Words you choose to mispronounce

[Qaanol]

Am I the only one who does this? There are a few words that I make the conscious choice to pronounce in a way that is different from the accepted standard. These include:

Iron (normally “I-ərn”, I choose to say “I-rən”)
England/English (normally “ing-”, I choose to say “eng-”)

[manictheatrefan]

(I apologize for not knowing enough IPA to be able to use the symbols here properly.)

I pronounce European (yoo-rope-EE-an) yoo-ROPE-ean.

I say "tap-er" instead of "tay-per".

[Anonymously Famous]

Most people in the areas that I've lived pronounce "February" feb-YU-ary. I choose feb-RU-ary.

[Oflick]

I prefer to pronounce Mayor the American way (May-er or May-or). In Australia it's pronounced Mare (Or maybe a 2 syllable version of that), but I have to force myself to pronounce it that way, so I prefer not to bother. In some contexts though it's better to pronounce it the Australian way.

[Aiea]

Ba-gel vs Bag-el

[AvatarIII]

sometimes i pronounce things in the American way as a joke
Dip-lod-ocus rather than Dip-lo-doc-us
Ca-rrib-ean rather than Carri-be-an
Alu-min-um rather than Al-u-mini-um

also maybe Californ-iy-ay rather than California.

but never ever Thorough as "thurow" always "thurah"

[GhostWolfe]

Omahge, like in Hot Fuzz, for homage.
Mohcha, instead of the short "O" sound we use here. Another one I picked up from a movie, actually, Zoolander.

/angell

[SlyReaper]

The French word "fromage", I pronounce as "frommidge". Because it sounds funnier.

[Derek]

I pronounced the l in words like "palm" and "calm". I think that may be more of a regional thing than mispronunciation. I also pronounce "women" like it's spelled.

[Oflick]

I pronounced the l in words like "palm" and "calm". I think that may be more of a regional thing than mispronunciation. I also pronounce "women" like it's spelled.

"Wo-men" or "Wom-en"? Or, even "Wome-n"?

[Anonymously Famous]

I'm guessing WOH-men as opposed to WEH-men or something similar.

[Oflick]

If someone ever said "WOH-men" all I'd be able to think of would be Life of Brian and "Welease Woger!"

[Derek]

/ˈwʊmɨn/. In theory, anyways. In practice, I cannot promise to always sufficiently distinguish scwha and schwi. But I try.

[Iulus Cofield]

Isn't that the standard (at least for AE) pronunciation?

[Lazar]

Isn't that the standard (at least for AE) pronunciation?

No, not for the plural. In standard AmEng and BrEng, "women" is pronounced [ˈwɪmɪn]. However, there are some dialects on both sides of the Atlantic that pronounce "women" and "woman" homophonous.

[Iulus Cofield]

Oops, I was thinking singular. Don't ask why, I couldn't begin to know.

[tesseraktik]

The Swedish word for "undeniably" is "onekligen", with stress on the o. However, when I feel strongly enough about something, I like to place the stress on the ne.
Initially I did this unconsciously, but after it was pointed out to me by friends, I've started doing it on purpose, and have even been known to spell the word "onékligen".

I also like pronouncing the word "projektor" (Swedish for "projector") as though the j were an h, just 'cuz I can.

[Cathode Ray Sunshine]

I didn't choose to mispronounce it, as I didn't know I was doing it, but apparently the word risen is not pronounced as rice-n but rather, rees-n.

[yurell]

Then I'm deliberately mispronouncing it, because I pronounce it rɪzən

[Iulus Cofield]

I say "meme" /mɪm/ (rhymes with "him"). I started it as a spelling pronunciation, didn't learn the more widely accepted one until years later, and never picked it up because I don't like how it sounds.

There a lot of words I'll mispronounce for fun. I have a strong tendency to say idioms like Tommy Wiseau and then chuckle creepily.

[Derek]

Then I'm deliberately mispronouncing it, because I pronounce it rɪzən

That's definitely the normal pronunciation.

I say "meme" /mɪm/ (rhymes with "him"). I started it as a spelling pronunciation, didn't learn the more widely accepted one until years later, and never picked it up because I don't like how it sounds.

How is that a spelling pronunciation? The spelling suggests a normal silent-e rule. Though I guess if you look at it as short for "memory" then it would make sense.

[Iulus Cofield]

That was the connection I made all those years ago. There may have also been an anology with creme.

[Euler]

Encyclopaedia
en-SIGH-clow-PAY-dee-uh

Bagel
BAY-gull

Iron
I-run

[Derek]

Bagel
BAY-gull

I'm pretty sure that's standard.

[dragon]

sɪnɛkdoʊʃ (sin-eck-doash) for synecdoche.
It started with reading the word before I'd heard it spoken. I'm entertained by butchering the word while using the linguistic term correctly, so I haven't made any effort to fix it. These days, it takes a few moments of thought before I remember that I am mispronouncing it.

[Oflick]

Bagel
BAY-gull

I'm pretty sure that's standard.

I would have thought standard Bagel pronunciation was "Bay-gel".

