How do you pronounce miniature?

On the day she become one Risk! millionaire, Amy Schneider revealed to TV viewers that she had long thought of “distraction” as the past tense form of the verb “distract,” and gradually realized that it was actually ” misguided”.

Many viewers exclaimed: “How can a genius like her come up with this mess!” And then many others said, “Wait – How did you just pronounce ‘awry’? “

The truth is that Schneider is like most of us in this regard: Everyone who has learned English words by reading has mispronounced them in some way. Usually, we get corrected quickly enough by a parent or teacher – “No, that’s ‘Bay-con, ‘not’ bah-juggle‘”- but sometimes we enter adolescence or even adulthood without realizing the misunderstanding. Every time someone mentions this phenomenon, a lot of people with a high level of culture shout out. to tell about their own mistakes.There are long and lively themes on Stock trading, Quora, and New York Public Library blog, just to get you started.

And yes, there is a word for this. In fact, there are several. Term established for a word that a person has learned by reading and is not told how to pronounce is a “book word”. But some also call these mispronunciations “misles” – often rhyming “misles” with “guys would” – in honor of “misled.” And Judith Wynn Halsted, in her book Some of my best friends are books, calling it “Calley-ope Syndrome” after another misleading word, “calliope.”

It is not surprising that English speakers, although literate, sometimes mispronounce words. We are often misspelled. English is the Home of the Winchester languages, developed in many strange and inconsistent ways, with many pitfalls and dead ends, some of which are purely intentional. If spelling was a game, then English would be the final boss level. There are several English spellings that differ from pronunciation, and each of them produces words, like lost, usually among the ‘bedeviling’ books.

Lexical kleptomania

Sometimes confusion occurs because we have stolen (ahem, “borrowed”) a word from another language with different spellings. When we do that, we sometimes change the pronunciation to match English expectations (we don’t say yoghurt, sauna and snowboarding like “ya-oort”, “gow-na” or ” shee” as in the original languages), but sometimes we don’t, or at least not quite.

This is why ennui supposed to be more like “on we” than like what it looks like. That’s why potpourri silent t (for those who follow the convention). That’s why we have to say OLD in façade is “s” (actually, it should be “facade”, but that OLD not an English letter!). And that’s how we don’t say S in Viscount – although we changed the way we speak I English style. We also changed the pronunciation of refer (“in-Have-it and forewarned (“cavvy-at”), used and adapted from Latin, towards the English sound … but not nearly entirely, the way they look British in the eye.

Sorry, wrong language

Sometimes we get it wrong because we know the word comes from another language, but we guess wrongly what language it comes from. That’s why some people say fake is “seg,” French, not “segway” according to the Italian origin (of course, some people also say “seg-you” to follow English rules). And sometimes we know what the language of a word is, and we get too eager and turn it into too no English. That’s why caching, should be said exactly like “cash”, sometimes said “cash-Open“as if it were” caché” (which, as a noun, is not; cache is also French, but it is an adjective meaning “hidden”).

Go to Hell

Words borrowed from Classical Greek (or based on Greek roots) are special degrees of Hades. Not only have they been converted to a different alphabet – often in Latin, which has caused strange things to pass – but English has, over the centuries, evolved standards. pronunciation for Classical Greek which sounds very little like the Original Greek but even less like normal English.

For example, we have to put stress on the third last syllable and pronounce the last e is “ee.” That is the pronunciation of calliope (“shift-lie-o-pe”) comes from, along with names like Hermione, Penelope, and Persephone, all of which are famous for having misled many readers. It’s also for us exemplary, exaggerated, and antithesis, all of which are established in the annals of Calley-Ope Syndrome. And, again, we sometimes apply the same principles to words taken from completely unrelated languages ​​- for example: yos se’meti, from a native California language, is written as Yosemite, which you would never guess how to say without being told.

