There have been so many songs about particular streets . . .

Tobacco Road
Broadway

others??[/QUOTE]
How's about, in Chicago, L.S.D?

"Of secondary import to me is the pronunciation of a local street ." ...riding the bus in Chicago will find a stop at "Gothy": Goethe!

"Lonely Street!" My girlfriend lives in Indiana and I'm in Oregon.[/QUOTE]

Kalleh asked, "How do you pronounce 'vagary?'."

Thanks to Gilbert and Sullivan, I never have trouble with this. This song follows an argument in which British peers behaved in the haughty, supercillious fashion unique to such peers. They were unaware that the ladies they addressed were in fact ladies of great influence.

[female in red; male in blue]

Oh! Chancellor unwary
It's highly necessary
Your tongue to teach
Respectful speech --
Your attitude to vary!
Your badinage so airy,
Your manner arbitrary,
Are out of place
When face to face
With an influential Fairy.

A plague on this vagary,
I'm in a nice quandary!
Of hasty tone
With dames unknown
I ought to be more chary;
It seems that she's a fairy
From Andersen's library,
And I took her for
The proprietor
Of a Ladies' Seminary!

Yessir, I don't think I've ever in my life pronounced 'vagary' incorrectly.

[or correctly, for that matter]

Well, obviously it's wrong, but I had pronounced it as VAGUE-ery. I think I have heard others pronounce it that way too.

There was another in QT just today that at least I pronounce right; it was "cache," which rhymes with "sash." Apparently some people pronounce it as "catch?"

cache

Pronounced like our cash which is the new spelling for this loanword. It's used a lot in the IT/computer industry, and I've always heard it pronounced /'kæʃ/.

quote:

Apparently some people pronounce it as "catch?"

I've never heard that myself, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Quote "...I've never heard that myself, but it wouldn't surprise me..."

The word "cache" is quite an old one and had rather faded from use. After all, few people cache stores, or fuel, or other necessaries along their travel routes these days.

So it was a word wide open to have an updated meaning attached to it with the inevitable result that those who had never learnt the word in childhood pronounced it in whatever way seemed to them to be correct.

But for me cache will always be pronounced "cash".

People in Larimer County, Colorado, where the
Cache La Poudre River is a prominent feature, pronounce it "cash."

The river's name means "Hiding Place of Powder." According to legend, French fur trappers in the 1820's were caught by a tremendous snowstorm. To lighten their load, they buried large amounts of gunpowder (poudre) in a hiding place (cache) along the banks of the river.

Reviving...

I am reviving this thread because it is where we have discussed the pronunciation of "err."

Last night(with tongue in cheek because I knew her response) I used the word "err" with my daughter, pronouncing it "ur." She said I was totally crazy. It is pronounced "air" she said. I told her of our discussion, but she would have none of it. She said she has an unabridged "Webster's Third New International Dictionary," which apparently she sees as the gold standard. So she just e-mailed me with this:

"We are both right, but I am probably a bit more right. Err, according to the Webster's Third New International Dictionary (unabridged), is pronounced with the vowel sounding like that in bet or bed (first choice!) or the first and third vowels in banana as well as the first vowel in collect (your option, also valid)."

I am not surprised that she thinks she is "more right." To be honest, I don't understand their second pronunciation at all. I don't see that the vowels in "banana" or the vowel in "collect" are the same as "ur." Am I missing something?

So, I sent her the online OED pronunciation guide, which I am sad to say that I don't understand:

(3: (r)) When I copy and paste, it doesn't appear like it does in the online OED. It has a little symbol that looks like a 3, so I substituted a 3. When you point on it, it says, {revope}. The next symbol is like a colon, but not quite, but I substituted a colon for it. When I point on that symbol, it says something like: {lm}. I am not sure what that means! Can someone decipher the OED pronunciation guide for me?

However, the AHD (online) is clearer, as we posted above, saying that it is pronounced "ur" with 56% of the usage panel preferring "ur," 34% preferring "air" (they use another symbol for it that I don't have) and 10% accepting both.

quote:

I am not surprised that she thinks she is "more right."

We all of us think we are more right.

quote:

To be honest, I don't understand their second pronunciation at all. I don't see that the vowels in "banana" or the vowel in "collect" are the same as "ur." Am I missing something?

I think they mean the first or third a in banana or the o in collect. They are, at least in Standard American English, the sound represented in IPA with a schwa: /ə/. Sometimes the sound of the older pronuciation of err is written with a special symbol, schwa with hook: /ɚ/.

