The top secret of talking like an American. Japanese puns that are not funny but at least are puns. Knowing is half the battle. Anti-American sentiment. How to pronounce an English "R".
I look better when I am wet. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity.
Two nations divided by a common language. Conservatism is not mean-spirited. Although herb has always been spelled with an h, pronunciation without it was usual in British English until the 19th century and is still standard in the US. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. Re: Pet peeve - it's pronounced "herb" not "erb" Tue Jul 09, pm Also, Star Trek was wrong for splitting the infinitive with their "to boldly go" line.
MistaKil Gerbil In Training. Re: Pet peeve - it's pronounced "herb" not "erb" Tue Jul 09, pm Thought this might be relevant. Good Times I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. Twittering away the day at TVsBen.
Scrotos Graphmaster Gerbil. Language is dynamic, not static, so even if you knew exactly how the Romans pronounced Latin, you don't know if they had various dialects, too, and it doesn't matter because we're not speaking latin, we're speaking english--the root is of academic interest but of little practical value as guidance for how to pronounce something.
You have to judge language by its contemporary standard when looking to the present day, not by a long-dead standard. Otherwise, where are all the sanskrit fanboys to shout you down about how latin muddled up all the words they stole? Just sayin'. Re: Pet peeve - it's pronounced "herb" not "erb" Tue Jul 09, pm To add to the silliness Herb can be slang for cannibus in the US.
Walkintarget Gerbil Team Leader. I would hope everyone here knows better than to hold the opinion of one snarky responder against the rest of his peers.
Yay for being an "USAmerican Mutt"! Thanks, Brit! BTW, I found it amusing that Anon's "phonetic" spellings of American pronunciations work only with a non-rhotic, British accent. I read not too long ago the results of a survey on national taste preferences.
Americans use more cinnamon in more foods than any other nation. The British have the record for mint-flavoured things. When it comes to fruit pies and other fruity sweet foods, the British prefer theirs tarter and more strongly tasting of fruit than any other country. FWIU, every written initial h was dropped at one point; many, but not all, were restored from the spelling, somewhat inconsistently in different countries.
Haitch , on the other hand, is hypercorrection. The name of the letter never began with h in Latin, where it was aha. When h was lost everywhere in the Romance languages, the name of the letter changed to aka , which became ache [atS ] in Old French and [eitS] in Modern English. I wonder what the condescending anon above makes of the words "hour" and "honour" in this context? British English omits the 'h' from these words which, acccording to his flawed argument, makes British English just as inconsistent as American English.
It would have to have something to do with when the words entered the English language or their language of origin However he's already dismissed these points as inconsequential. Hmm, guess there is nothing one can do about ignorant people who are convinced they're right!
Cheers everyone - enjoy the blog immensely. Those Spanish words are pronounced differently in different parts of the country. The same name will not be pronounced the same here in California as it is in Texas.
They've been interpreted by different American accents. We can't really pronounce "San Jose" properly, and don't feel much need to. In California, that's "San Hosay," or sometimes "sannosay. And why am I arguing with someone who thinks I'm a hick, anyway? My rural California upbringing is not something I've ever been ashamed of. It really bothers me when someone [from Britain] bad-mouths the American dialect. It has been around years since we came here - of course the language will change.
In some ways, it is separate and distinct from the language of Britain and Australia, South Africa, etc. I only discovered this a few years ago and it is strange to say things that way, but it really is the correct way, no matter whether or not the H is pronounced or if it "sounds right.
As far as pronunciation in general goes, English does have very strict rules regarding it. There are just a lot of them and it would be almost impossible to know when to apply them, as there are so many conditions to most of them. Someone I don't remember who or where to find it once wrote a computer program that takes a set of given English words numbering in the several thousand , runs them through a complicated set of pronunciation rules in a specific order, and gives you the pronunciation in IPA.
