Friedag, let's just say that most Americans don't refer to Old French , Latin, or PigLatin for their pronunciations. The example I cited is a result of sloppiness pure and simple.

Yoyobon, perhaps we are coming at your observation of the pronunciation of the word immediately from the differing views of a prescriptivist for and a descriptivist of language.

I like the statements of linguist and author John McWhorter:

'Any language is always and forever on its way to changing into a new one, with many of the sounds, word meanings, and sentence patterns we process as "sloppy" and "incorrect" being the very things that will constitute the "proper" language of the future.

Because a language changes in different random directions among different groups, any language is actually a bundle of dialects, none of which can be seen as degraded language because they all arise from the same process of gradual, unstoppable change.

Because there are so many languages in the world and so many bilingual people, language mixture is a natural and inevitable part of how languages have changed, now change, and will change -- and not just today . . .' Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a "Pure" Standard English

Samuel Johnson wanted to write a prescriptive dictionary, but after ten years of researching, compiling, editing and finally getting his dictionary published, he admitted that as soon as the printing ended it was outdated.

I think it's fun to note the many, many changes in English just in my lifetime, as well as all the changes that came before. It's always a good topic for discussion, I think.

yoyo and Frieda I can't join in with your pronunciation discussion as, over here, we all speak so sloppily!

Here's an eg of lack of punctuation in a sentence from my 'bedside' read

I met my husband who died when I was eighteen.

As there was no forewarning/context about this strange comment it left me totally perplexed.

At first I thought the writer must have been very young when she meet the man she went on to marry. Even with a comma after 'died' I feel it is a very over-casual way of writing.

In a news article this morning it was suggested that communication is evolving due to the younger generation's reliance on texting. They are creating new words and abbreviated forms of words to fit texting limitations. I would say communication is decomposing.

Yoyo, perhaps transforming?

I have just been watching a TV doco about Chaucer and imagine his reaction to seeing a modern version of The Canterbury Tales. He would deplore the spelling of his words, no doubt!

It would be interesting to recreate a portion of Chaucer using the current texting vocab and abbreviations. Here is the beginning of the Miller's Tale rewritten in today's English:

Whan that the Knyght had thus his tale ytoold,
When the Knight had thus told his tale,
3110 In al the route nas ther yong ne oold
In all the company there was no one young nor old
3111 That he ne seyde it was a noble storie
Who did not say it was a noble story
3112 And worthy for to drawen to memorie,
And worthy to draw into memory,

Texted ? : N worthy 2 draw N 2 memory.

Vee, is your example a sentence or a sentence fragment? If there is no context, it is perplexing indeed. It has to be missing a clause or two because it makes absolutely no sense as it stands. I am assuming it must be some sort of informal writing -- what sort?

I love Chaucer! I possibly could make some sense out of the 14th-century words and sentence structure, but the modern version sure helps me. I am guessing that Chaucer wrote about the time the Great Vowel Shift was getting underway and English spelling certainly hadn't been standardized yet.

Yoyobon, maybe you can decode this for me:

Texted ? : N worthy 2 draw N 2 memory.

My experience with texting is minimal.

ETA: Never mind, Yoyo. I "got it" as soon as I submitted the original post. :-)

Frieda, the 'sentence I quoted was quite free standing The writer had mentioned her husband briefly in an earlier chapter but I was still puzzled.

Actually you might enjoy the premise of the book Time Song: Searching for Doggerland by Julia Blackburn about the lost area off the East coast of England, that drowned when the sea levels rose after the ice age and now part of the shallow area in the N Sea/English Channel known as the Dogger Bank. Many animal remains and human artifacts are being trawled up in fishermen's nets and along the cliff edges where ancient rivers once flowed towards what is now Norway.

Vee, the Doggerland book sounds fascinating!

We're currently in the US and I've ordered coffee a couple of times in places where they ask your name to write on the order. Now I know that even at home, Kath is quite a difficult name to get, so the first time I said 'Kate'. No problems. But the next time it came with 'Kite' on the label, and today I said 'Kath' and it had 'Keth' LOL!