The /ɜ/ in the OED is open-mid central unrounded vowel. It's a rarer sound, and I'm not sure that I could distinguish a schwa from it.

But to me the "ur" sound is not the same as the first and third a in banana or the o in collect. With those sounds it almost sounds like are. I have thought the real pronunciation of err is like ir, ur or ir.

Try blending sofa and err and say so-fer, and you realize there is no way to blend the vowels to make them the same. Still, this vowel does seem pretty rare, I'll have to do some research into this. For any interested, wikipedia has a fairly deep description of IPA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

Speaking of Wikipedia . . .

I recently read an article about Wikipedia becoming the most popular reference source, even surpassing many news sources. If it keeps growing at its current rate, it will likely overtake the New York Times and the Drudge Report sites. Its popularity is due to its percieved neutrality and the fact that virtually anyone can contribute. Democracy in action!

Tinman

{revope} means 'reverse open e', and is that small 3 symbol. It's a symbol used exclusively for the English er/ur/ir sound, that is it's not needed for any other language. English is unusual in allowing a long, stressed equivalent of the unstressed schwa. {lm} means 'length mark': the colon composed of two triangles shows that the 3 is long.

For most speakers (in most dialects too) the final vowel of sofa, bigot, circus is the same, and for many accents it's also true of rivet, livid. This is the neutral vowel or schwa. Now not being able to hear Kalleh's accent, we can't be sure what sound(s) she has here if she doesn't have the usual schwa.

In most accents - and General American is one such - the [3] sound is very like a schwa, but longer. (In American it also has an [r] in it, but this doesn't affect this particular identification.)

The third symbol in the OED guide, (r), shows that there's an [r] sound in some dialects but not others.

Most accents have the same vowel for all three of er/ir/ur, but in Scottish they're different.

Thanks, Aput, for explaining those sounds.

My daughter, who I wish would join this board (and she's just about your age, Sean! ), of course wants me to be sure that she is correct on this. So she sent me the MW pronunciation guide, which, indeed, pronounces it like "air."

Kalleh, there are two pronuciations of err: your daughter's is the newer of the two and yours is the older. At this point both are still correct, though the newer one seems to be the preferred.

Reviving a thread...

Poor Louisville! I was recently there for a meeting, and they have signs up all over saying:

You can pronounce our city:

Luh-a-vul
Luh-vul
Loo-a-ville
Loo-ey-ville
Lew-is-ville

The top pronunciation is preferred, but they say they will welcome all pronunciations!

It is interesting to see on the Wikepedia site that Louisville, Colorado, is pronounced "Lewisville."

This old joke used to be current around Louisville, Colorado. "If the name of this town is "LEWISville, then how do you pronounce the name of the
Capital of Kentucky?"

This message has been edited. Last edited by: jerry thomas,

Sounds rather like the old saying, "You can call me anything you like so long as you call me!"

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

Jer, had I not known the joke, I would have been completely duped!

British posters, my youngest daughter just sent me an email saying: "A British study reported that a woman's chance of getting married goes down by 40% for every 16-point increase in
her IQ, while a man's chance of getting married increases with a higher IQ."

Have any of you heard about this study? It makes me and my daughter mad!

I have never heard of any such study and doubt very much the claim. I suspect it's an urban myth.

Have you checked Snopes?

I don't check Snopes because I can't seem to access it. I have been in contact with their administrators, and no one knows what is wrong.

Perhaps it is an urban myth, then. I wouldn't be surprised.

I can get Snopes OK and have done a quick search but can't find anything apart from a Kinsey study about IQ being affected by havong children. I'll keep looking later.

Does anyone know how to pronounce "boanthropy?" The Wikipedia, Grandiloquent, Luciferous Logolepsy, and Worthless Word for the Day dictionaries don't have pronunciation guides. I can't post the guide from the OED because it won't copy, and I can't understand it. They are asking me for a pronunciation guide on OEDILF. Thanks!

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=Zoanthropy

I believe boanthropy is a pun taken from this word, which I've never heard of, although the roots stuck together make it pretty obvious once you see the definition.

Zoanthropy is a medical condition, the delusion that one is an animal. Boanthropy is evidently(from wikipedia stub article) the delusion that one is an ox, although "bovanthropy" seems a little more natural, boanthropy was probably chosen for the rhyme.

I hadn't heard it either, though it must be legitimate because it's in the OED. It sounds like it might be pronounced bow-AN-thrah-pee. Does that seem right? They used all those funny signs in the OED, and I just don't know them.

