Also, Testicles

    • Deconceptualist@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      No. Testicles, though lacking the raw strength of Muscles or the courage of elder Uncles, would not be separated from steadfast Principles. Though many tried to insult him with nicknames like “Tubercles” or “Microparticles”, those could never stick like they did to poor Treacles or restrain his vigor like heavy Manacles.

      Tired of senseless Debacles, he studied scholarly Articles and read ancient Chronicles and prayed nightly for the most magnificent Miracles. Finally one day while meditating, a vision of complex Epicycles formed in the most profound Tabernacles of his mind. He awoke to realize it mattered not what hateful words prodded him like chilly Icicles; he was already atop the Pinnacles of manliness, and he wasn’t alone. From that day forth he hung proudly with his wiry protector, the hideous and patchy Follicles no one dared approach.

    • hydroptic@sopuli.xyzOP
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      2 months ago

      One of my favorite mispronounciations comes from the joke how there’s 5 words in the English language with “meow” in them:

      meow
      meows
      meowing
      meowed
      homeowner

      I’m a happy ho-meow-ner

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I checked the list of 370k english words I downloaded from github a while ago and yeah, its true other than the variants of homeowner (homeowners, homeownership)

        I was looking at some other random words, heres some I found:

        • self: weaselfish, damselfish
        • eye: greyer, honeyed, journeyed, etc
        • bear: beard

        this got me interested so I wrote a program to find each time a small word bridges the gap between two larger words in a compound word, honestly the funnier part of its outputs is the weird ‘compound words’ its finding, like “asp: aspirating: as, pirating” or “at: deepseated: deepsea, ted” (ted, apparently, meaning ‘to scatter hay for drying’). Occasionally it finds good ones, like “ices: apprenticeship: apprentice, ship” or “hen: archenemy: arch, enemy”, and it did find the meow one. It does allow the small word to contain the first word in a compound word, because that can still give some interesting ones like “warp: warplanes: war, planes”. It probably would have been a lot better if I had actually used a list of compound words, it tries to find its own very slowly which does allow it to find any possible combination for any word

        anyways, here’s the list

  • blaue_Fledermaus@mstdn.io
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    2 months ago

    As someone whose contact with English is mostly by reading, this made me sure I’m likely pronouncing a bunch of words wrong in my mind.

    • Sidhean@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      As someone who didn’t their formative years reading a lot more than taking, I also certainly pronounce a bunch of words wrong. It’s always the pretentious ones, too, like pretentious, because people so rarely use them in speech.

      Anyway, if enough of us pronounce them wrong together, it’ll be the right people who are wrong!

  • Orbituary@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    My brother and I have been doing this for decades. The Greek god of up and down is Verticles.

  • Bezier@suppo.fi
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    2 months ago

    So, as a non-native English speaker, I’d like to ask:

    If these letters weren’t supposed to be pronounced, why the hell did you even put them there in the first place?

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 months ago

      Because english and a lot of other languages have just stopped changing their spelling to reflect speech, this is useful because it means you can read older texts and you have a fairly standard system of spellings so people don’t get confused, but it means you’re left with spellings that you just have to treat more like how chinese works, where it represents a concept but has absolutely nothing to say about how it’s pronounced.

      A lot of words in english look fucked because they’re straight up from like 300 years ago.
      Take “knight” for example: it used to be pronounced like it’s spelled, /k-nei-ch-t/, and you can see how cousins like german and swedish have kept this pronunciation in Knecht and Knekt (although now meaning completely different things).

      You can also see why we tend to have this standard unchanging writing if you compare to people who write in dialect, where it can become as incomprehensible as the spoken dialect.
      Example from Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men:
      Crivens! It’s a’ verra well sayin’ ‘find the hag,’ but what should we be lookin’ for, can ye tell me that? All these bigjobs look just the same tae me!

      • Bezier@suppo.fi
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        2 months ago

        I was half joking, but honestly thank you for the explanation. I hadn’t thought of that.

    • Dicska@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The e at the end of the word makes the previous syllable longer. See saxophone/mastodon, Brightstone/Brighton, trampoline/mandolin, etc.

      I BET there are a buttload of exceptions, but removing the e from the end of those words might mess with the pronunciation.

      • Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 months ago

        Gone, have, live, love, come, etc are all super common exceptions to the “rule.”

        English is a complete mess. The inconsistencies create a massive and unfair burden for people to learn it as a 2nd language and then the language is so difficult to master that it forces people to keep relearning it throughout their entire life which doesn’t leave much room for learning other languages.

    • Johanno@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      English is a mixture of many languages. Often English just took a word from another language and kept the spelling the same.

      Examples:

      Kindergarten. A German word which is pronounced like the German word. If you would pronounce it like it should then you would say kinder like in kind.

      Bureaucracy. French word. Nobody knows how to write or pronounce it. French people are weird.

    • Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 months ago

      You can thank french colonialism for that. Old English (Ænglisc) was a more phonetical language, but then the french took over (colonized) Ængland they forced Ænglisc to adopt countless french words, french spellings and even some french grammar with little to no regard for the phonetical consistency with the rest of the language.

  • _____@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    It frustrates me as someone who learned English as their 3rd language that these borrowed words and names are pronounced both wrong in English and wrong in their original language. Whose idea was that ?

    • swab148@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Language is determined by usage, so it was basically everyone’s idea all at once.

    • Deconceptualist@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      I used to think it was just a social in-group/out-group thing, so English speakers could more easily spot foreigners for not knowing the odd pronunciations. But the more I learn about language the more I think of the adage “don’t ascribe malice to what could be adequately explained by incompetence”.

      With how many speakers use English, I now think it just gets jumbled and mangled over time and there’s no real central authority to correct for that. Ultimately that makes our words sound weirder and more colorful so it’s not the worst thing, especially once you understand that even native speakers don’t know how to pronounce most large words until heard.

  • flames5123@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I listen to a podcast called “No Dumb Questions” and they have a bit every once in a while called “Barnacles and Testicles” (pronounced like Greek names) where they voice these time traveling Grecians and just be funny and stupid.