[yurell]

I thought it was beɪɡəl, as I would pronounce bay-g'l (i.e. pretty much straight from the 'g' sound to the 'l' sound).

[ZLVT]

I've been known to say ['wed.nez.dæj] and I don;t knwo whether it's considered "wrong" in the descriptivist community but I still say [ɒf.n̩] for often.

[Euler]

Bagel
BAY-gull

I'm pretty sure that's standard.

I would have thought standard Bagel pronunciation was "Bay-gel".

Bay-gel (Hard g, like god, not hair gel) is the standard pronunciation in my region.
As I wrote this, I realized that I may also mispronounce pronunciation.
Is it pronounced "pro-NUN-see-AY-shun" or "pro-NOUN-see-AY-shun"?

[Lazar]

I have trouble understanding what y'all are trying to convey regarding "bagel" because you're not using IPA. The standard pronunciation is [ˈbeɪɡəɫ] or [ˈbeɪɡɫ], the presence or absence of a schwa in the transcription being trivial.

Is it pronounced "pro-NUN-see-AY-shun" or "pro-NOUN-see-AY-shun"?

The former.

[ZLVT]

Also, for some reason, even though my non-rhotic dialect merged law and lore, I pronounce lore as americans do [lɔ:ɹ]. Might be a merger which isn't always distinguished by context I guess.

[Oflick]

Bagel
BAY-gull

I'm pretty sure that's standard.

I would have thought standard Bagel pronunciation was "Bay-gel".

Bay-gel (Hard g, like god, not hair gel) is the standard pronunciation in my region.
As I wrote this, I realized that I may also mispronounce pronunciation.
Is it pronounced "pro-NUN-see-AY-shun" or "pro-NOUN-see-AY-shun"?

Yeah, I meant with a hard g. ALso, I'd say "pro-NUN-see-AY-shun".

I have trouble understanding what y'all are trying to convey regarding "bagel" because you're not using IPA. The standard pronunciation is [ˈbeɪɡəɫ] or [ˈbeɪɡɫ], the presence or absence of a schwa in the transcription being trivial.

I have trouble understanding what your trying to convey because you're using IPA.

[Iulus Cofield]

Learn IPA! You won't regret it.

[Kizyr]

Here's a couple that I can't get out of the habit of:

- Antibiotics, as Anteebeeotics (long e instead of long i)
- Tuesday/Thursday, as Tuesdee/Thursdee (long e instead of ae)
- Wednesday, as Wensdee (long e instead of ae, and 'wednes' as 'wens')

Funny thing is I don't do the 'day' to 'dee' thing with Monday, Friday, or the weekend, or the 'bi' to 'bee' thing with words like biology. KF

[Euler]

Learn IPA! You won't regret it.

[Lazar]

Regarding IPA, it's really not that we're trying to be obscure or elitist, it's simply that layman's respellings cannot convey the full range of English sounds, and thus make it impossible for speakers of different dialects to accurately convey information to one another.

[Iulus Cofield]

It's also the only real way to communicate sounds across languages with any accuracy via text alone, since no improvised English spelling is going to indicate the difference between a dental and alveolar stop (or, heaven's forbid, a retroflex one) or an aspirated and an unaspirated stop.

[yurell]

If you're ever pressed for time / annoyed at people in the video pronouncing things objectively wrong (blasted rhotic accents!), I've found this Wikipedia article to be particularly useful to quickly look up IPA.

[ZLVT]

It's also wrong. Wikipedia's IPA standard for english uses conventions which are weird. [r] doesn't exist in the vast majority of English dialects, same with final (and in some cases intitial) [l]. The use of [u:] for the oo sound was even worse as that's closer to [ʉʊ]. [eɪ] is another pet peeve. To me at least, it's obvious that the bay sound starts off more open than the bet sound, so why transcribe it with a vowel that's more closed, and [oʊ] go similarly begins on a more open central vowel than [o] (which even wiki recognises, like [e], is not an English sound)

If the motivation for using innacurate symbols is ease of typing, they should use [o] for aural, and [əʊ] for go, since o is easy to type and ə is pretty important in English transcription. I find the IPA standard for wikipedia more confusing than helpful. Speaking or studying languages where these sounds do exist makes it hard to use, I often see a transcription on a wiki page and assume it refers to the pronunciation in the original language before I realised that it's IPA for English and then I have to re-think my IPA to get the pronunciation out of it.

[Iulus Cofield]

Whoa! Unexpected venom!

IPA, when using broad transcription across dialects is primarily used for phonemic representation. That's why you see things like /aj/ for [ai] and [aɪ], /oʊ/ for [əʊ] and [ɛʊ], /æ/ for [ɛə], /r/ for [ɚ], [rʷ], and [r], and about a hundred different things. English has too many dialects for the IPA to represent all of them simultaneously and when you look at IPA for English, as a whole, you see some pretty phonetically inaccurate transcriptions. It's basically doing what those weird FLEECE GOOSE (etc) tables do, but with IPA characters.

Edit: Also, it occurred to me that your complaint about /r/ might have to do with IPA for the <r> phoneme being /ɹ/ and American linguists, in particular, tending to use /r/ for convenience and maybe a little spite towards the Romance linguists.