Pronunciation watch

[EnemyoftheStoat]

Amol Rajan on UC this week had Ms Stoatfoe and me screaming "Tannhäuser!" at him. I do wonder how much he mangles in languages that we don't have.

[kernelbogey]

Someone on't telly recently pronounced 'sloth' to rhyme with 'cloth'.

[gurnemanz]

Amol Rajan on UC this week had Ms Stoatfoe and me screaming "Tannhäuser!" at him. I do wonder how much he mangles in languages that we don't have.

'Fräulein' is also often mispronounced. On the other hand, it might be advisable not to give the philosopher, Kant, his authentic German pronunciation.

[french frank]

'Fräulein' is also often mispronounced. On the other hand, it might be advisable not to give the philosopher, Kant, his authentic German pronunciation.

I was musing over the word sloth. Which aspects of 'pronunciation' are fixed and which vary depending on regional practice? I may say slohth, but if I hear someone from Yorkshire saying slawth I wouldn't think they were pronouncing the word idifferently from me. But if I heard Petroc Trelawny pronounce sloth to rhyme with cloth I'd think it was ignorance, limited experience, unfamiliarity, and that he was therefore pronouncing it 'wrongly'. Similarly, different languages have different phonetic systems and methods of articulation, so the same pronunciation sounds different.

[Roslynmuse]

A while ago I heard a Shakespeare scholar on Radio 4 pronounce the word 'eschew' as 'eskew'. It may have been on 'In Our Time' (I certainly once heard a Bronte scholar on that programme come out with 'Hay-worth') Any thoughts about this (or these)?

[smittims]

I think it's worth remembering that claiming to know the 'correct' pronunciation has been used as a put-down. Shrowsbury or Shrewsbury? I always recall an episode of 'Black Books where they were twitting Bernard for not knowing about the computer game 'Pokemon'.

'Oh yes I do, and by the way, it's pronounced 'PacMan'.

[Roger Webb]

The person interviewing Stephen Hough about ten to nine on the BBC 4 news this morning, identified the clip played by Hough as Liszt's 'Fountains of the Villa dur-Est', with the 'd' detached from the Est....and the final 'e' awol!

I haven't laughed so much since Lady Kate of Dereham tried Puccini's 'Che gelida manina', managing to mangle all three words!......her rendition of 'Che' straight from Manuel (Fawlty Towers).

[oddoneout]

Someone on't telly recently pronounced 'sloth' to rhyme with 'cloth'.

There's been discussion of this elsewhere I think? I was brought up to use a long 'o' for both the sin and the animal. When the animal became something of an ever present image a while back the short 'o' seemed to be the preferred version. American English has short 'o' for both sin and animal according to several online references.

[EnemyoftheStoat]

'Fräulein' is also often mispronounced. On the other hand, it might be advisable not to give the philosopher, Kant, his authentic German pronunciation.

Yes, a correctly pronounced Kant might attract unwanted attention in the wrong company darn the Old Kent Road. And various James Bonds and I think Richard Burton in "Eagles" are guilty of Frowlein misdemeanours. Or should that be miss-demeanours?