Hah, Kath. It's our wonderful sense of individuality at work.

Kathy, perhaps you need to say " Phaedra" next time and see what happens. When asked to fill out my age on any form that is not absolutely official, I write down 50+. Good enough :0)

Kath, where are you in the US? Just curious...

Yesterday our local weather lady said it was going to be "mostly partly cloudy". At least it wasn't the "extramostbestest" weather forecast!

Donna

Donna...nooooo ! She said that on air ? egads.

Our local weather people have a chart that tells us what to wear or bring with us today . Then they read it to us : " Today you'll need a light jacket and sunglasses. Be sure to bring along your umbrella in case of some surprise showers !" As I have always suspected, idiots abound and are reproducing.

Bon....... on southernmost border of NY

Donna, we had a few days in NYC, to Philadelphia for a week and now back in NYC. Weather is quite nice although a bit too humid for my taste.

We very frequently hear/read in newspapers and TV reports usually from the police or sports commentators " so and so fell to the floor/ hit the floor " when talking about an activity that happened outside. They seem unaware that the floor refers to a surface within a building and they should be using the word ground for the outside space where the robber was caught or the player was brought down in a tackle.

LOL, Vee!

Yes, vee, that drives me nuts!

I have a Southern friend (US) who uses the phrase 'sit in the floor'. I thought it was a mistake at first but she says it's local usage.

Kath, a lot of people here say they “stood on line” where I would say “stood in line”. I had a coworker fro Guatemala who often said “in” when she really meant “on” because the Spanish word en is used for both.

Donna

Kath......that's why most transplants from the north have to send their children to private schools !

I am increasingly irritated by the usage in America of "wallah" or "walla" when the person is trying to say "voila", which is a legitimate French term. Maybe it's because I lived a year in France and respect the language and people. If you are going to use a foreign term, at least try to spell it correctly instead of guessing.

and add "chow" ( ciao ) to that list.

My MIL used to say " lah-zag-nah" ( lasagne) and " oh joe " ( au jus ) and although she never once ever traveled to England , would always say " paste-ah" instead of " pah-stah" ( like the actual Italian ).

Colleen, you're right ! That is how she pronounced it .

I'm probably fighting a losing battle on this one but I'm annoyed by "lahn-zhe-ray" for lingerie.

Mary, I think a lot of Americans don’t know the word is “voila”. They’re just repeating what they think they’ve heard.

My grandmother was from rural Georgia and had very little formal education. She called dachshunds “dash hounds” and pronounced Don Quixote phonetically. :)

Donna

phoebe.....how would you pronounce lingerie ....because I think I'd annoy you !

I'd say it with -REE the last syllable. The first syllable is so often Anglicized that English-speakers probably can't be expected to get the French version letter-perfect but the "in" in lingerie should be more like the "in" in the French "vin" when pronounced correctly. If it were pronounced lahn-zhe-RAY, it would be spelled differently, with the first syllable being lan-. My main quibble is with the last syllable, but it's a lost cause. I've heard lahn-zhe-RAY all too often.

msmeow, I rarely hear an Australian pronounce "dachshund" correctly; it's almost _always_ "dash hound". Or they avoid it altogether and say "sausage dog".

I avoid saying lingerie, it sounds a bit precious unless I am in a very upmarket boutique, and usually refer to "undies" or a specific item as I have a mental picture of something fluttery in chiffon, so not me!

When I was in France my French penfriend was asking me if I knew about someone called Donkey-Shart, it was only when she pointed at a picture of the man tilting at a windmill that it clicked...

Phoebe.....apparently the lingerie pronunciation is either British ( EE) or American (AY). Simple as that.

annpanagain, that's exactly what I do--just not use the word lingerie at all and so avoid the whole issue of its pronunciation. In a department store a whole section of the store might be labelled LINGERIE. In that case I'd just hope that I didn't have to ask anyone for directions to it.

