Yeah "Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz " is a breeze. You'll know that means “law delegating beef label monitoring." The law it describes was repealed. When the English language wants to make a long word from two or more we just throw in a few hyphens.
Colonel is a word I learned how to pronounce as an adult! When I heard it in movies I thought it was spelled kernel and when I read it in books I didn’t know it was the same word!
Kernel of corn and Colonel is rank in Army, Airforce and Marines. Kentucky Colonel is appointed by governor of Kentucky and approved by Kentucky legislators.
I always thought it was pronounced Col an el. I was also familiar with kernal (via Plants vs Zombies Kernal Pult) and thought they weren’t pronounced the same.
Just say "co lo nel" really fast with a French accent and you end up with 'kernel". Actually, the French used to say 'coronel", and that's likely how we got our pronunciation. But the spelling got corrected back to Colonel based on the Italian Colonella. The Colonel is the guy who is in charge of the Column (pillar, top) of soldiers.
I used to pronounce the word library as “lie berry” The main reason is because I never heard the r after the letter b when listening to others talking. Whenever I read “library” in a book or article, I never paid close enough attention to detail to notice the first r. I thought the word was spelled “libary”. It wasn’t until I watched a RU-vid video at least 7 years ago when I found out that I was mispronouncing and misspelling “library” and all along
9:56 Because the "e" at the end of "cliché" has an accent mark from French (which is often omitted). In French, final ⟨e⟩ is silent, but Final ⟨é⟩ isn't; it makes the sound /e/, which is approximated as /eɪ̯/ in English. 10:44 "Debt" was originally spelled without a B; the B was later added to reflect the word's Latin etymology.
That's literally what I was about to comment 😂 French makes sense, most of the times, because it has pronunciation rules, whereas English basically has none.
@@scorpiosumo4202 I was surprised too. The acute accent tells you how to pronounce it. Okay, I'm a bit hypocritical here, because I know the sound from my own name; it has the same accent. But I thought an English teacher should know this.
I know how to speak Yosemite because of the Loony Tunes Character "Yosemite Sam" that dual weilding revolver cowboy. He always screams his name when chasing bug bunny.
I'm a retired architect, and it drove me crazy how many people mispronounced "masonry." They would stick an "a" in it and say, "mason-airy." it's "mason-ree."
Bam! She got me there too! I guess I’ve never looked at the spelling! And that goes for triathlete... but I’ll keep pronouncing it the “wrong” way... I might change it, though, if, let’s say, Wednesday is pronounced properly by society in general.
Me too except that I knew it was wrong even as I kept saying it wrong. I've realized that the problem is that it's much easier to say it with the schwa than without. Switching directly from a soft "th" to an "l" sometimes isn't that easy, which, is suspect, is why so many people say "ath-uh-lete."
Only a relatively short matter of time until the language evolves to erase the unnatural sound combinations in the current “correct” pronunciations of words like realtor and triathlon. The transition from “l” to “t”, or that from “th” to “l”, leaves the mouth wanting an intervening vowel to smooth the sound transition in one’s mouth and maintain the natural rhythm of speech. It’s all good since the goal is communication. There isn’t a single native English speaker who would misunderstand “REAL-uh-tor” or “tri-ATH-uh-lon”. The language is constantly in flux.
No, it doesn't, but almost. GUIllermo? aGIlidad? The tildes, why aren't they always written? H is silent but written. Even d has two sounds in words like "felicidad" in one country at least, and because of that most of time the second one is dropped.
During my high school English class, teacher was having us take turns reading aloud from Greek plays. My friend encountered the name Sophocles, and confidently pronounced it as sop-hockles.
I'm always amazed by language learning experts who teach the incorrect word along with the correct word. It's common knowledge in educational field that separating two concepts (like the Spanish verbs ser and estar) while teaching allows them to be more memorable. Otherwise they become cognitively fused and the errors persist.
@@BubblewrapMe Yes, clichéd is definitely an adjective. But cliché can be a noun and an adjective as well according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. So, the presenter did not mispronounce it; she wasn't making a grammar mistake when she used cliché as an adjective.
I'm 74, lifelong resident of Indiana. I used to be the fastest reader in my high school. It's only in the last twenty years that I learned the pronunciation of chaos and voila ! ! I guess my pet peeve words are the misuse of hone and home, with in. Also, volatile originally meant something would evaporate, but now is used to mean something that will burn or explode. So water is volatile, and wood isn't !