BTW, looking for the pronunciation, I found another word. Has anyone heard of "assanka," meaning 10 to the 63rd power? I could only find it in the Grandiloquent Dictionary and am not sure if it is a real word.

The -o- of anthrop- is long in Greek, so if we were doing this from scratch there's a good case for stressing that: bo-an-thró-py. However, words like misánthropy and philánthropy are well established, so boánthropy is the only reasonable choice.

Could assanka be Sanskrit? It looks it and I have a vague idea (very vague) they coined a number of words for very large numbers. -- Added. For example in the Lalitavistara the Buddha names powers of 10 up to 10^421, but I can't find a list of all the names.

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

Thanks, aput, that really helps. It means I have to change the limerick, though.

As for 'assanka,' Shu thought it could be Hindu, which is close to Sanskrit, isn't it?

You could say Hindu is to Sanskrit as Italian is to Latin.

quote:

You could say Hindu is to Sanskrit as Italian is to Latin.

Don't you mean Hindi?

A Hindu is a person, Hindi is a language. Sanskrit is a language, and most of the Buddhist literature is written in Pali, which is a Prakrit. The exact relationship of Sanskrit to the modern Indo-Iranian languages of India (e.g., Hindi-Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi, Panjabi, Bengali, etc.) is uncertain. Vedic Sanskrit, the language in which the Vedas were composed, is quite different from Classical Sanskrit, which like many national standards in modern Europe is a bit of an artificial language. That ancient Indian grammarians made a distinction between Sanskrit ('refined') and Prakrit ('natural, vulgar') may indicate that the modern spoken Indo-Iranian languages of India are related to the Prakrits and not to Sanskrit. In a similar way, it dawned on Romance philologists that Italian, French, Spanish, et al., are really descendants of Vulgar (i.e., spoken) Latin and not the Classical language of Cicero and Vergil.

quote:

Don't you mean Hindi?

Yes, silly mistake.

Mine, too. Sorry.

Reviving a thread...

I need help with translating the pronunciation symbols in the OED. Bob wrote a limerick for OEDILF that I am workshopping. There has been some discussion about the pronunciation of agger. Bob has it rhyming with stagger, and I had seen it as a-jer in Onelook. So I went to the OED, but I always have trouble understanding their symbols. Here is what how it copies (not everything will copy): (æd(r)) The stress is on the first syllable, and between the aed and r is a symbol that looks like a little written (rather then printed) z or a 3 and then an upside down e. It seems to me to be the j sound, but I can't be sure.

Oh, and their definition is: " A mound; esp. the earthen mound or rampart of a camp, formed by the earth excavated from the ditch; a technical term of Roman Antiquities, extended to similar ancient works."

Does anyone either know...or can you interpret the OED for me? Thanks!

That should be the sound in measure, pleasure, or menagerie. The upside down e is the last vowel in sofa.

The ə is called a schwa; the ʒ is called an ezh (not to be confused with a yogh which looks similar but sounds different); the æ is sometimes called an ash or an a e ligature, and it is the sound of the vowel in cat. The sound represented by English j or dg in judgment is usually transcribed as dʒ. The transcription would be: /'ædʒə(r)/. The r is not usually pronounced in Standard British English, but is in US English. For me, badger and agger rhyme.

Oh, thanks, guys. Bob changed his limerick because "agger" doesn't in fact rhyme with "stagger."

Just having read this whole thread, time to me to hoy in a contribution!In my neck of the woods you call your mother 'mam' and father 'dad' or 'da', all of which are pronounced with a flat 'a' as in fat- including father!- but not however 'da' which is pronounced 'dar'as in bar!
All of which leads to another thing. I understand George Bernard Shaw amongst others was an enthusiast for simplified spelling whereas enough would become 'enuff', rough 'ruff', while 'wile', etc. I think it was Bill Bryson who pointed out in one of his books how impossible this would be for the simple fact that few of us pronounce the same words the same way anywhere! In New York girl would be 'goil', it would be 'gal' somewhere else and something like 'girrrl' in Scotland!
And finally I notice the US pronunciation of laboratory is usually 'labratory' whereas the English usually say every syllable with the emphasis, if any, on the 'bor' which is pronounced as in 'borrow'.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Erik Johansen,

I have mentioned this before but I'll mention it again.

The phonemic symbols are very useful but when you have to rely on a written key, as is the case with a dictionary, you are in trouble.

