One for the pedants: Impious

[AgentPidge]

I went to see Hamnet. There were (unsurprisingly) some quotes from Hamlet in the film, and one of them mentioned "impious stubbornness". Paul Mescal pronounced it like pious with -im at the beginning: im-PIE-us. But a tiny bell rang in my head, saying it should be IMP-ee-us. I mentioned it to the friend I was with - who happens to have taught Hamlet at A-level - and she said she'd say "im-PIE-us".
Next day, she sent me a screenshot from Cambridge dictionary backing her up, and mentioned a (robot-voiced) video on YouTube saying the same thing. But the first comment says it's incorrect - the correct way is IMP-ee-us. I looked in my old Chambers' and Collins dictionaries and they give IMP-ee-us as correct; one of them gives im-PIE-us as a N. American variant. Now this is not a word I've ever used, I don't think, and it's very likely that the 'correct' way has fallen out of use, but I'm interested in whether anyone was taught 'my' way at school. I also remember ignoble, also hardly used. TIA

You're brave to argue for an immutual rule in English pronunciation!

Rough, dough, thought, plough, cough...

Did you mean "immutable"? "Immutual" means something completely different from what your point seems to be.

Yes, thank you, presumably an autocorrected typo since I didn't even know "immutual" was a word.

American English often always mangles French pronunciations, understandably as they don't tend to learn it like we do. The Guardian was frothing last weekend about a (Brit) on TV saying 'femme fatale' as fem rather than fam. But that's always been the US pronunciation. I think a lot of US ways are turning up over here now due to Google - traveling, cozy, truck instead of lorry, etc.

Exact match! I wouldn't go to the wall for it though, just assumed that it would be the same pronunciation as pious.

Re US/UK pronunciation, isn't the American accent (or at least north western American) supposed to be closer to Shakespeare and English than current British English anyway? So even if OPs version is correct now, Im-PIE-ous might have been the way it was originally said.

I've never had occasion to say it out loud, and would go to great lengths not to, but with a gun to my head it would be im pee us, then I'd correct to im pie us. Much as I would pronounce 'misled' as mizzled, then I'd correct to mis led.

It doesn't scan, though, in the Hamlet piece. IMPious does. It makes sense in the way that, as a previous poster said, potent and impotent do.
Well it was the way I was taught in school, so it was right then. But that was a long time ago and it's not a common word, so I'm not surprised that no-one knows it now or how to pronounce it.

It doesn't scan, though, in the Hamlet piece. IMPious does.

Exactly - as per my post above. The rhythm makes it clear it would be IMP pee ous not Im- PIE- ous

There are lots of words in Shakespeare, though, which don't work as well in modern pronunciation. Which may well be an argument for pronouncing them that way if you're performing Shakespeare, but doesn't mean you'd pronounce them that way in any other context. I know that your original post about Hamnet was about the Shakespeare speech, but I don't think that confirms either way what the right pronunciation of the actual word is.

Entirely! There are also loads of words that don't scan in Shakespeare and we don't all start pronouncing them differently because he's the only person that dictates how we should say them! The man signed his own surname six different ways! This rigidity is just stupid and lacking modern contextualisation.

There are also loads of words that don't scan in Shakespeare and we don't all start pronouncing them differently because he's the only person that dictates how we should say them!

Scan? The Shakespeare reference on this thread isn't about pronunciation in the sense of accent as in love/move. It is about rhythm and emphasis.

Often their pronunciation is the original pronunciation when they emigrated. So they do not pronounce the h in herb because it’s a word taken from French and at the time pronounced as French still does (no h). I don’t know about more modern words, or current differences between the French spoken in Canada and France as maybe Americans have more exposure to that (or did until 🍊 showed up).

Those are not divorced issues. Ask any actor.

It was PEE in my head, but I mispronounce a lot of words from being an early and avid reader. I was also lazy about the dictionary, and first encountered it at an age when I would have assumed it meant something imp -like, because I hadn’t encountered the word pious yet. I’m rarely a good source for pronunciation.

This is not true. Pious and impious are pronounced differently. Pie-us and Im-pee-us