@D- Goms Hi, I just checked the Real Academia Española. In Spanish, volatile is written with a "tilde" in the "a" (to indicate stress) and without the final "e". It's "volátil". The physics definition is "Fís. Dicho de un líquido: Que se transforma espontáneamente en vapor.", a liquid that spontaneously transforms into vapor, like alcohol or gasoline (water does too, but it has a low volatility). But you are right, a lot of people use it to refer to flammable/inciendary stuff or people with short temper.
As a Brazilian person, I used to mispronounce "clothes" (it's actually like "close") because of the TH. Brazilians in general have a tough time with words that end with LE such as "castle", "people", "uncle" and words that have NH such as "enhance"
Those of us who grew up with Saturday morning cartoons have known how to pronounce it since we were small. " Yosemite Sam is a cartoon character in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of short films produced by Warner Bros. His name is taken from Yosemite National Park."
My husband grew up reading it Yosemite with the long i sound at the end so he would call him Yose-might Sam and we call him that to this day because it's endearing.
That's assuming the channel you watched even had Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes. I pronounced it Yo' Semite until I saw the Warner Bros. cartoons later on watching cartoons afternoon reruns after school. From then on it was Yo' Semmity
More to the point, "Yosemite" is a derivation of the Ahwahneechee word "uzumate", which was their word for the grizzly bear. Hence, strictly speaking it's not part of English at all, any more than "San Bernardino" is.
@Nehemiah Scudder Both can be true And also true that the Normans were descended from Vikings. But that didn't stop Henry from claiming the French throne as a legal heir. Being both fully English and fully French, I'll let Schrodinger decide. BTW I Like Bowdlerism. It sounds much better than political correctness.
Getting used to tildes/accents would be a good idea in order to understand certain stress rules. Also, I've realized English speaking people tend to approach languages in a way that's more practical than technical and theoretical. I, as a Spanish person, have been taught languages from the syntactical dimension on, and I'd say that's a good starting point. I think it helps a lot. Great video!
I grew up reading (I racked up 400 books in 3 months once during a library contest) and was homeschooled before the internet. I also hated speaking in social situations and would write down what I'd say if I needed to use the phone as a teenager. I then went on to graduate from a college of less than 400 people. I'm now 40 years old and still have trouble with English. I laugh off pronunciations as it's amazing to me that I am able to speak aloud at all. 🥰😂
@@xsageonexx7399 I did. I was a teenager before the internet. I was/am obsessed with reading and it was a summer contest hosted by my local library. These weren't novels but young teen lit (less than 200 pages I'd say). I was allowed to take home 21 books from the library and my mom would bring my siblings and I almost daily.
The complete opposite happened to me with the word Yosemite. I grew up in Mexico, across the San Diego border, hearing the name of that National Park but never looking at how it was written for years... One day I saw the written word 'Yosemite' and had no idea that word was actually the written name of that National Park... very weird.
"Some of them are terrified, mortified of saying a word incorrectly". Dang Rachel, didn't need to hurt me like this lol. More seriously, you're an excellent teacher and it's thanks to you that I'm losing that fear. Thank you!
When it comes to foyer, sorry to say, both foy-er and foy-yay are correct in American English. I've heard Australians also pronounce it foy-er. In fact, foy-yay isn't "correct" either, if that is your argument. Because the French pronounce it fwa-yay.
Refrigerator (ɹɛfrɪdʒəɹeɪda)? That’s been my pet peeve. As a native Spanish speaker, there’s something about the “frɪdʒ” sound that I can’t get quite right. I’ve had whole dinner conversations with friends who lovingly explained and demonstrated the sound which have led to funny moments, especially after a couple of drinks. And it’s because in Spanish, we don’t have many of the English sounds such as “dʒ“ or the buzzing “z” in zoo or zebra. Or the “st” and “sp” in words like stop or spot; none of our words start with “st” or “sp” or “sk”, that’s why we tend to put an e in front as in “especially”.
One word I used to say is “ask”. I used to say “aks” which is typical for AAE speakers and both of my parents are black. It wasn’t until grad school that I fixed that.
As a Shakespeare coach, one of my pet peeves is "nupshooal" instead of "nupshul". The word "nuptial" is fairly common in Shakespeare, and I'm constantly correcting my acting students. Another is "nitch" instead of "neesh" for "niche" - a French word which is correctly pronounced in English as if it were still French.
I looked up the word "niche" a while back, and the "nitch" pronunciation is actually just as corrrct as pronouncing it as "neesh" - in fact, a bit more correct for American English. The reasoning is that "niche" has been in the English vocabulary pronounced as "nitch" since the 17th century. It was borrowed from France, but France had borrowed it from Latin. (- according to this source and I found several others that were similar - www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2009/04/a-nitch-to-scratch.html) From what I understand, it is common for a language to borrow from another language, and when they do, they may change some things about the word or the way it is pronounced. The official version for that language becomes the revised version. Anyway, that's just the interesting story for why it is correct to pronounce "niche" as "nitch," although "neesh" is also correct.
