Pronunciation (lighthearted)

[overnightangel]

AIBU tocthink the following...?
TORTOISE is “Torr-Toyyssss” not “Torr-Tuss”
TONGUE is “Tung” not “Tonnggg”

yabu

Depends which part of the country you live in and which regional accent you have.
I say Tor-tuss and tung. Lived in London for 30 years, now in rural Scotland.

Of course you are right - suspect you are from the north.

I'm with Tighna.

Tortoyz sounds really weird to me.

I’m from the north. I say tortuss and tung.

YAB half U

I am nearly 36 and have never heard anyone say tung! How could it be pronounced with a ‘U’?

Cambridge disagrees on TORTOISE
dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tortoise
For the UK, it's Torr-tuss

It agrees on TONGUE
dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tongue
It's tung
I think some people don't know the difference between kitchen tongs vs. their mouth tongue on that one.

[gavel]

Tor-toys? Yabu

Tung: yanbu

Fiveletters

A trip down south would blow your mind

What in the good lords name is a tor-tuss?

Tor-toys over here.

Tor-tuss and tung here. South east.

English is not a phonetic language, words are not always pronounced the way they’re spelled (of course regional accents can have some effect). -ough has many different pronunciations depending on the word.

My Mum says "tong" and it drives me crackers. It is definitely tung.

What the frog is a tor tuss?? Its tor toise, rhymes with Rolls Royce

And Tung

Tong is the singular of something you use to pick hot things up with or curl your hair

I say tor-tus and tung.

Fiveletters, I can guarantee you have heard tongue pronounced 'tung' if you've watched TV or listened to the radio - it is the standard pronunciation.

YABU: Pronunciations vary throughout the UK, as accents do. When someone is getting all "x is correct" about pronunciation it really grinds my gears.

I'm Scottish, so it's tor-toys and tung for me.

My tortuss has a tung.

What reading these pronunciation threads demonstrates is that people when listening to other speakers of their native language hear what they expect to hear and don't listen 'carefully' - and why would they? You see it all the time on the rhotic/non-rhotic threads. Of course people with rhotic accents have heard non-rhotic pronunciations of all the words quoted, not least because probably a majority of TV presenters and politicians etc still speak with South-Eastern, received-ish accents.

I know that in Scotland poor, pour, pore and paw are all pronounced differently, but I couldn't replicate them off the top of my head. In my dialect they're all pronounced exactly the same.

I know that in Scotland poor, pour, pore and paw are all pronounced differently

There is plenty variation within Scotland: Where I come from pour and pore would be pronounced the same but, yes, differently to poor and paw.

You see, that proves it. I've probably heard all of them pronounced at some time in all the ways but haven't noticed the differences!

I'm from the south. I say tortuss and tung.

Tor-tuss and tung. A hard "g" at the end of a word really irks me.

Ontop that's right: when you're listening to someone speak, you sort of lock in to their pronunciation and manage to (at least mostly) understand what they're saying, even if their pronunciations are different to yours. You can even predict how they'd pronounce a word... as people do when they're impersonating an accent that isn't their own.

Growing up with mostly English TV programmes (with quite a bit of American thrown in) on only 3 channels wasn't too difficult to understand; nor did it dilute our Scottish mess!

Scottishness!

'When we were little,' the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, 'we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle — we used to call him Tortoise — '

'Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?' Alice asked.

'We called him Tortoise because he taught us,' said the Mock Turtle angrily: 'really you are very dull!'

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll