The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #132499 Message #4056771
Posted By: Thompson
02-Jun-20 - 05:37 PM
Thread Name: BS: Language Pet Peeves
Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
Ah yes, creeping pronunciations. To "proTEST" has become to "PROtest", the verb pronounced the same as the noun, and in various other words I can't now place but which make my flesh creep when I hear them, the emphasis has sneaked back to the first syllable. Then there's all the pronunciations where people have seen the word written but have never heard it used - albeit "Al Bate"; segue rhyming with vague, etc. And place names: when they're pronounced wrong once, that's it, the pronunciation changes forever. Hubert Butler has a wonderful article where he's raging about Dublin placenames like those correctly pronounced DorSETT Street and WESTmoreland Street being pronounced DORset and WestMOREland nowadays. And of course Louth in Ireland - always correctly pronounced with a hard 'th' like 'the' - is more and more horribly often pronounced like the English town of Louth, which has a soft 'th' like 'commonwealth'.