The dictionary may well print a symbol (and I'm not sure how to do them here, some of the ones in zmj's post only show up as a blank square on my monitor) and say that it represents the sound of the "a" in "act" but unless I hear the person who wrote that say the word I can't know how he pronounces it.

Two good examples spring to mind.

My dictionary says that the symbol that looks like an upside down "v" is the vowel sound in "cut", "flood" "rough" and "son". Not only are they not all the same vowel sound for me, the actual sound represented by this symbol doesn't exist at all in my accent. But I need to be completely familiar with the phenemic alaphabet already to know that.

The other example is from the ever dubious rhymezone.

According to rhymezone all of the following words rhyme with "walk".

balk (not to me it doesn't, balk has an "l" sound in the middle which walk, in spite of its spelling, doesn't)

block, clock, sock, rock, mock etc (which to me rhyme with each other but NOT with walk, talk, stalk, chalk - another, completely separate, set of rhymes.)

loch (which not only has a different vowel sound to walk but also a different terminal sound, akin to the more gutteral German "ch")


All I can say reliably is if these have been honestly recorded as rhymes by the author of the rhymezone database then he has a different accent to mine. What that accent is and how ANY of those words are pronounced in it I can't know unless I hear him say them.

quote:

I understand George Bernard Shaw amongst others was an enthusiast for simplified spelling whereas enough would become 'enuff', rough 'ruff', while 'wile', etc. I think it was Bill Bryson who pointed out in one of his books how impossible this would be for the simple fact that few of us pronounce the same words the same way anywhere!

I think you are confusing the issues. The first is that, regardless of what we'd like, if we all spelled things phonetically, then certain words would be spelled in so many different ways that reading them would become impossible.

The second is that, certain words in the English language have universal differences in spelling and pronunciation, like "enough". I'm sure there are many different pronunciations of this word across all the dialects of English, but none of them involve a g. Thus we could simplify the spelling for everyone by making it "enuff". "While" may be different, as I'm sure there are people who pronounce the "wh", and there already exists a word, "wile". Still, the issues can be made separate. If no dialects pronounce the word phonetically, then the spelling can be improved.

This is in no way an endorsement on my part for spelling change. I don't really know how I feel about it.

quote:

balk (not to me it doesn't, balk has an "l" sound in the middle which walk, in spite of its spelling, doesn't)

In baseball terms I have only ever heard pronounced rhyming with walk, so perhaps this was the sense they were suggesting.

There you go, see. I didn't even know it was a baseball term. (Not only am I English, I'm a lifelong sport hater.)

Incidentally my dictionary gives both pronunciations. I've never heard it without the "l" sound.

quote:

I've never heard it without the "l" sound

Same here.

quote:

In baseball terms I have only ever heard pronounced rhyming with walk, so perhaps this was the sense they were suggesting.

Sean, when you say "walk" do you emphasize the "L"? I don't. But I do with "balk," and I am talking about the baseball "balk." To me, "talk" and "walk" rhyme, but "balk" doesn't.

There is also 'baulk', which is used in snooker and billiards. According to Dictionary.com its use is "Chiefly British".

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:

quote:

In baseball terms I have only ever heard pronounced rhyming with walk, so perhaps this was the sense they were suggesting.

Sean, when you say "walk" do you emphasize the "L"? I don't. But I do with "balk," and I am talking about the baseball "balk." To me, "talk" and "walk" rhyme, but "balk" doesn't.

There may be regional and national differences between American English and British English pronunciation. The OED plainly omits the l-sound in both the verb and the noun BALK, and in the past participle BALKED. But in the different word BALKAN, the l- is pronounced.

I don't think there is a single "-alk" word where I pronounce the "l". The only one I can think of is "Malk", which is a Simpsons word.

quote:

Originally posted by pearce:
There may be regional and national differences between American English and British English pronunciation. The OED plainly omits the l-sound in both the verb and the noun BALK, and in the past participle BALKED. But in the different word BALKAN, the l- is pronounced.

Collins English Dictionary on the other hand shows "balk" with both pronunciations - with and without the "l".

I heard a speaker last night on the radio saying "guarantee" as "g-are-en-tee." I say, "g-air-en-tee." Is my way wrong? Is it regional? I am betting the British say "g-are," correct?

Not really except in the South East. Elsewhere it would be

ga----run----tee

ga (a as in cat)
run (neutral schwa vowel sound)
tee (as it looks)

Precisely, Bob. That's how I'd say the word.