they happen in inappropriate situations.
I just can’t help when it pops up.
I mean, there’s Bababooey.
One dnd session, the dm described the room as having flaming braziers. He pronounced them as “brassieres.”
We never let him forget.
Oh my DM really leaned into that one. Had us searching for a golden brassiere as part of a ritual we needed to perform. We ended up picking up a rumour that the captain of the guard wears one, so on to the seduction attempt to go find out what she’s into and where she hangs out. Play through the whole bit, get the brassiere and then ask what we do next. Well, now we need to burn incense in the brassiere. Now everyone just looks at eachother completely confused. Then the guy sitting next to the DM suddenly perks up and asks to see the module we’re running for a sec. Tells the table it says brazier. Confusion dispelled and everyone laughing for days.
a friend of mine wants to know how to actually pronounce braziers. what a dumb friend, right?
bray-zers
I’ve only ever heard it pronounced bruhzears so now I’m confused.
is this a bit? that is the underwear you’re referring to, not fire container that I am.
No it’s not a bit I’m just retarded. That makes a lot more sense though
The magic of the modern day means you can type “define” or “pronounce” then any word into Google and it’ll tell you how to say it. There’s also an absurd amount of YouTube pronunciation videos for basically every word that exists.
Not that there’s a problem asking, this is more advice for future words your friend doesn’t know. So you can help them. The dummy.
Had a DM that did the same thing. A different dm pronounced chitin as chai-tin
The DM for Critical Role did that in one of the early episodes. I think that if you’re making a podcast, you should check your words for pronunciation.
How are you going to bring up early CR Matthew Mercer without his most infamous pronunciation gaffe?
Sigil* as “siggle”. If I were at that table, I’d still be ribbing him about it (good-naturedly, of course).
^*SIJ-uhl
I imagine Dan Carlin gets a lot of crap over “Makedon” instead of “Macedon” just because he’s being extra
He’s doing that because he believes that it the way the people from there called it during the period he’s talking about
I note he doesn’t do the same for other places
I learned chitin from playing Morrowind. Pronounced it like “chit in” (like in “chip”). But also my local dialect/accent tends to drop pronouncing t’s so it came out more like “chi’in”. To this day it’s an active effort to pronounce it correctly if I ever have to say it out loud
Okay, so I’ve just realised I’ve been pronouncing this wrong.
So I’ve been pronouncing it “chit in”, probably as above - perhaps halfway between “chicken” and “shit in”.
Apparently it’s pronounced “kite in”.
Not that it’s a word that crops up too much, but I’ve almost certainly made other people say it wrong too :(
I still mispronounce those words from time to time, and I bloody well know how they’re supposed to be said.
I did that once, but I’m pretty sure my group has long since forgotten
On the one hand … “Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading.”
On the other hand… what else are friends there for?
We were playing some game (don’t even remember what) back in 2005 and I read a card that said Lebron James as “Lee-bron James”.
My wife will not let this go. It’s been almost a full 2 decades, but anytime Lebron is mentioned in any context whatsoever, my wife will give me that look like “haha Lee-bron. You moron.”
Stories like this make for lasting relationships.
My wife accidentally bumped someone at a traffic light while sitting immediately in front of a cop like 10 years ago. No damage, no ticket, no problems but she’s SO bad with that sort of thing.
So naturally it occasionally comes up when she’s driving.
I’m ruined on “Lee-“ anything. , because I think of Leeroy Jenkins. Now I’m just imagining Lebron just charging into every play with no strategy, shouting “Leeee-bron James!”