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Wells's History Presidential Inaugurals ----- All Fiction ----- Shelf of Fiction Ghost Stories Short Stories Shaw, G.B. Stein, G. Stevenson, R.L. Wells, H.G. Reference > Usage > American Heritage® Book of English Usage > 7. Pronunciation Challenges   PREVIOUS NEXT   CONTENTS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD · WORD INDEX · SUBJECT INDEX The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English.  1996. 7. Pronunciation Challenges Confusions and Controversy   THE AFFLUENT and choleric comptroller heinously inveigled herbs from the impious valet who often harasses the dour governor with aplomb. The funny thing about this sentence (aside from the fact that it really doesn’t make any sense) is that it is mostly made up of words that can be pronounced in at least two distinctly different ways, regardless of the speaker’s accent or regional dialect. That is, when pronouncing these words, the speaker has a choice, whether to stress one syllable or another, or to pronounce a letter that for other people is silent, or to substitute or lose certain sounds. Because of all these choices, many speakers hesitate when pronouncing these words. The entries listed below will inform you about these words, and, we hope, will make you more comfortable about pronouncing them.    1   People commonly complain about the inadequacies of the English spelling system and about the difficulties that arise when they try to pronounce unfamiliar words. Many other languages are not plagued with these problems. Native speakers of English who are learning Czech, Finnish, Spanish, or Polish are delighted to discover that the pronunciation of a word in these languages can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy by its spelling. And conversely, the correct spelling of a word can be fairly easily deduced from its pronunciation. Unfortunately, in English the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is not as close. Just consider, for example, the letter a, which represents a different vowel sound in each of the following words: pat, mane, father, any, village, waffle, wall, was. Or consider the short e sound in pet, which may also be spelled a (any), ae (aesthetic), ai (said), ay (says), ea (thread), ei (heifer), eo (leopard), ie (friendly), oe (roentgen), and u (burial).    2   How did this situation come about? English adopted its alphabet, except for the letters j, u, and w, from the one used by the Romans to represent the sounds of Latin, and the fit was not an exact one. English is a Germanic language that has borrowed many words from French, Dutch, and other languages, and the result is a phonological mishmash in which certain letters are pronounced differently depending on the origin of the words they appear in. Nonetheless, English sound and spelling were not all that far apart until the advent of printing in the 15th and 16th centuries, which helped to freeze English spelling while its pronunciation underwent dramatic changes, principally in the system of long vowels, which is known as the Great Vowel Shift. As a result of these changes Middle English name, pronounced (nä’m), became Modern English name; Middle English sweete, pronounced (sw’t), became Modern English sweet; Middle English ride, pronounced (r’d), became Modern English ride, and so forth. It was also during this period that final e became silent. Printers, however, preserved the spellings used in medieval manuscripts, so that our modern spellings actually reflect more accurately the medieval pronunciations of words before all these changes took place.    3   Today, enormous variety in pronunciation also exists because English is so widespread, with 350 million native speakers worldwide, which makes the existence of a universal standard impossible. Traditionally, however, varieties of English have been divided into two types, British English and American English, each with its own more or less acknowledged standard. Within the United States, home to 232 million native speakers of English, there is no single perceived standard of pronunciation. There are certain norms based on the variety of English spoken in the northern United States (not including New England) that have been adopted for use by news broadcasters, but even these are subject to more regional variation than most people might suppose. Thus, generally speaking, standards in the U.S., if they exist at all, tend to be regional. And with regard to the pronunciation of vowels in particular an enormous variation is tolerated across regional boundaries.    4   The list of entries that follows is composed of words whose pronunciation has a history of variation or controversy, or for one reason or another has been problematic for speakers. A few of the entries simply address various processes of phonologic change, such as assimilation and dissimilation, which are natural processes that occur in all living languages. Other entries, as at C and G, concern aspects of pronunciation that are taken for granted or ignored by most speakers but that are interesting nevertheless from a historical point of view.    5    The symbols used to render pronunciations are those that are used in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition (1992). These symbols are phonemic rather than phonetic. That is, they are designed to help you distinguish meaningful units of sound, such as the difference between cat and cad or pat and pet. They are not designed to represent the specific pronunciation of any individual or of any particular speech community. Thus they allow people from different speech communities to pronounce words correctly in their native dialect. In the discussions that follow, the term long vowel can refer to any of the following sounds: (), (), (), (), (ä), and (); it can also refer to the diphthongs (ou) and (oi). The term short vowel can refer to any of these sounds: (), (), (), (), (), and (). A full pronunciation key can be found at Pronunciation Symbols.    6 a aberrant acumen -ade aerate affluence / affluent -age agoraphobia ague albumen / albumin alms alumni / alumnae analogous anesthetist angina Antarctic apartheid aplomb arctic / Arctic argot ask assimilation asterisk athlete auxiliary banal barbiturate blackguard boatswain bogeyman bouquet bowline breeches brooch bulimia buoy C cabal cache cadre catacomb Celt / Celtic centenary cerebral Ch choleric clique clothes colander comptroller conch coupon covert culinary dais debacle deify / deity demagogic / demagogy despicable desultory diphtheria diphthong disastrous disparate dissect dissimilation doughty dour dwarf ebullience / ebullient -ed either envelope environment epoch err escalator escape espresso / expresso et cetera exquisite February flaccid forecastle formidable forte fulminant / fulminate fulsome fungi G genealogy genuine genus gerrymander gibberish governor grievous gunwale H harass hegemony height heinous herb hoof hovel / hover impious inherence / inherent integral interest intrusion inveigle jewelry junta juvenilia kerchief kilometer kudos L lasso leeward leisure length library lived lower / lour machinate mainsail mauve mayoral metathesis millenary mineralogy mischievous moot mores naphtha / naphthalene neither niche nuclear often ophthalmia -or panegyric penalize poinsettia portentous posthumous potpourri primer pronunciation spelling prosody pumpkin quark quasi quay quixotic ration Realtor remonstrate renaissance / Renaissance renege renown ribald roof row sarcophagi scarify schism scone secretive sheik shone similar sloth sonorous spelling pronunciation spontaneity strength the tomato topgallant / topmast / topsail trauma troth valet vase victual whilst wizen Xmas zoo- / zo- The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.   CONTENTS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD · WORD INDEX · SUBJECT INDEX   PREVIOUS NEXT     Click here to shop the Bartleby Bookstore. Welcome · Press · Advertising · Linking · Terms of Use · © 2008 Bartleby.com