Proper Pronunciation or lah-dee-dah

Kewreeuss wrote: »

People on the radio who say Uz when they mean Us. The letter is S ess , like confess!!

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

Gateaux

somesoldiers wrote: »

The Toyota MR2 had to be renamed in France due to sounding like another French word- “MR deux”

dxhound2005 wrote: »

This is from an American song:

Oh, and she never gives out and she never gives in
She just changes her mind…

It rhymes with Kylie. The sound is copied from the word Child.

ne1410is

whew chile

Tissue and kilometre (spelled/spelt kilometer in US English) have more than one standard pronunciation. As have thousands of other words. This is where widespread usage of different pronunciations are recognised by dictionaries, and pronunciation guides. Scone is probably the best known example. It is pointless for people to lay down the law and say their preferred version is the only correct version. Pronunciatons, definitions and spellings can evolve, sometimes with American versions gaining prominence in the UK and Ireland. Which is ironic when it provokes complaints, since it is often the version that went over to America hundreds of years ago coming back.

I notice a preference for American spellings coming into Boards. Just search for the words "favor" and "neighbor". Perhaps a result of devices "correcting" what people type. If this becomes prevalent enough it will be recognised as part of both US and British English. Railway station in British English usage has declined in the last 60 years, being largely replaced with Train station which gained prominence in America first. And of course if you search for "alot" on Boards or the internet, there are thousands of examples of this new word, which seems to be a product of the internet age. It can't be long before it joins "altogether" and "although" in dictionaries.

The one which I notice a lot is Crow Park. I know that it is due to natural speech, but I often thought the purists would give out more about it. They are not slow to jump on someone on the radio who says Westminister.

Another one the purists complain about is "twenny". But could they count from twenty to twentynine out loud quickly, without making themselves stand out as being odd for pronouncing every T?

Another very common Irish phraseology, usually in media interviews, is "I would have", as in "I would have gone to Dingle on holidays a lot when I was a child". "I went" would be more grammatically accurate.

We also have "went" used incorrectly as in "He should have went" instead of " he should have gone". I hear football pundits saying it a lot, " he should have went for the far corner".

Problem pronouncing his “r”s,that fella

Grammatically they are both fine. The issue here is meaning, not grammar.

Most languages, including Irish, make a distinction between a past instant tense and a past continuous or habitual tense. English does not; it just has one past tense. In English "I went to Dingle" could mean that you went on one occasion or that you went regularly over a period of time; in Irish it's not possible to make this ambiguous statement, because you have to pick one or other of the past tenses.

This affects Hiberno-English, which militates strongly against not clarifying this ambiguity. Thus a speaker of Hiberno-English will nearly always add words to this sentence to clarify what is meant. But, because standard British English doesn't require any words to be added, there are no rules or customs about what words a speaker of standard British English would add here, so there are variety of equally acceptable formulations you can use here:

"I went to Dingle once" - single occasion, and it was some time ago.

"I went to Dingle lately" - single occasion, and it was recent.

"I used to go to Dingle . . . " - went on more than one occasion, but implication that I no longer go.

"I would have gone to Dingle . . . ." or "I would go to Dingle whenever . . ." - went on more than one occasion, and I am about to tell you something about how frequent those occasions were, or what kind of occasions they were.

"I have been going to Dingle . . ." - went on more than one occasion, and still go.

"I had been going to Dingle . . ." - went on more than one occasion, but these occasions were prior to an event which is itself in the past (and which I am about to mention).

Etc, etc. Grammatically they are all fine. Which one is appropriate to use depends on exactly what you're trying to say. But not using one of them, not resolving the ambiguity in the bare "I went to Dingle", while also grammatical, sounds unnatural, stilted, not idiomatic to a speaker of Hiberno-English.