For a long time, I used to wonder what causes people to consistently mispronounce certain words even when they are exposed to many people pronouncing them correctly. (which mostly applies to people speaking in a non-native language, e.g. people from continental Europe speaking English)
Some examples that I’ve heard from different people around me over the years:
Saying “rectangel” instead of “rectangle”
Saying “pre-purr” (like prefer, but with a p) instead of “prepare”
Saying something like, uhh, “devil-oupaw” instead of “developer”
Saying “leech” instead of “league”
Saying “immu-table” instead of “immutable”
Saying “cyurrently” instead of “currently”
I did, of course, understand that if you only read a word, particularly in English where pronunciations are all over the place and often unpredictable, you may end up with a wrong assumption of how it’s pronounced. This happened to me quite a lot[1]. But then, once I did hear someone pronounce it, I usually quickly learned my lesson and adapted the correct way of saying it. But still I’ve seen all these other people stick to their very unusual pronunciations anyway. What’s up with that?[2] Naturally, it was always too awkward for me to ask them directly, so I never found out.
Recently, however, I got a rather uncomfortable insight into how this happens when a friend pointed out that I was pronouncing “dude” incorrectly, and have apparently done so for all my life, without anyone ever informing me about it, and without me noticing it.
So, as I learned now, “dude” is pronounced “dood” or “dewd”. Whereas I used to say “dyood” (similar to duke). And while I found some evidence that dyood is not completely made up, it still seems to be very unusual, and something people notice when I say it.
Hence I now have the, or at least one, answer to my age-old question of how this happens. So, how did I never realize? Basically, I did realize that some people said “dood”, and just took that as one of two possible ways of pronouncing that word. Kind of, like, the overly American way, or something a super chill surfer bro might say. Whenever people said “dood” (which, in my defense, didn’t happen all that often in my presence[3]) I had this subtle internal reaction of wondering why they suddenly saw the need to switch to such a heavy accent for a single word.
I never quite realized that practically everyone said “dood” and I was the only “dyood” person.
So, yeah, I guess it was a bit of a trapped prior and it took some well-directed evidence to lift me out of that valley. And maybe the same is the case for many of the other people out there who are consistently mispronouncing very particular words.
But, admittedly, I still don’t wanna be the one to point it out to them.
And when I lie awake at night, I wonder which other words I may be mispronouncing with nobody daring to tell me about it.
e.g., for some time I thought “biased” was pronounced “bee-ased”. Or that “sesame” was pronounced “see-same”. Whoops. And to this day I have a hard time remembering how “suite” is pronounced.
Of course one part of the explanation is survivorship bias. I’m much less likely to witness the cases where someone quickly corrects their wrong pronunciation upon hearing it correctly. Maybe 95% of cases end up in this bucket that remains invisible to me. But still, I found the remaining 5% rather mysterious.
I use written English much more than spoken English, so I am probably wrong about the pronunciation of many words. I wonder if it would help to have a software that would read each sentence I wrote immediately after I finished it (because that’s when I still remember how I imagined it to sound).
EDIT: I put the previous paragraph in Google Translate, and luckily it was just as I imagined. But that probably only means that I am already familiar with frequent words, and may make lots of mistakes with rare ones.
For a long time, I used to wonder what causes people to consistently mispronounce certain words even when they are exposed to many people pronouncing them correctly. (which mostly applies to people speaking in a non-native language, e.g. people from continental Europe speaking English)
Some examples that I’ve heard from different people around me over the years:
Saying “rectangel” instead of “rectangle”
Saying “pre-purr” (like prefer, but with a p) instead of “prepare”
Saying something like, uhh, “devil-oupaw” instead of “developer”
Saying “leech” instead of “league”
Saying “immu-table” instead of “immutable”
Saying “cyurrently” instead of “currently”
I did, of course, understand that if you only read a word, particularly in English where pronunciations are all over the place and often unpredictable, you may end up with a wrong assumption of how it’s pronounced. This happened to me quite a lot[1]. But then, once I did hear someone pronounce it, I usually quickly learned my lesson and adapted the correct way of saying it. But still I’ve seen all these other people stick to their very unusual pronunciations anyway. What’s up with that?[2] Naturally, it was always too awkward for me to ask them directly, so I never found out.
Recently, however, I got a rather uncomfortable insight into how this happens when a friend pointed out that I was pronouncing “dude” incorrectly, and have apparently done so for all my life, without anyone ever informing me about it, and without me noticing it.
So, as I learned now, “dude” is pronounced “dood” or “dewd”. Whereas I used to say “dyood” (similar to duke). And while I found some evidence that dyood is not completely made up, it still seems to be very unusual, and something people notice when I say it.
Hence I now have the, or at least one, answer to my age-old question of how this happens. So, how did I never realize? Basically, I did realize that some people said “dood”, and just took that as one of two possible ways of pronouncing that word. Kind of, like, the overly American way, or something a super chill surfer bro might say. Whenever people said “dood” (which, in my defense, didn’t happen all that often in my presence[3]) I had this subtle internal reaction of wondering why they suddenly saw the need to switch to such a heavy accent for a single word.
I never quite realized that practically everyone said “dood” and I was the only “dyood” person.
So, yeah, I guess it was a bit of a trapped prior and it took some well-directed evidence to lift me out of that valley. And maybe the same is the case for many of the other people out there who are consistently mispronouncing very particular words.
But, admittedly, I still don’t wanna be the one to point it out to them.
And when I lie awake at night, I wonder which other words I may be mispronouncing with nobody daring to tell me about it.
e.g., for some time I thought “biased” was pronounced “bee-ased”. Or that “sesame” was pronounced “see-same”. Whoops. And to this day I have a hard time remembering how “suite” is pronounced.
Of course one part of the explanation is survivorship bias. I’m much less likely to witness the cases where someone quickly corrects their wrong pronunciation upon hearing it correctly. Maybe 95% of cases end up in this bucket that remains invisible to me. But still, I found the remaining 5% rather mysterious.
Maybe they were intimidated by my confident “dyood”s I threw left and right.
I use written English much more than spoken English, so I am probably wrong about the pronunciation of many words. I wonder if it would help to have a software that would read each sentence I wrote immediately after I finished it (because that’s when I still remember how I imagined it to sound).
EDIT: I put the previous paragraph in Google Translate, and luckily it was just as I imagined. But that probably only means that I am already familiar with frequent words, and may make lots of mistakes with rare ones.