There's no rule against switching pronunciations to suit the locale. If you are in New York, you would say 'ray' for the last syllable of lingerie. If in London, end with 'ree'. In Paris, say lah(n)zh-ri (approximate since my keyboard doesn't have the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols and diacritics). Even in France, you will hear variations in provincial pronunciations -- as I recall, there are notable differences the farther you get from Paris, but most non-Parisian French speakers will try to say it the Parisian way when in 'mixed' company because, after all, Parisian is the French standard. It all depends on how much of a purist or strict prescriptivist a speaker wants to be. For a nonnative when outside of France there's always a danger of sounding affected if one insists on the French way.

The Parisian pronunciation that I wrote above with the 'n' in parenthesis indicates that the 'n' is barely hinted at, as it can be inhaled (or gently snorted into the nasal cavity), a wonderful trick of native and fluent French speakers that gives the authentic French sound. It's always been devilishly difficult for me to accomplish.

Authentic french folks cannot pronounce "th".......so forgive Americans if we slip on some of their sounds :0) It's a big world.

I will never sound French! For a start, I can't roll my "RRRS"!

In spite of this, I got by with my British sounding French anyway. Smile and point works for most languages, I have found!

Hand gestures speak volumes in Italian !

I was interested to learn that the TV series "Keeping Faith" performed in both English and Welsh was different in some ways when the actors used the two languages.

Apparently the cultures got involved in subtle ways. Another point was that the two couples in the play were actually couples in real life and the Welsh lead actress had to learn to speak Welsh! She isn't a native speaker although the rest of the cast were. Quite a triumph.

I have Welsh ancestry and looked at a language book, thinking of learning. We went to Wales quite a number of times when I lived in the UK. It looked very hard and has no connection to the Romance languages which I can relate to.

As I am not likely to go there any more, I passed on that!

Annpan, among the Germanic languages, English is the oddest in many ways. One way is in the sentence construction for asking a question. Linguists were puzzled about the many questions starting with Do . . . in English since this is not a construction used in any of the other Germanic languages. Yet it is very old in English. Where did it originate, then?

Do you see what he's doing?

Do you understand?

Do you know the time?

It doesn't seem weird to English speakers because we are accustomed to hearing it, but to learners of English as a second language it is very peculiar.

The answer to the "do problem" was within hearing distance, so to speak, of the English linguists. It comes from Welsh!

The Welsh also use 'do' in other constructions that were adopted by English speakers very early. And it continues to the present. Americans particularly seem to like the 'do' construction. For instance, many Americans say "I have done done it." It might seem ungrammatical to many hearers, but it has long precedence. 'Do' is a workhorse in English. In Middle English some of its forms were 'doth' and 'doeth'?

I read about this in Our Magnificent B*st*rd Tongue: The Untold History of English by linguist John McWhorter. I think that's fascinating and thought you might too. :-)

Annpan, re 'Keeping Faith' Like you I had read that the series was being made in both English and Welsh and that the leading actress didn't speak the language so had to learn her lines phonetically, I would guess. Knowing this before I watched the series I noticed that when she is speaking very often she is not facing the camera and wondered if it was to make it less obvious that she wasn't talking with ease.

Frieda, although I live less than 8 miles from the border I only know a few words of Welsh and DH a few more as he was at University in N Wales (a complete culture shock for him!) and am surprised at the word do having come from the Welsh as there are so few words used in English that can trace their origin back to Welsh/Celtic . . . mostly reference to 'landscape' eg afon/avon meaning river and so on.

The Welsh word for 'do' is wneud pronounced 'woonide' . . . more or less . . . but perhaps 'do' is a much older Welsh word that is quite different from the 'modern form of the language.

Regarding the English word 'do'. In this neck of the woods older people still say "Him d' do" for "He said" to add emphasis to what they are saying.

Vee, I noticed that about Faith too. Add a lot of silent acting, such as fiddling and tossing her long hair, playing with the children etc. Also the show was padded with driving the cars and long shots of the countryside!