Hi Rachel, I've (I'm Russian, if it matters) remembered an awkward situation when I repeated the word "arrogant" several times to my American interlocutors, but they didn't understand me. After five or six attempts one of them finally got it. Árrogant, he asked me? - Yes! ....for me it was a very embarrassing situation, because I was sure that I more or less know English. But I pronounced that word as arrógant, don't know why :)
Both "shur'bert" and "shur'bêt" are wrong. It should be pronounced as "shur'bay" as in sorbet "sore-bay". Both are from the French, therefore both have French pronunciations.
The difference between "cliché" and "cache" is that, in French, the e in "cache" is mute (e is always mute at the end of a word), whereas accented "é" is always pronounced; the closest phoneme in English is /ei/.
I am glad I reviewed the comments. This is obvious to anyone who has studied French. The fact that, in your slide, cliché is spelled both with and without the accent makes it more confusing than it, in fact, is.
That's incorrect to state "" letter "e" is always mute at the end of word in French"". French has ALWAYS exceptions !!! Haha 😂🤣 Example:. The word "Le" letter "e" must be pronounced.
@@capitainebonhomme1609 You are right, of course, and the same can be said of "de", "ce", "me", "ne"... But as a general rule (with exceptions ;)), in most lexical words, it is true. Sometimes, we must push exceptions aside to make things clearer ;)
@@capitainebonhomme1609 Let's refine that rule then: The (unaccented) letter "e" at the end of a word is always unstressed in French. In most words it's so unstressed that it vanishes completely. Does this variant of the rule still have some exceptions?
My pet peeve is when native speakers of English (I'm not one but I'm in love with the language) write "should of" instead of should have. Also, lately, I've heard even educated Americans (FBI agents and a prosecutor) saying "had went". What's with that?
Wow! 'Had went' is definitely incorrect grammar - interesting! And there are lots of examples where spoken English makes its way into written English and leads to silly mistakes, like "should of" vs. "should have". Great point! Thanks for your comment!
As an American radio announcer for 52 years, I always had difficulty pronouncing the treatment of melanoma lesions in the skin and lymph nodes known as Talimogene Laherparepvec, plus a few other medications. Easy to stumble over when reading live copy.
Facade was a term I read but the "c" with a tail has a rule to pronounce it soft like an "s", vs. hard like a "k". But I wasn't aware of the tail until I had developed habit of using the hard c. It may have been the limited fonts on the media I read. My friend/boss corrected me in a casual setting away from work. I grew up in a rural community 25 miles outside of the Twin Cities in Minnesota. My boss was from NY City so it was more likely a common term there.
The ç has a cedilla, which, in French where the word “façade” comes from, is pronounced as a soft c like an s. It’s similar to “cliché” in that the é is pronounced “ay” in French, so it sounds different to the ending of “cache” (I was slightly annoyed the video maker had no idea why they were different).
@@ew6483 Thanks for the comment. About 35 yrs. ago when i was informed of this i was aware of the French term cedilla but had only seen the traditional English font in most books where this was used (I had a year of French language in my early secondary education, 25 years prior). Cliche has both hard and soft c sounds like circus, circle or cicadas but a better example might be civil, certain or central. But i got your point. Again thank you for your kind response and direction.
@Willie Cooke FWIW, Shakespeare's language is not Old English. As to whether "aksed" is Ebonics our not, my suspicion is that you will find that pronunciation among less formally educated populations of many ethnicities.
I grew up calling those little paper-covered wires that close a loaf of bread - twistees, because that’s how my Mom pronounced it. I was an adult before I realized that she was mis-reading “Twist Ties”. Pet peeves : newsreaders who pronounce it “temp-uh-ture”. And business network hosts who pronounce “entra-puh-noor”.
Here is one, a difference between American and Canadian spoken English. Example; foyer. Canadians will say FOY-yay, Americans will say FOY-er with the 'r' being pronounced. Just an interesting tidbit. And we spell words differently. In words that end in -or like favor, neighbor, savor will be spelled with an -our. Favour, savour, neighbour etc. Another example are words ending in -er like theater, center will be spelled theatre and centre in Canada..
I totally agree with you! I just had that discussion last night with my husband. I asked him what’s a full bird colonel, and pronounce co-lon-nel... and he looked at me like ...wth?!
I thought "lapel" was pronounced like maple until I heard my friend say it. Before that I had only ever seen it written down. I also still pronounce "applicable" wrong. I say it like application rather than apply. Not that big of a deal to me so I never fixed it.
