Mispronunciation - Linguistics Blog

Everest Leo

Mr. Roddy

IHSS

10 September 2021

Mispronunciation of Words

https://theconversation.com/mispronunciation-why-you-should-stop-correcting-peoples-mistakes-163308

    The article I read was about mispronunciations and how they arise, as well as why we should stop correcting peoples mispronunciations, unless they are incomprehensible. One reason for how mispronunciations are created that the article pointed out is that people will see/hear a word and if they are unfamiliar with it, they will tend to think of another word that is similar to it and try to pronounce it like that word. For example, the word "espresso" clearly has no "x" but it is often pronounced as "expresso" which, as the article points out, is probably due to the fact that "espresso" is not an English word, but it is similar to "express" and so individuals might be prone to mashing the two pronunciations together. Another way that mispronunciations are born is through dropping unnecessary syllables for convenience. Some examples of words that have succumbed to this fate are words like "probably" "memory" "library" and many more. One of the more interesting methods for how mispronunciations arise, however, is the stressing of different syllables. Some examples that the article gave were "irreparable" and "comparable" which used to be pronounced "ir-REP-ra-ble" but is now "ir-re-PAR-a-ble" and "COM-pra-ble" changed to "com-PAR-a-ble". I think these transformations are interesting because we are taking the roots of the word and applying it to it's more complex form. In the two examples I gave, the pronunciation of the root words, repair and compare are more similar to their modern version, signifying that the pronunciation of the root word comes to peoples minds when trying to pronounce words that have prefixes or suffixes attached to them.

    Another topic that the article covered was correcting people's mispronunciations of words. I think calling it an act of linguistic prejudice is usually not called for and incorrect, but I do think that it's unnecessary the large majority of the time, and if you can understand them, correcting them jut shows that you think you are superior in a way.

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