Sand movement of time

Not all of our spelling troubles are due to kleptomania of English vocabulary. English has inexplicably changed since the Angles and Saxons invaded England.

Some words were originally spelled as they sounded, but over the centuries we’ve changed the way we say them – but not so much about how we spell them. This is what happened to draft (“draft”): that “gh” was originally the meaning of the word friction behind the mouth that you can still hear in Dutch, but the English word has long since disappeared. That’s also what happened to vest (“wes-kit”) and long boat (“bo-zun”) – as with ” cupboard “, all of their original sounds are still audible in English, but we just … save our pronunciation (unless we only know them from the word) books). This has also happened with many names, such as Worcester (“Desire-ter”) and Greenwich (“Gren-itch”). Sometimes a lot of people misunderstand the spelling so the more detailed pronunciation is once again held. You might even be among those who say “t” in often and soften, previously lost into the mists of time.

Imposing etymology

Some words already have silent characters inserted into them. Why would anyone do that? Not just because they hate people and want to see them suffer (although that may be part of it). No, they wanted the words to tell them where they came from – like how back in Latin, not just in French they passed on on their way to us.

This is why “debt” and “subtle” have a silence b and “one” has a silence o: because they trace back to Latin debit, subtilis, and people love, and some bookworms want people to know it. And that’s why the word was formerly spelled vitailes (are from food) became Food (“vittles”), and the word was once written faucon became eagle (thanks, Latin falx!).

But, again, that spelling was beginning to prevail over pronunciation; The spelling pronunciation of “food” is gaining ground and almost everyone has been saying the “l” in “falcon” for a long time. Meanwhile, the French words cisme and cedule, when borrowed into English, is eventually rewritten as schism and schedule to display their glorious distant ancient Greek origins, and the result is utter endless controversies over the correct pronunciation of each word.

Panic

But wait! It gets better – or worse. Sometimes we changed the spelling to match what we thought is the source, but we were actually wrong about it. The S in “island”? Added to the pattern of “isle” – but while “isle” comes from Latin insula, “island” is unrelated: it comes from y, an old word for “island”, plus soil, that means now what it means.

This process also gave us turn, used to be spelled “key”, like the other word it pronounced, but someone noticed the French spelling it straps and thought that must be the origin. It’s not – the French take this word from the same German source we did and spell it out to please themselves.

And then sometimes we’re not even sure where a word comes from, but it’s there now, like a booby trap, and you’ll get caught if you don’t look. research at it – oh, by the way, it’s “a-slide,” Not “ask-ance. “

Gas Lighting

Finally, sometimes a word is put together using perfectly reasonable methods of English word formation, either from bits that have always been English or from bits of Latin or Greek that have been used. used in English for centuries, but we’ve been very careful by spelling that, when we’re looking for something to model our pronunciation, we’re wrong.

add biological (from “biography”) to pic (from “painting”) and you get story, supposedly “biological pic” but looks Therefore like it should rhyme with “myopic.” Originated from Greece the infrastructure (“below”) and add it to good old English Red and you get infrared rays, which to almost any English-speaking brain sounds wrong like it should rhyme with “prepare”. Although, a thousand years ago, although obviously al (from “although”) plus it is in more it, now – under the influence of German loans such as zeitgeist – many of us would actually feel more at ease if it sounded like tit for tat. And of course, add the prefix One- (as in “about” and “around”) to frown and prefix wrong arrive lead to must naturally lead us to say “a-wry” and “mis-lead” for unsatisfactory and lost. But, well…

As long as English spelling remains weird and inconsistent – which will be until the end of time – their speakers will continue to be misled by words in books and mispronounced. And there will always be people like the old English teacher on Quora who sniffed: “You are so simple [sic] misrepresentation. If you are not sure about the messenger [sic] of a word, look it up in a dictionary. “

But there will also be those of us who smile sympathetically and say, like those on Twitter “Never mock someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned the word by reading.” And don’t let anyone see.