Growing up in Germany, on the border of France and having Italian in school, really helps with pronunciation of these English words. If you recognize the origin it’s much easier.
I wss born n raised in Hawaii. To hear Malahinis (newcomers) pronounce local destinations is often hilarious! Locals (kamaainas) even speak pidgin english- a mix of hawaiian, english, japanese, filipino, etc. Language and pronounciation add spice to life. Thanks for video, teach!
I'm a southerner. We mispronounce so many things. I am very conscious about how I pronounce things . SaLmon is a big one down here. But I am very self-conscious. I love my accent but I don't want to sound ignorant.
I’m German and the only word I didn‘t know/would have pronounced wrong was corpsman. The rest was easy, I had a great English teacher. She actually tortured us for a few years with the different ways to pronounce „th“.
I once heard someone say that you shouldn’t make fun of people for these mispronunciations because it means they read it before they heard it. My word I mispronounced was “debris” when I was in first grade. I knew the word by sound but didn’t connect the two.
My daughter has a hearing disability and loves reading. She would frequently "mispronounce" words.
3 года назад
I had a venezuelan friend who speak "perfectly" english (As a matter of fact, he taught in a University in North NY) and once he was asked to read a word out loud and he replied that he didn't know how to do it because he had never heard it.
Taught 🙃😉 or teaches ? Perhaps ? I’m a Spanish native speaker, I have a so much to learn in both languages, so not judging here (disclaimer 🙃) we all need a little help here and there 🙂
Same. It is a word I had learned from reading and it wasn't until I heard someone say it one day that the lightbulb came on and I realized I was hearing it wrong while reading.
“epitome” as ‘ep-ee-tohm “jewelry” as ‘jew-luh-ree “cache” as kaysh “chaos” as tchowse This is not an English word but English speakers usually know what it refers to: “lederhosen” as lee-der-hoh-zen (songs “lieder” trousers) vs. lay-der-hoh-zen (leather “leder” trousers)
The reason we pronounce the ending in cliche' is the accent, which in the original French signals pronunciation as opposed to no accent, which cues the dropping of the final e, as in cache.
I first saw "epitome" when reading. For the longest time, I thought that it was pronounced [ɛpɪtom], and thought that [əpɪtəmi] was spelled "epitomy" when I first heard it. I also thought there were differences between the meanings of "these two words." I am ashamed to admit that I was in my mid 30s (I'm in my late 30s now, to give you an idea of just how recent I'm talking) before I learned I was wrong!
In 10th grade French I told my teacher I had been MIZLED. She asked Huh? and I said MIZLED - you know tricked,. She said that's misled; I told her that was spelled misleAd. I was confident that mislead was simple and MIZLED was mean trickery. This was just after a classmate told the same teacher that the ballgame had been total CHOUS - complete confusion. Madame Daignault was most gracious in dignifying our errors and explaining etymology and pronunciation divergences and complications. Because of her I still say err - prouno unced ERR, not AIR. She also pointed out that it was helpful when you learned a new word from reading it was always good to check the pronunciation guide or a reliable person.
Try to convince the Brits of this fact. French is probably the single biggest influence to modern English but the Brits claim to be so different and that they invented English, which they did not. The Brits use the French "u" in so much of the spelling such as honour, flavour, etc. We Americans dropped the French "u".
Just be aware that the locals usually don’t pronounce French looking place names the way you would expect. Example: Bellefontaine, Ohio sounds like bell fountain.
Poignant. I said "poh-IG-nant" 😂 I'd only ever read it in books, I knew what it meant, but not heard it spoken. I said it in conversation once and was met with giggles.
Just saw this video. Excellent, by the way. And, as a french native speaker, I wanted to response to the why the final “e” is pronounced differently in cache and in cliche. This is because of the “accent” (little mark above the e => é) we use in french that gives the sound “ey”, like in cliché. Whereas there is no “accent” used for cache, so the final e stays silent. Hope it helps.
I have always been an avid reader, but I am socially awkward. Most of my vocabulary has come from reading, after having been made fun of multiple times for mispronunciation of multiple words, I became even more socially inept. I thank you for your videos which are a tremendous help to all who wish to speak American English.
Just wanted to highlight a distinction here. The word Realtor is a trademark referring to someone who's an active member of the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Not all real estate are realtors and not all realtors are real estate agents (can be property managers, home appraisers, etc).
