I turned on the
television in the early afternoon at the beginning of May to watch coverage of
the County Championship cricket match between Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire.
When the picture
appeared, I was confronted by the face of Matt Allwright. He is someone
whose reports on the television programme “Watchdog” I have found interesting
and so I stayed with that channel. He was hosting a quiz programme called
“The Code”.
I managed to watch 25
minutes of it before I either fell asleep or switched to the cricket. I
can’t remember which. “The Code” is the dullest, most boring and
contrived quiz show that has ever polluted afternoon television viewing.
The highpoint of the
programme seemed to be to watch electronic digits 1 to 9 flicker in a small
square box and see whether, when the flickering stops, the number that appears
is the number that had been chosen by the contestant. It really is
as thrilling as that and it happens every 5 or 6 minutes.
I used to get more
excitement at the playground by anticipating where a roundabout carrying my
children would stop and then standing at that place to see if I was right.
“What kind of nut is
in the nut in a Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut chocolate bar?” was one question.
The answer is almond.
How do you pronounce
“almond”?
The days when a linguist might be able to tell
someone’s birthplace from the way they pronounced a particular word have
gone. A recent University of Cambridge
study has found that more and more people are using and pronouncing words in
the way that people from London and the southeast do. The cause is unclear, but
is probably the result of greater mobility and the influence of broadcast
media.
I heard “almond”
pronounced in three ways by three people in three minutes.
Matt Allwright: “AL-mond”
Contestant: “AR-mond”
Woman at a desk: “AWL-mond”
Does it matter?
Yes, it bloody well does matter! I feel the same irritation when someone
says, “AL-mond” as I do with
those who have tea and “sconns”.
They are “scones” as far as I’m concerned. I know that a lot
of people disagree with me on that and will challenge me by asking how I
pronounce “gone” or "shone". Fair enough, but I will counter
with “bone” and "stone".
English pronunciation
is tricky, what with “bough”, “through”, “cough” and “rough” but some
pronunciations are just plain wrong and AL-mond is one of those. I wonder how Allwright pronounces “alms”, the
money or food given to poor people?
I suspect that
everyone of us pronounces words the way that our parents did. I can
remember being jeered by other pupils on my first day at junior school in
Suffolk when I answered a question by saying, “drama”.
I had just moved to
live in Lowestoft from south London and I used a long vowel sound in the first
syllable – “drarmer”.
I was laughed at by everyone, including the teacher.
“Oh, it’s drARmer is it?” he sneered. Bloody Mr Sandford!
I came across an article that begins with
the words:
There’s nothing more
irritating to a pedant’s ear than someone saying, “mis-chiev-ious” instead of “mis-chif-erse”. OK, I’m a pedant - in that person’s
view - because I do become irritated but I am unapologetic.
Every one of the four
dictionaries I have looked at says that phonetically, the word “arm” is
pronounced ɑːm; “almond” is pronounced ɑːmənd
and “alms” is pronounced ɑːmz.
And so, the contestant pronounced it correctly because the first syllable of
"almond" is pronounced like "arm". That’s not
difficult is it?
There are other words
that I seem to be hearing mispronounced more often. When she was
Secretary of State for Transport, Justine Greening often had to talk about the
proposed HS2 rail line. In an interview in October 2011, soon after she
had been appointed, she pronounced the ‘H’ as “haitch”.
I think that someone
must have spoken to her because she always spoke about “High Speed Two” after
that. Never again while she held that office did she ever say, “(h)aitch
ess two”.
The word that is the
sixth most often mispronounced by UK residents, apparently, is the word “often”
itself. The ‘t’ should be silent but many people say, “off-ten” instead of “offen”. Similarly, I find it
jarring when the ‘t’ in ‘hospital’ is accentuated. The pronunciation is “hospidtle”.
For five years,
Caroline and I lived on Grand Cayman, an island that to all intents and
purposes is a suburb of Miami and some American pronunciations, such as leaving
the ‘h’ off the word ‘herb’ really niggled me.
When we were living in
Cayman, we found that all indigenous Caymanians, including pastors, teachers
and cabinet ministers, always “arks”
for something and never did they ‘ask’.
We got used to hearing
the American way of pronouncing words. I sometimes asked for tomato juice
with Worcester sauce even when I didn’t really want one, just so that I could
snigger when I heard the bartender say, “ter-may-dow
juice and wuss-sess-ter-shy-yer sauce”.
Caroline once had a
problem in the University of Miami Hospital Cafeteria. It was lunchtime;
the café was crowded and she was in a long, slow moving queue.
“Could I have a bottle of water please?”
she asked.
“Huh?” said the assistant. “Say wah?”
“A bottle of water please.”
“What’s that, honey?”
“A bottle of water.”
“Is that some kind of juice?”
“No, water.”
“Huh? There’s a line, honey.
Say again.”
“Water!”
“Honey, we’re kinda
busy. What d’yer want?”
Caroline, remembering
that around 70% of Miami is of Hispanic origin, asked for a bottle of “agua”.
“Agua! Right,
okay! A boddle of wodder. Why didn’t you say?”
The assistant had
finally understood what this strange woman with her funny accent was
wanting. After that, we both learnt to always change the ‘t’ into a ‘d’
whenever we wanted water and to ask for “budder” to spread on our bread.
When Americans say
“privacy” they pronounce it with a long vowel so that it becomes, “preyevacy”.
That’s fair enough I suppose but why do they shorten the vowel in “leverage”
and pronounce it, ‘levverage’?
And why have so many news reporters here in the UK recently begun to copy
them? That really peeves me.
“Leverage” is a word
that I only ever hear in news reports. I don’t think I’ve ever used it in
conversation and no one I’ve ever talked to has used it either. I do wish
that reporters in the UK said, ‘leeverage’.
When saying “primarily” there is an
increasing number of people who stress the second syllable, not the first. That’s another American influence.
Americans are
inconsistent in their pronunciation too. Caroline’s sister lives on
Sullivan Street, close to Houston Street in New York. The street is
pronounced “How-ston”.
The city of the same spelling in Texas is pronounced, “Hoo-ston”.
How words are
pronounced doesn’t really matter at all as long as the meaning of what is said
is clear. Pronunciation is like grammar in that even if a ‘rule’ is
broken, no damage is done if the listener understands what is meant.
However, like poor
grammar, nonstandard pronunciation can cause irritation and to me it certainly
does.
