Pronouncing words correctly - Page 2

The British make a living pronouncing things wrong. Maybe that tells you something.

Correction you-who

Generally, the brits ARE wrong. Historically. Importing a German king screwed up their version of the language and screwed around with their accent rather badly.

What we think of as a thick Southern drawl in the US is about the closest thing you'll find to a preserved pre-hanoverian english accent. How a word would be pronounced in that accent is, at least historically, the most correct way.

As another sidenote to that, there are a lot of 'Americanisms' that are actually preserved uses from older forms of english. 'Fall' rather than 'autumn', for instance.

thats like claiming Afrikaans is correct and dutch is wrong

Not at all, really. American English is, in many areas, a preserved version of what English was in England before they imported a German king who butchered it, and was imitated by all the elites so as not to appear to be correcting their king. That version became authoritative in England, but not in the american colonies, where the older version remained due to lack of communication. New england, new york and the like developed their own accents over time, but the aristocratically controlled south kept the old accent.

A similar principle applies to Aussies- the Australian dialect is actually one from low class workers in a few concentrated areas, from whence a lot of poor criminals were shipped out to the penal colony.

Afrikaans is later variation of the original Dutch. American english, specifically the form you might find in the old south, is the original, while England underwent a shift in the language.


All that said, I'm not going to be one to claim there's a correct and an incorrect form. Language is defined by usage, and English has an incredibly flexible structure and vocabulary. It formed as a pidgin, after all.

Forte, schism, and err are my personal pet peeves. But that's because my father was an English teacher who liked to diagram sentences with me instead of playing catch.

(Fort, not fortay; siz-um, not sk-izm; and ur, not air. Not that you asked.)

"The life of the wife is ended by the knife."

I'm pretty sure the first two of those "correct" pronunciations are now wrong by virtue of absolutely no one on the planet ever having used them.

I'd probably say all three at this point,.