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'

Have we had how to pronounce the surname Featherstonehaugh yet? I once had to ring a very posh lady with that surname and she was not impressed at my efforts at all...

It's pronounced Fanshaw, for those who might need to know one day.

@1066vegan It's the split ee diagraph

Digraph! Not diagraph!

@HopeClearwater You're right of course.

I knew it was digraph because that means 2 letter shapes. "di" as in 2 (dipolar, dichotomy etc) and not the prefix "dia" (through, across etc).

I was typing too quickly on my phone and didn't bother proof reading.

Most of the KS1 teachers I’ve met in my teaching career say ‘diagraph’

Exeat - I thought it was ex-eat to rhyme with let’s eat but it’s ex-ee-at!

You can work out the pronunciation of any word looking at the phonetic spelling.

Loughborough?

Exeat? How have I got to my 50s without needing this word?

In my 20s I thought the name Siobhan was pronounced Si-o-ban until I heard someone else say it!

I once went into a patient waiting area and called, "Siobhan X" to come through. She just looked at her mother who stared back, I asked what was wrong, Siobhan was 14 and I was the first person to get it right.

But then I went to school with a Dymphna and regularly travelled through Mythelmroyd.

Exeat is an absence, such as a long weekend, away from public school, Testing.
I’m an ex journalist and I don’t know the meaning let alone the pronunciation of some of the words on this thread!

Oxford dictionaries go with 3 syllables for Aspartame. I am distraught! www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/aspartame

I read a lot of Horrible Histories as a child. I still remember how my parents laughed when I tried to tell them about ancient Egyptian ‘b-yoo-real’ chambers...

Burial.

Mind you, I did have a little giggle to myself once when I overheard two very elderly ladies looking at a fibreoptic Christmas tree in a shop window, and one authoritatively informed the other that “it’s done with them led lights”
“Led” the word, rather than LED. She said it with such conviction.

Google pronounce has been mind blowing .

@MorrisZapp

Nugget is a perfectly legitimate regional pronunciation. I've always called it that, in Scotland.

Same here, You'd get looks if you pronounced it noo-gah where I'm from!

My two embarrassments as a literate articulate adult were the plant cotoneaster (obviously pronounced cotton - Easter ( like the eggs) and - even worse and to a bigger audience - Portakabin. I don't know why I thought it was pronounced PortAHkubin.

Oh no, it seems I pronounce aspartame the US way rather than the UK way. Mustn’t let DS know. His pronunciation seems to come from YouTube and is very heavily US weighted (and I take the piss.)

ASS par tame - US
ass PAR tame - UK

You have to request a UK pronunciation on Google, I guess.

*well, as that doesn't work for pretty much any word on this thread, that is a bit irrelevant isn't it?

penelope - pronounce the lope at the end ....Oh no wait grin*

Er yes - look up a word on Google, and the phonetic alphabet spelling is there. There’s also google pronounce. So doesn’t help if you don’t know you’re mispronouncing but if you’re unsure then there’s your answer. Phonetic alphabet is easy to learn.

@BabyLlamaZen I knew a girl who pronounced it Hermi One.

@AvonCallingBarksdale

*well, as that doesn't work for pretty much any word on this thread, that is a bit irrelevant isn't it?

penelope - pronounce the lope at the end ....Oh no wait grin*

Er yes - look up a word on Google, and the phonetic alphabet spelling is there. There’s also google pronounce. So doesn’t help if you don’t know you’re mispronouncing but if you’re unsure then there’s your answer. Phonetic alphabet is easy to learn.

Well, if you’d said that the first time! 🙄

Most of the KS1 teachers I’ve met in my teaching career say ‘diagraph’

Ironically, when the word 'diphthong' was used to mean largely the same thing, before it fell out of favour, most people used to take away one of the letters - the first 'h' - when saying it, rather than adding the random 'a' that they do for 'digraph'!

MillicentMartha sorry
Seriously people, acquaint yourselves with the phonetic alphabet and you’ll never look back - could be the best thing you’ve ever done. Maybe

Er yes - look up a word on Google, and the phonetic alphabet spelling is there.

Part of the problem there, though, is that dictionaries are usually descriptive rather than prescriptive. If enough people routinely mispronounce a word, it will become a (if not THE) de facto 'correct' way of saying it. This happens frequently with pronunciation, as well as with grammar, such as the word 'there's' which has now become universally used and accepted (not by me, mind ) when used before a plural. Nobody would say "There is five apples in that bowl", but virtually everybody would now say "There's five apples" rather than the correct 'there are' or 'there're'.

Years ago, when a friend came back from the Middle East and was telling me about falafels, in my head it was spelt ‘fluffles’.

Yosemite National Park will always be Yo- sem-ite in my head.

Macabre was makkabra

@PuppyMonkey

Have we had how to pronounce the surname Featherstonehaugh yet? I once had to ring a very posh lady with that surname and she was not impressed at my efforts at all...

It's pronounced Fanshaw, for those who might need to know one day.

My goodness - that has to be the craziest name spelling ever!! I wonder sometimes if the first person to name themselves was dyslexic. Or maybe they just had a random selection of letters to use up. I would never have known how to say it....... But why not just change it by deed?? Who could be bothered to keep spelling that out, or correcting it when someone else has written it sensibly