From an article via Slashdot:

quote:

"Blog", "netiquette", "cookie" and "wiki" have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to the results of a poll published Thursday.

Topping the list of words most likely to make web users "wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard" was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.

I am developing a wiki project at work, and many of my colleagues are less than computer savvy. "Wiki"??? they say. "What is that???" It just sounds kind of stupid.

Try pronouncing veekee, as I sometimes do with IT professionals. They're confabulasticated by the original Hawai`ian pronunciation.

A tangent, I know, but Amazon has dubbed its new wiki "Askville." Eeewwww.

This is off-subject, but akin to zmj's veekee. I always pronounce Muslim as MOOSE-lim and Carnegie as car-NEGG-ee because that's how I've been told they are pronounced, even though the dictionaries mostly have the Western pronunciation for Muslim and the incorrect pronunciation (as confirmed to me by someone in the Carnegie family) of Carnegie. So I get funny looks (and corrective comments) when I pronounce them correctly. I suppose I should just start pronouncing them incorrectly to be better understood, as has happend with err.

Sorry...back to your original subject...

[edited to correct some stupid mistakes I made, as you can see in goofy's post below. Sorry!]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
This is off-subject, but akin to zmj's veekee. I always pronounce Muslim[/i as [i]MOOSE-lim and Carnegie as car-NEGG-ee because that's how I've been told they are pronounced (by the U.S. Diplomatic Corps), even though the dictionaries mostly have the Western pronunciation for Muslim and the incorrect pronunciation (as confirmed to me by someone in the Carnegie family) of Carnegie. So I get funny looks (and corrective comments) when I pronounce them correctly. I suppose I should just start pronouncing them incorrectly to be better understood, as has happend with err.

One could argue that the correct pronunciation is the one recorded in the dictionaries, since is it the one used by the majority of English speakers.

About veekee: the Hawaiian pronunciation is neither /v/ or /w/, it's a labiodental approximant that sounds to me like something between /v/ and /w/. It's also in Hindi and German.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

I suppose one could argue that (well, in reality, one could argue anything..., as only we on Wordcraft know. ), and I'd agree regarding Muslim. However, Carnegie comes from a name, and I couldn't agree with that one.

Good point, goofy. I guess I'll go back to muz-lim then. However, then it should be wi-kee, as that's how the dictionaries show the pronunciation.

the Hawaiian pronunciation is neither /v/ or /w/, it's a labialdental approximant that sounds to me like something between /v/ and /w/. It's also in Hindi and German.

Ah, I hadn't realized it was a labiodental approximant. I thought it was just a plain old labiodental fricative. Thanks for the heads-up.

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Originally posted by bethree5:
A tangent, I know, but Amazon has dubbed its new wiki "Askville." Eeewwww.

If they provide complete answers, are they Askwholes?"

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
I get funny looks (and corrective comments) when I pronounce them correctly.

There was an Oregon pioneer named Glisan, and a street is named after him. According to historical records, it's pronounced "Glis'n," yet 99% of people here say "Gleason." Sigh...

There's a Cairo along the Mississippi, in Illinois I think, and they pronounce it Kay-row, just like the abbreviation for Kerosene.

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regarding Muslim.

I'm old enough to remember when it was pronounced "Moslem" and the prophet was "Mohamed." Often the difference is due to regional pronounciations. For example, I always said Af GAN is tan but on the news I heard natives of that country pronounce it in different ways. One, from the north(?) said Aff HAN is tan.
And by the way, we have a Cairo, pronounced KAY row, here in Georgia. The KAY sylable is twice as long as the row.

We in Illinois also have a Cairo (KAY ro), at our southern tip. [also a Marsailles (mar SAILS) and a Versailles (ver-SAILS)]

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,' just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
- Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, ch. 17

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Try pronouncing veekee, as I sometimes do with IT professionals. They're confabulasticated by the original Hawai`ian pronunciation.

tourist in Hawaii, speaking to a local:
tour: How do you pronounce the name of your state? Is it Hawaii or Havaii?
local: Havaii, definitely.
tour: Thanks.
local: You're velcome.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

As we all know, Spanish also has the indistinguishable "b / v" phoneme. Hence "vaquero" (cow herder) evolved to "buckaroo."

Spanish also has the indistinguishable "b / v" phoneme

JT, that's yet another sound: a voiced bilabial fricative. The voiceless version of this sound is how the Japanese pronounce the f in futon and Fuji.

Yes, Sean, Cairo is in Illinois and you are correct about its pronunciation. I lived in southern Illinois for a summer, and it's so different from northern Illinois...there is definitely a southern accent down there.

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As we all know, Spanish also has the indistinguishable "b / v" phoneme. Hence "vaquero" (cow herder) evolved to "buckaroo."

I have a feeling that this is more true in South American Spanish than in Castillian Spanish.

South American Spanish (like US English) has developed in different ways from the original European languages, often retaining older styles as well as creating new ones.

Interestingly, I was having a long chat with a lady in Grand Canary a couple of weeks ago and she made the point that Canarian Spanish uses older formations and pronunciations - much like South American Spanish. For example, the Canarians, like South Americans, do not lisp their "Cs" and "Zs" and I had to be careful to remember to ask for "una cerveza" rather than "una therevetha, when ordering a beer.

There are many varieties of Spanish spoken throughout the world. Mexico and Colombia have more Spanish speakers than Spain. The /b/ phoneme, written with a b or a v in the orthography, has different realizations as different allophones in different contexts. Most Iberian varieties of Spanish (at least those in the northern two-thirds of the Iberian peninsula, where c and z are interdental fricatives) have b word-initially and after nasals word-internally (e.g., both the bs in bomba). Intervocalically, the phoneme is the voiced bilabial fricative mentioned above (w.g., chaval). In some isolated regions in Spain and in the Spanish varieties of the Andes in South America, f intially is pronounced not as a labiodental, as it is in the rest of the Hispanophone world, but as a voiceless bilabial fricative, as in Japanese, e.g., in fue. Sounds for the graphemes y and ll also have different pronunciations in different varieties of Spanish. My high school Spanish teacher had a strong Argentine accent. Her ll usually was realized as a voiced alveolar fricative (like the z haček in my online name).

In the movie, "Motorcycle Diaries," it is pointed out that Ernesto "Che" Guevara got his nickname because of this very shibboleth.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
Good point, goofy. I guess I'll go back to muz-lim then.

Don't change your pronunciation on my account!

Speaking of KAY-ro, one of my favorite town pronunciation quirks comes from Upstate New York, where the village of New Berlin (pronounced NEW ber-LIN) is just a hop, skip and a jump from South New Berlin (pronounced SOUTH new BER-lin).

Wordmatic

During the 18 months that I lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin I learned that the next city to the north, pronounced in Chicago dialect, was "Sou' Mwawkee," and the next was Mwawkee, Skonsin."

(Kalleh and Shu will feel free to protest ..... )

There's a New Berlin in Skonsin; oral tradition held that it was pronounced ber-LIN until 1914, BER-lin afterwards.