My word-kryptonite is "comfortable". It wasn't until I was in my mid-thirties that the written "ascertain" isn't pronounced "as certain" but is the word I already knew of asser-TAIN
The fact that the last "e" in cliché is due to the fact that there is an accent on it. Generally speaking, in French: - if "e" at the end of a syllable: schwa sound - if "é": closed "e" - if "è": open "e" - if "e" at the end of the last syllable, not pronounced generally speaking the letters which aren't pronounced if they appear at the end of a syllable are "d,p,s,t,x,z" (one trick is to remember "deposit"+x,z). These letters are pronounced though in quite some 1-syllable words, particularly toponyms (names of places), and some 2-syllable toponyms.
Once in high school I was reading in class from a textbook and I came across the word "rhetoric". I said it as re-TOR-ic instead of the correct pronunciation of RED-er-ic.
@@erinnab8335 In American English, the letter T often sounds more like a D. Especially between vowels and at the end of words. Obviously it's spelled with a T, but when it's spoken it sounds more like a D. It's the same phenomenon wherein Americans pronounce "water" as "wadder".
Thank you. I am a retired university professor and am very used to my colleagues butchering the English language. I have emphasized that the students I worked with learn to be fluent in reading, speaking and writing English. Few have taken the advice with serious problems for them professionally. Others seriously learned to use better English and made astonishing advances. Thank you again. Glen
Why does it have be “wrong”? In different parts of the country the accent people have is what they grew up with. Why then does the “standard English” have to be what is imposed on people?
Hi Rachel, I love your videos and the way you teach English, it’s really great and complete. I’m a Spanish native speaker and it’s has been challenging for me to say “what’s it called” instead of “how is it called” which is the translation in Spanish. Another word is the past tense of read, that is pronounced like red 😅
My oldest son struggled so much with spelling. It was the way they taught it, all the same sounds with different spellings on each test. I made him lists during summer break with same spelling, same sounds only on each list. He memorized them easily. One day: bow, throw, flow, ect. Next time: though, dough, ect. Much less confusing!
Maybe not exactly the same thing, but just asking because I'm not really sure: Do people sometimes or even most of the time pronounce et cetera (etc) as eggcetera? Or is it just my imagination?
Gus Bencomo - my wife, who grew up speaking Spanish, can’t break the habit of pronouncing it: “chi-Polt-ay.” In her defense I think the word is indigenous to Mexico and is not Spanish per se.
A few of my pet peeve mispronounced words are; Wensday (Wednesday), Febuary (February), Kindygarden (Kindergarten), and Ekzacly (Exactly). --- When I was a kid the first time I saw a Union service station I thought it was pronounced Onion. --- People that mispronounce words usually misspell them like they say them.
My mother forever mispronounced "croissant". She says, "croy-uh-sahnt". And teaching my nephews how to read and phonics, they get hung up on the "ch" words that are pronounced "sh". Those French derived words.
I'm in Canada. I took French in school, and I still pronounce certain words like croissant the French way. In this case, croi-son(silent t), not croi-sant.
Ubiquitous. I learned this word in eighth grade. I’m now 65! Our teacher taught it to us as eww-biquitous. I learned just this year that I’ve been saying it incorrectly!! I now say, “you-biquitous”. It’s been challenging to remember the correct pronunciation 😆
@@TheSouthIsHot You think I can remember? I suspect that by the time I first saw it written the pronunciation had been so drilled into me that reading it correctly came naturally. I say this with some confidence as I do recall many childhood moments where mistaken pronunciation embarrassed me, but Yosemite is not one of them.
Cache : ends with an e. E at the end or beginning of a word, is pronounced as a schwa. French schwa is regularly dropped. A random e at the end of the world will almost always be dropped. é. É is not e. It's "e accent aigu". It's pronounced quite similarly to the English i in kit. È: not in any of the words of the video, but è is pronounced as the English e in bet. Et: A common ending to words, pronounced like an é. Ette: also a common ending to words. first e is pronounced è, t is pronounced (because it's followed by a vowel), last schwa is optional and only pronounced when the letters are consonants and you're reading poetry or you want to articulate or errrr just too many consonants. Conclusion: just keep the accent on cliché and fiancée (which I've seen used in English literature, so not that hard) and you'll know how to pronounced French words. Honestly quite surprised to find that this video only covers foreign words when A/ How is it news that American people don't speak other languages. B/ You're picking words borrowed from languages that have a much more instinctive approach to pronunciation than English, while I'm sure there are rare enough English words that are hard to pronounce for natives as well.
as a kid i mispronounced plaid wrong (the fabric pattern). I pronounced it like "played" to rhyme with "braid". i learned that pronunciation from my mother who is Puerto Rican so English was her second language. in grade school my best friend corrected me to say it's pronounced "plaid" to rhyme with "glad".
