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There's probably a word I've been pronouncing wrong my whole life that I don't know about
(discuss.tchncs.de)
My wife pronounces ‘foliage’ like ‘foil-adj’.
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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My favorite example of this happened during a D&D game years ago in which the DM kept pronouncing the word portcullis as PORK-YOO-LISS.
To this day, the word causes the image of some sort of ancient Roman pig gladiator to appear unbidden in my mind.
Though I want to know why Wednesday is pronounced "wendsday" or "wensday". The n is after the d!
The d before n is inherited from the original name Wodans dag (like Tiu's dag, Thor's dag and Frey's dag inherited through the Saxons and Danes from pagan germanic gods)
The rest is just linguistic shift through the centuries of changing language. Like Dag -> Day while for example in German Dag -> Tag.
But the root of the word is still Wodan then old english Weoden then Wedn.
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My wife says "wheelbarrel" and I giggle every time.
The channel this video is from can be a useful resource.
Thanks for reminding me of these. A while back I met someone named Chateauneuf, and I tried to look up how to pronounce his name and found this very helpful answer.
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Panacea. I pronounced it incorrectly for a long time. Never knew because no one corrected me. Fortunately it didn't come up too often.
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We've probably all said a sentence that no other person in history has ever said.
- genre
- only
- gif
- croissant
- Aloysius
- Edinburgh
The rest I can understand, but... only?
I had heard the word “only” spoken in English, but didn’t know how to spell it. At the same time, I had seen the word written, but thought it was pronounced “on-lie” — oddly enough, I had never heard anyone use “on-lie” in speech; I thought it was one of those words that exist but aren’t used very much, like “splendid” or “indubitably”.
I just remembered I also had trouble for so long with the English words “union” (pronounced like English “onion”) and “onion” (pronounced “onny-on” or “on-ion”).
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Trough?