Americans often pronounce ‘phenomena’ and ‘phenomenon’ almost exactly the same way! The last two letters are just a flat mute sound.
Is this definitely true? I think the last vowel sound is the same for both forms (in American, British, and my own Australian English), but I thought people usually hit the ‘n’ of phenomenon enough to distinguish it from the plural.
I certainly do notice the phenomenon/phenomena mistake a lot, though almost always it’s people using ‘phenomena’ as the singular, rather than vice versa. It seems to happen in both print and speech, though if you’re right about the American pronunciations, maybe I’m sometimes just mishearing. Anyway, until now my best guess was that maybe ‘phenomena’ intuitively seems singular to some people because the ending sounds like the singular article ‘a’.
I think it’s mostly that people don’t hear the “n” at the end, so they end up under the impression that “phenomena” is both the singular and the plural form.
Is this definitely true? I think the last vowel sound is the same for both forms (in American, British, and my own Australian English), but I thought people usually hit the ‘n’ of phenomenon enough to distinguish it from the plural.
I certainly do notice the phenomenon/phenomena mistake a lot, though almost always it’s people using ‘phenomena’ as the singular, rather than vice versa. It seems to happen in both print and speech, though if you’re right about the American pronunciations, maybe I’m sometimes just mishearing. Anyway, until now my best guess was that maybe ‘phenomena’ intuitively seems singular to some people because the ending sounds like the singular article ‘a’.
I think it’s mostly that people don’t hear the “n” at the end, so they end up under the impression that “phenomena” is both the singular and the plural form.