AIBU to think that the BBC should employ newsreaders who know how to pronounce words correctly?

[Dawndonna]

I have put up with 'contra verse y' for years, recently it has been 'pie ra cy' and 'pry va cy'. This morning, I heard 'in gin u a' for ingenue. I turned it off.

Yeah, I know it's trivial, but it annoys the hell out of me!

Contra-versy is the UK pronunciation, con-troversy is the USA version, isn't it?

Piracy should be pronounced the same way as pirate.

Privacy - agree with you.

Ingenue - should be pronounced in the French manner.

But while we're at it - it really utterly fucks me off that medics have made the pronunciation of "cervical" to be cer-via-cal. WHY??? It's not a fucking cer-viax, is it? it's a cerVIX - so why in God's name stick an unnecessary extra syllable in there?

what's wrong with "an hotel"?

I'm sitting here saying pie-ra-cy out loud :o

No, I'm pretty sure pie-ra-cy is 'correct' for me though really there is no such thing as correct. There is just 'most common'. Even a dictionary isn't a rule book, but a list of the most common pronunciations.

It changes over time too.

hotel is a French word though, so the h used to be silent; house is not so "an house" is just wrong, while "an hotel" isn't.

There is a BBC pronunication unit which is supposed to instruct, but its influence seems to be spotty (or maybe focuses on foreign names?). Though the UK TV coverage of the Queen's visit to Ireland was cringe-worthy, though - only someone with no idea of what Áras an Uachtaráin means would insist on referring to it as 'Orris' (which is nowhere near the proper pronunciation anyway and makes as much sense as calling the White House 'House' or Buckingham Palace 'Palace') and 'Taoiseach' is not, and never has been, pronounced 'Tee-sack'.

Yes, I realise these are foreign words whose pronunciation you have to look up, but if you can get your tongue around 'Netanyahu' and 'Ahmadinejad' , you can do it.

But I thought it was a 'rule', I.e., an preceding vowels with h classified as a vowel.

Perhaps it focuses on foreign names because only names can be said to have a correct pronunciation. You can reasonably expect people to pronounce your name the way you prefer it (once you have told them), but the rest of the langauge is optional with no regional variation being better or worse than another.

Troisgarcons I hope you were joking about accents

No it's not people objecting to regional accents.

I was going to point out the pronunciation of Newcastle but VFVF beat me to it.

It's people mangling words and places when they are being paid to get it right. If you don't do it right you sound ignorant and people will dismiss you.

I heard a BBC pronunciation expert explaining what pains they'd gone to to get announcers to pronounce Medvedev correctly so they would be taken seriously in Russia. Everyone makes a decent stab at it even though she said it was tricky for non Russian speakers.

I didn't know how to pronounce Omagh until I heard local reporters pronouncing it properly. Same with Bombardier until the firm went under. The least you can do in such horrible situations is get the bloody name right.

I have to say though VFVF that as a southerner I feel a bit of a fraud pronouncing it New-cassel. .

You can go too far. I worked with someone during the house arrest of Pinochet who droned on about how we should call him the Chil-layun mass murderer rather than the Chillyan one. I think that was missing the point of the story a bit.

limited in that case I wish people would put the emphasis in the right place on my home city.

It's WolverHAMPton, not WOLverhampton. I feel like committing murder when the travel woman on R2 says it

The H thing is a rule.
unless you're a modernist knobhead

and it's New CAS el

'Contro-versy' is actually the 'correct' pronunciation as the newer, American-favoured 'con-trov-ersy' breaks up the morphemes, or parts of the word which hold the meaning. 'Trov' is not a morpheme, it is the running together of the two meaningful parts of the word. So the BBC pronunciation is correct on that count, if not on others.

I've heard that nickelbabe. I just didn't write it properly. I generally avoid naming the city at all in case I sound like a suck-up.

there's a village near me that has two syllables and the emphasis should go on the first. bloody scotrail on their automated announcement thing have put the emphasis on the second syllable and now you end up with people outwith the area (condescendingly) correcting you when you say it correctly aaarrgghhh much more irritating IMO...

HardCheese I'm pretty sure the pronunciation unit (my actual dream job) has been closed down now. My dreams are ashes, ashes I tells ya.

While I'm on it's med - i - cine, not med - sin. Ta awfully!

limited - I pronounce it the way that my uni friend from there pronounced it. I'm probably offending half of newcastlians by pronouncing it that way!

Novacastrians, actually. But they'll answer to Geordie...

Can I add -
adver tise ment when it should be adver tiss ment
pro noun ciation when it should be pro nun ciation
restaur on teur when it should be restaur a teur

But language is a fluid thing. You only have to listen to old broadcasts (and not all that old - 20 years is enough) to realise how much the 'Engish' accent has changed. We're tending to use more 'American' pronunciation (eg 'whadever'), and the Australian uplift is rife. We use verbs that simply didn't exist even 10 years ago (to text, to google). And there's nothing any of us can do about it. I find that quite exciting.

I have no problem with accents (I have one myself) but if I hear sec-e-tray, or li-bry, or Wens-day once more I will throw a hammer through the TV.

I believe I may have mentioned this before on here!

How about 'drawing' being pronounced draw-ring

And 'Ibiza' does not begin with 'eye'.

i couldn't think what they were called!

I've only started saying draw-ing in the last couple of years. It still sounds odd, and I have t oremind myself. But if I didn't, my pedantry alarm would sound.

at nickel's pedantry alarm.

I think drawing like that sounds odd and I don't know anyone who says it "correctly"

Can pronounciations not ever change then?

As a middle-aged woman (do I have a point?), I vote we start a list.

Newcastle
controversy
anywhere in the London A-Z
piracy
privacy
nuclear
anything beginning with H
caravan
the village near skrumble
advertisement
pronunciation
restaurateur
secretary
library
Wednesday
drawing
Ibiza

And don't get me started on Naomi.

Wednesday is imo another one that sounds really pompus pronounced "correctly" and I don't know anyone who does.

The place near where I grew up, Wednesbury is most definitley pronounced Wenns-bry and it makes me cringe to hear BBC presenters saying it like the "correct" pronounciation of Wednesday :o