[Sca-cooks] Reptilian Pronunciation (was Drive up ATM's OT, OOP (was Languages)

[Jane Williams]

Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com> wrote :
> >The metal? The one I'd spell aluminium? (And, come to think of it, the
> init=
> >ial "u" *would* sound like "oo" in this case.
>
> It does. But it is frequently pronounced al-yew-min-i-um, which is
> simply incorrect, on more than one count.

"Incorrect" in what sense? And what are the other counts?

> You _are_ using their language, or at least a part of it.
No, I'm using English. It's the only language I can claim to know.

> what I object to is ... the implication that South Americans who fail
> to pronounce "jaguar" as "jag-yew-ar" and North Americans who don't
> pronounce "aluminum" as "al-yew-min-i-um" are pronouncing those words
> incorrectly.

Surely they're pronouncing them correctly for their language? Which is different from mine? "Derived from" does not mean "identical to", after all. Otherwise we'd have to insist on Americans putting that unnecessary "u" back into "color" and so on, because it's derived from a French word that keeps (and needs) the U :) And most of English would have to return to its French/Norse/etc origins...  aargh!


> Possibly. Each is consistent with examples from its source language,
> if not with those from others.

Well, that's good news.

> Probably. Actually even the spelling in Middle English is a lot more
> consistent than a lot of people make it out to be, at least within
> individual documents, so obviously the writers of the documents felt
> that spelling counted.

Yes, it's not all *that* bad. Just enough variation to make it fun.