Oh, and saying "as long as" sounds perfectly acceptable in the US for what you meant by it. I don't know anyone who would find that construct nonsensical or even unusual. Hi ff6m, Welcome to the discussion--I see you've been making it through the back catalog ue!
One thing that I think needs pointing out is that there is no one making up or legislating the rules for English. We don't have an academy that rules on which things we should and shouldn't say. All we have are traditions and fashions, really, and the traditions and fashions in some places and amongst some groups are different from those in others.
And whether or not a person finds a particular expression clear and understandable has as much to do with where they were raised and what they're used to as with the actual logic of the expression.
English just isn't very logical. It's usable because we use it a lot and get used to particular expressions meaning particular things. And that, I would say, is part of its charm! I was taught at school UK that where the H was silent.. In the case of 'hotel' we took it from the french where the h is not pronounced,thus 'an hotel'. Although pronunciation of 'hotel' has changed, the written construct has stayed the same. Sadly by the time my something children were educated, grammar had all but been banished from the curriculum in comprehensive schools.
Just on the 'an hotel' thing. If you ngram it, it's much more of a British usage than an American one, and its use has been dramatically decreasing since about Secondly, both The Oxford Dictionaries better writing section and Fowler say that if you pronounce the initial 'h', which we nearly all do, it's pretty illogical to precede it with 'an'.
I think Oxford says something about trying to have your cake and eat it too. To me it just sounds pretentious. And as an 'educated Brit', I regret that another 'educated Brit' doesn't really seem to 'get' the spirit of your blog.
Mind you, to manage two different spellings of the letter 'h' in the same paragraph, and perhaps more astonishingly, different at both ends, is quite an achievement. Oh, and lastly, thanks for your tweet a couple of weeks ago.
Needless to say, te "h" of "historic" was pronounced emphatically. This managed to be pretentious in multiple ways, not only linguistically but also in pontificating on the historical significance of an event that had only just occurred. Anon you know which one made me laugh rather a lot. These pretentious people always manage to have basic errors while lecturing the rest of us on what is "correct".
Other than the weirdly various spellings of "aitch", anon couldn't even get "its" right, using an apostrophe for a possessibe. I was actually considering a post pointing out their incorrectnesses, but decided they would just carry on with their nose in the air and insist everyone else was uneducated anyway. My education was quite consistent - A before a consonant, AN before a vowel. Since H is sometimes a consonant and sometimes silent, it follows that if you pronounce the H, you don't use AN.
A hotel, a hospital, an hour, an honour, an aitch. The Italians pronounce it as the Americans do, with the accent on the second syllable. It's spelled 'origano' in Italian. In reply James Helgeson's comment just above: Ah, that explains the pronunciation, which for me American with Italian heritage has an ih, not an eh, in the second syllable.
More generally, I'm surprised by the comments about being educated in "an" versus "a". Apology accepted, Purple - and it's 'yobbo', not 'yabbo'. Someone who is uncouth, a slob, no-hoper you get the idea - NOT a compliment! A 'yabbie' is a sort of freshwater crayfish, totally unrelated to a yobbo because they're quite nice.
As for 'soda' or 'pop' - we Aussies solve the problem by calling them 'soft drinks'. As opposed to 'the hard stuff'. In British English the H is almost universally aspirated. The exceptions would be people who habitually 'drop' their H's ie some regional accents. I first heard 'erbs on a tape of Judy Blume reading some of her own children's stories. My kids thought it was a joke to start with until we realised that was genuinely how she pronounced the word.
In my experience one of the most noticeable differences of all between British and American speech is volume. Even the soft-spoken among us drop the "h" in "herbs", although we Americans enjoy national stereotypes as much as, oh, Aussies or Brits. After having this discussion in the back of my mind for a few weeks, I've realized that all the commercials say erbs. Taxtax, do you watch tv?
Your profile says you are in the US. We recently had tv hooked back up after taking an 18 month break. As I figured, there's still nothing interesting on there except a few cooking shows and documentaries. I like having the news back, especially with the elections coming up next year.
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