Can we have a 'how do you pronounce that' thread please?

[Wonkybanana]

I'll start with one that drives me crackers, Louboutin.

Is it -
LOO-boo-tan

Loo-BOO-tan
or
Loo-Boo-TAN

Please put me out of my misery!
(As you might have guessed, they're not in my price range however it's pronounced.)

Eilidh is not pronounced AY-lay, it’s pronounced AY-lee. Many Gaelic words end in -idh (e.g., ceilidh), and at the end of a word it makes and ‘ee’ sound.

I thought that @itsmum but someone up thread says her daughter is Ay-lay?

The one that always blows my mind is hyperbole. Thought it was hyper-bowl for many years.

And Segue is another mind blower.

Bolero (going back to page 1) is boller-roe fir the garment and Bol-air-roe for the music.

(Isn’t it?)

A Welsh one but how do you pronounce the Haven site Hafan Y Mor? In my head it’s Haff-ann-ee-more but happy to be corrected

The one that always blows my mind is hyperbole. Thought it was hyper-bowl for many years

I always thought albeit was pronounced All-beet

Lots of misinformation on this thread but I'm not going to get into an argument about it at this time on a Sunday.

Gew-gaws? Turns up in American books, Anne Tyler etc.

Hard g - goo-gores?
Soft g - jewjaws?
Bit of both - jewgaws?

Culzean

Cull-een. But I only know that as we weren’t there when we went on holiday to Ayrshire

Went. When is mumsnet going to join the 21st century and allow post editing? 😩

I never know how to pronounce Hebe. It is Heb Bay or Hee Bee or something else altogether?

@Kieran, I was teased mercilessly at work for saying I wanted to wear a boller- oe with a dress.

So if it is boller-oe not bo-lair-o for the garment I will feel vindicated!

Can anyone clarify?

iismum
Where i come from (east scotland) it is indeed Ay-lay. Ceilidh happens to be Cay-lay.
Maybe it depends on your accent

I pronounce it Shed ual ( Yule ) but most of my family say it with a hard K ( we are all from the uk )

@Standstilling I thought it was jee- hard
But I could be wrong.

I think gewgaw is said as it's written, with hard g sounds, 'gew' rhymes with pew rather than poo.

Gewgaw is as it's written,rhymes with pew as Ahoy say.

And my post was not only wrong but made no sense, I meant jee jaw.

Reading Enid Blyton growing up, I read Alicia as Alicka so still sometimes say it like that in my head although I have heard two ways of prn it properly!

@FredAndChips fair enough - I guess it sounds different in different accents. I’ve never heard a Gaelic speaker pronounced it anything other than AY-lee, but it’s also widely used by non-Gaelic speakers.

Havan uh mor

I have an Eilidh too. Ay ley rhymes with Bailey. We no longer live in Scotland so I have to explain it- a lot! I usually say it’s Hayley but without the H.

Part of the confusion with French words and names like Louboutin is that there is barely any lexical stress in French, so the syllables have pretty much the same weighting, maybe a fraction more on the last syllable. English speakers generally find that pretty alien and want to put a firm stress somewhere, but weirdly Brits seem to prefer to put ot on the first syllable and Americans on the last. E.g. we Brits tend to say BERet and CROIssant but they say beRET and croiSSANT.

Speaking of Enid Blyton, I always pronounced her name 'Ee-ney' but it's not is it... I'm meant to pronounce the 'd' on the end?

And is Caribbean meant to be Carry-be-an or Carrib-e-an

There have been many discussions on the subject of lattay vs lahtay on MN, but the Italian pronunciation is really somewhere in between the two.

Yup, Enid is pronounced Eenid with a pronounced d.