It was later that I read about the dual shooting of the series. I borrowed the DVD as I was impatient to see the whole thing, rather than weekly installments and there were "extras" on the disc, explaining this.

Vee, Welsh is not one of the languages of Britain that I studied in linguistics coursework, so the only things I know about it are bits and pieces I picked up in synoptic reading.

From my understanding of the 'do problem', it's not the actual word do that comes from Welsh which was apparently Nes in Welsh, as in Nes i agor? meaning Did I open? The Welsh influence is rather in the way a question was constructed with the do-verb. In a Welsh sentence the verb always came first with the subject noun/pronoun coming after the verb. The Celtic languages are some of only a very few in the world that have this structure. The Germanic languages put the verb after the subject noun -- sometimes putting the verb as the very last word in a German sentence (remember Mark Twain's joke about German verbs). English uses the same German pattern (subject noun - verb - objective noun) in most sentences.

At some point, English and Welsh began cross-pollinating their languages, and it was the Welsh structure that prevailed for asking questions with the verb do, the verb always coming first. Some linguists have called this "the meaningless do" because its only purpose seems to have been as an opener to ask a question, as an attention getter. Why did this happen? Nobody knows for certain -- it's just one of those oddities of language change.

Cornish, the other nearby Celtic language, also bequeathed to English some interesting words and grammatical features, according to McWhorter and other linguists, but I don't recall any of those.

In another post, Annpan mentioned the 'a-prefixing plus present participle' pattern. The Concise Oxford . . . attributes it to Norman French influence, but in some of my reading on the 'do problem' I found that some linguists prefer the theory that the Welsh were also responsible for that construction.

Although my mother went to Wales on holidays,as her parents had a liking for the place ( I never thought to question why a London family went there, one of the things you wish to know when it is too late to ask! ) she never picked up any of the language.

What she did often use was the English idioms spoken by Welsh people. Like "Look you!" "Indeed to goodness." and a big favourite "There's posh for you!" which could be either in admiration or mocking. All done with a kind of sing-song, rythemic accent. My Welsh ancestry came from my father's family but I don't think he ever went there.

Vee, my husband did a post-doc at the University of North Wales at Bangor in 1985-6. The Welsh language is quite hard to pick up and I mostly only learnt place names. Our street name was Lon-y-Ffrwd in Gwynedd.

Kath, John was in Bangor in the '60's just when the 'anti-English' thing was getting under way. Many of the rather dour 'locals' had no time for the population of South Wales, let along from those over the border . . . and of course the Welsh spoken in the North is not quite the same as that in the South! He did however enjoy the coastal scenery and took up diving while there.

Welsh must be one of the few languages used when locals don't want visitors/incomers to understand what they are saying. It is not unusual in rural communities for someone (me for eg) to have walked into a village shop and all those inside to stop talking English and start up again in Welsh. There is also the old chestnut of someone going into a Welsh pub and trying to order. It isn't until he has said loudly "Can I buy any of you a drink?" that they remember the English for "Mines a pint."

Just read an appallingly constructed sentence in our local paper:

”That is the core difference between [Paul Hogan’s] comedic shtick”.

How the heck does “between” fit in this sentence? Presumably the writer- who has a byline- is a trained journalist, though a poorly educated one.

Colleen, someone might have altered the original copy. He must have meant to compare Paul Hogan with another comedian.

Reading the rest of the article, I don’t think so, Annpan. But whoever edited it, if it _was_ edited, should have been on the ball.

Colleen, we see endless eg's of writing in the local papers where the so-called reporter has checked his copy but not deleted his previous mistakes so we see and . . . but . .. (or whatever the words are) next to each other. Obviously it's not picked up before the paper goes to print; very shoddy workmanship.

*sigh*.....the local news reporter was saying that a route that had been closed was now open and reports " ....and route 81 is back open"

Back open. Not reopened ...or ....is now open to traffic .

Apparently they write their own script ,