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Names from other languages I think are especially obvious for the self taught or avid reader. Euler, Goethe, Camus, etc
Leibniz
Shillelagh embodies this for me. None of my guesses were even close.
Looks Irish or I guess Gaelic is the word in looking for? I’m guessing something weird like ji-gah-lo
It is Irish yeah, it’s shill-LAY-lee
Looks like Irish also has varying pronunciations with the same spelling, because the shillelagh -lagh sounds like lee, but in the name Shelagh (or Sheelagh) it’s lah.
I pronounced hyperbole as it is spelled “hyper bole” for decades and nobody corrected me! It wasn’t until I finally saw someone say it in a TV show that I realized the error of my ways. Now I stumble over the word every time I try to say it because I have decades of habit to overcome. Sometimes when I think I might need to say it, I start mouthing it ahead of time so that I get it right on the first try. There are at least a dozen other words like this for me, and I’m sure dozens more that I’m not even aware of.
This one is particularly annoying because of Hyperbolic, which is pronounced Hy-per-bol-ic. Which just makes Hy-per-bole seem more valid…
Generally it kind of retains the features of the pronunciation of the language it was borrowed from. In this case Greek, which generally pronounces every vowel in a word. Similar to Aphrodite (which one would expect to be pronounced Afro-dight).
I know that doesn’t help much unless you have already built a guide in your head about how words of a certain language are pronounced and can guess what language that word originates from. You might need to consult a dictionary to find out what language it was borrowed from, at which point you’ll also see the pronunciation.
Same here. Hyper bowl. Until i heard it on TV.
I just want to suggest that your pronunciation at the end of your message is not quite right still.
Wouldn’t it be closer to say “hi-per-ber-lee”? Or am i still getting it wrong?
Someone else replied and gave a better phonetic spelling of it. I updated mine too. “Hy-per-buh-lee”.
What’s funny is the first time I heard it, I knew immediately what it was, but I wasn’t sure if that was the correct pronunciation, or if the speaker was being all high-born fancy-pants, so I had to ask my wife. English isn’t even her first language and she knows everything about it. She’s 10x better at speaking and writing English than I am. I do have other talents though! I think…
I thought Harry Potter’s friends was pronounced her-mee-ohn for the first three books.
What does not exactly help in some people’s case, is that other Euro languages have adjusted Greek etc. words more to their own needs and actually do the “bowl” thing (even omit the e on the end, like in Dutch). I mean, I think that is what keeps me back.
The Hyperb Owl, the less known relative of the Superb Owl.
I’m the same vein, epitome.
Hy-per-buh-lee
wow! I made the same mistake till now! I just started speaking English again after a decade. all of my pronunciations are wacky 😁
Now pronounce “Nukular.”
It genuinely is hard to master more obscure English pronunciation because so much of it is made up of loan words from very different languages, but this will help as a general principle to follow.
You can tell someone grew up a rube because they say things like “You can tell someone grew up reading”
Annihilator - i used to say annie he lator - the spelling on this word. Seriously.
Hyperbole - like 2 years ago i found out its not hyper bowl. Really?
Onyx - Onks. On icks? Only 40 years saying that word wrong…
Ok, you have to admit Onks was just a bad guess.
How is annihilator supposed to be pronounced?
uh nai ui laytor With a heavy accent on N. Say it as if you’re just about to sacrifice a cat
Relative to how OP wrote it out I would say it is usually pronounced an-EYE-ill-ate-or.
Аннигилятор I guess. Just kidding.
I was really embarrassed the first time I watched Harry Potter.
Why?
Lotta folk though it was Her-me-own
That without the e.
Some dubs (as in translated dialogue, not inept people) pronounce it that way.
Nah, she is Hermy One, the prototype.
That’s (almost) the correct prononciation in french though.
Would that be like “Ehr-me-own”?
Instance of this I remember, was genre. I had seen the word, knew what it meant, 0 clue how to say it. At work one day in my teen days and someone asks “What kind of genres do you like” (in context, we were talking about video games). I clearly had a confused look on my face and the guy that asked me that switched to insulting me for not knowing a word. It took me maybe 30 seconds to figure out the word he said and the word I knew were the same thing, but apparently that was “too long”.
Mine was facade. I read it as fuh-cade and thought phissod was people putting up a false front.
The confusion probably arose because the authors spelled it as «facade» rather than «façade» as if the cedilha were just decoration in the french word.
Why did you have to do “phissod” dirty like that 💀 At least write something like “fuhsod”
That’s what that sound was in my head. Ph specifically.
My pet theory is that spoken English and written English are two different languages that kinda translate between them.
In spoken English, “I read books.” doesn’t have ambiguous tense.
You’re not exactly wrong. Spoken english was shaped by mostly the use of common people while writing was exclusively the domain of the clergy and nobility for a very long time.
Noah Webster didn’t go far enuf
I am so with you. I’m not a native speaker. I learned most of my English from reading books - thousands of books, actually. So written English is absolutely no problem.
My pronounciation sucks, and my listening comprehension is horrible, on the other hand.
I said Hermione “hermy-own” in my head until I watched the movies.
Idempotent
It still never sounds right to me.
Segue - Seg? Segyoo? No, it’s Segway.
segooey
