Things that you thought were said differently

[BabyLlamaZen]

When I first read Harry Potter I thought it was 'hermy-own' - was gobsmacked when I heard how it was pronounced when the films started coming out! I also thought mirror of Erised was pronounced 'i-rye-sd'

Kitty that sounds like a painful illness lol

@Twenty2

That should be Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, thank you autocarrot, you piece of shut

Love it!!!

I still can't see the word without thinking it's por-TAKA-bin. Was mortified to be corrected at the age of 16 when we moved to England - I had never seen a Portakabin before!

I still say submareener for submariner.

@WarmSausageTea It's because league and tongue come from French, which like English has a lot of silent letters and silent syllables. Segue is Italian where you tend to pronounce all the letters.

The Borgias character is called Cesare (yes it's the same name as Caesar, but Caesar is the Latin word and Cesare has evolved from that). It's pronounced like Chezzaray because in Italian a C before E or I is pronounced like 'Ch' (as in 'ciao') and you have to sound the final E as an AY sound - which is why segue = segway. If he'd been French, the same name would be pronounced like 'seZZAR', much closer to Caesar in sound. Different languages, different rules. That's all it is.

These are hilarious. I remember calling Samuel Pepys Samuel Pep-ays to my ex bf's sister who was an English teacher at the time. They laughed in my face!

Peace corps. For a long time I never heard it pronounced, so I assumed it was pronounced like corpse as in a dead body.

Thanks, @turquoise50, I didn’t realise that about segue, it makes sense now, though still feels wrong.

I should have twigged about Cesare, because I knew about C and re sounds in Italian. I remember being on the tube years ago, an Italian couple who were going to Russell Squa-re, which is what it’s been in my mind ever since.

This is what I love about language, there’s always something new to learn.

The Borgias character is called Cesare (yes it's the same name as Caesar, but Caesar is the Latin word and Cesare has evolved from that). It's pronounced like Chezzaray because in Italian a C before E or I is pronounced like 'Ch' (as in 'ciao') and you have to sound the final E as an AY sound - which is why segue = segway. If he'd been French, the same name would be pronounced like 'seZZAR', much closer to Caesar in sound. Different languages, different rules. That's all it is.

I would just add that cheZZaray is a very Anglo pronunciation of the Italian. It's softer than that in the ending- more like chez-ah-rae with the final sounds a kind of muted 'ay' should- Italian is almost completely phonetic, so once you know the pronunciation rules you pronounce every letter in the word - Cesare - C is a hard 'ch' sound, the e makes the 'eh' sound, s making a hard s, nearly z sound, and then 'are' make the 'ah-rae' sound that a lot of Italian words end with (many infinitive verbs in Italian end with 'are' along with 'ere' and 'ire').

I remember when I was little our school had a display of homophones and I couldn't work out why "hour" and "our" were appearing next to "are"

Hour and our, yes I agree but are is pronounced arr not to rhyme with our! So I understand your confusion. In a school, too!

I still struggle with clerk/clark, the Mall in London (Maow?), how to say Plaistow (I always thought it was PLASS-toe), lieutenant/leftennant, and colonel which because I have a rhotic accent comes out as kernel.

Also where my parents grew up there is a town called BOS-ca-wen, but in Cornwall I was laughed at - it's bos-COW-un apparently.

Nougat is a french word and as such, the 'at' sounds like 'ah'. So you get 'noo-gah'.

If you don't know French, it's an easy mistake to make. I was raised in the Midlands and all my friends used to say nugget.
I knew what they meant!

I thought Arkansas was pronounced Ar-can-sas for waaaay too long!!

Me too! In fact it was only when Bill Clinton was running for President and was the Governor of Arkansas that I heard how it was meant to be pronounced!

Segue is interesting because in italian (origin) it doesn't quite have an ay ending. More like the a from ay, but without the y, as pointed out earlier in this thread for another word.

forvo.com/word/segue/
Compare the English and Italian versions. And the two Italian versions don't quite match either.

But the oddest thing is the meaning. It's a form of the verb seguire, but it has become a noun as well as other forms in English.

@Xiaoxiong I'm from glamorous Plaistow, in East London and it's Plar-sto.

hour, our and are

for me, our and are are the same, but hour is different!

unless I am speaking slowly and over enunciating a bit and then our becomes more like hour

Someone mentioned flip flops twice on another thread. I am loosing sleep over not having pointed it out but I didn't want to seem pedantic.

Summerhouse what? what is wrong with flip flops?

My DB used to play with a barren arrra. It took me years to realise DM meant Bow and arrow.

Was it just me who was saying "furloff" at the beginning of lockdown? 🤭

I also used to pronounce Ciabatta as shar-bar-tar. I was really disappointed to find out it was see-a-bat-ah. I still prefer my version!

When I was a child I was really cross to find salmon was pronounced sammun. "Sall-mon" seemed to sound so pretty, all pink and silvery, just right for the type of fish. (I was an odd child. )

Once overhead an American tourist at the station asking to buy a ticket to Gwild-Ford. I sniggered but it's actually very logical.

@steppemum flip flobs sorry my autocorrect also couldn't cope with it.

that makes more sense, I thought I'd been sayign it wrong for 50 + years!

Oh I've just remembered what I joined the thread to say, inspired by all the Hermione comments. A former colleague recently had a baby, name spelt Hermarnie. I'm guessing she spelt it like that to avoid all the hermy-own pronunciations. However she's destined the poor child to spelling her name out every single time someone is writing/inputting it.

I did a quick Google and it's not a known variation of the name. However the Urban dictionary says Hermarnie is slang for a "girl's booty". Poor Hermarnie. Named after an arse.

I still struggle with clerk/clark, the Mall in London (Maow?),

I think that's just local dialect & pronunciation of the L at the end. My London friends pronounced words ending with L more like a W.

Oh I've just remembered what I joined the thread to say, inspired by all the Hermione comments. A former colleague recently had a baby, name spelt Hermarnie. I'm guessing she spelt it like that to avoid all the hermy-own pronunciations. However she's destined the poor child to spelling her name out every single time someone is writing/inputting it.

I did a quick Google and it's not a known variation of the name. However the Urban dictionary says Hermarnie is slang for a "girl's booty". Poor Hermarnie. Named after an arse.

When I looked, I only found a British woman on Twitter called Hermarni (no 'e' at the end) - assuming that it is her actual name and not adapted/assumed for Twitter. I'm guessing a lot of people will 'hear' it as Armani and take it upon themselves to call her that. Maybe changing the 'e' at the end for a 'y' might have been a better alternative - like Briony - but that assumes the parents pronounce all of the syllables. In their accent, they may clip it so that 'Hermarnie' is exactly how they would say it, hence the choice of spelling.

Even so, I agree with you: anybody would be gutted to Google their own name and see Urban Dictionary come up right near the top of the hits