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How the hell does he keep insisting that 80-90% of Americans pronounce that word like that? I'm all over the place with verbal communication. You only have people in universities using that pronunciation. He's wrong 11:31.
@@NinjaNezumi"You only have people in universities using that pronunciation" - But isn't "processes" the type of word that is more commonly used in an academic setting? It's hard to imagine people throwing that word around in casual conversation about a football game or something like that.
American English: I treat GOT and GOTTEN as two different verbs. "I've got a cat" means I have a cat, while "I've gotten a cat" means I just acquired a cat. "I've got it" means I understand, or more broadly that I have it without making reference to it being recent, while "I've gotten it" means I received it, probably recently.
I'm from the US also and I've never said, "I've gotten a cat" but rather "I got a cat" or "I just got a cat" to mean "I just acquired a cat." Maybe you're a younger speaker or from a different area than me.
@@edwardmiessner6502 Yeah I'm in the US and can't really imagine someone saying "I've gotten a cat" - it sounds extremely unnatural to me. Definitely seems like an age or area thing probably.
Sort of depends. I'd say, for instance, "I've gotten used to hearing the word 'gotten'". I'd never say, "I've got used to.." Grammatically that's more British, I think.
As a non native speaker it's always fun to see how my pronunciations and vocabulary seem to come from all over the the place and apparently from different generations as well haha
I’m a native speaker who grew up watching lots of international content, so while I mostly speak in my regional accent there are quite words/sounds I say “weird”
Same. I thought for the koala the kwala pronunciation was THE correct one in English but in my native language it's pronounced as it's written. I hear the kwala variant most often. Processes sounds more natural and simple than varying the end of the word into Processeez, the former rolls off the tongue better-this one might be my personal bias showing and maybe other non-native speakers are used to the other pronunciation, probably mainly ones who lived in the US. (but sometimes i might also subconsciously use the latter if the sentence has other words with a similar ending so i might not be consistent with that one) Mature-i pronounce this word extremely inconsistently but mostly as maetshoor or maetsher (like the -cher in teacher)which is wrong ofc., it comes down to me not being used to the phonetic inconsistencies in English. Misshiv-misshiv(i)ous, sometimes i spell the c, sometimes not. I never heard about drawring and didn't notice it ever as a common thing, thought it was a dialect thing for when you put too much emphasis on spelling out every character to the point you start creating nonexistent ones-so basically accent-related. Trip i just say t as t most of the time without forming it into shrip so it's more like thrip, people paying attention might perceive this as a mild accent but as far as i'm aware some native speakers also pronounce it as just a t or close to it. I generally tend to default to British-English pronunciations unless it sounds more natural in the US version, the reason for that some of the sounds-characters in British-English are similar to what i'm used to so they got a more 'correct' feel to them. For example Brits often spell an A as just that, an A instead of an AE which for me is an E and É. I also used to study German even before i started learning English from the then English Cartoon Network so i might mix up a few things here and there where i just default to that when a word is similar. Like how in the word Machine there's more of an emphasis on the A and in German Maschine the longer sch and e are emphasized. Even here in the word Emphasized it makes little sense to me to use the US variety of the word, but i hear this more often even though i remember i used to write it with an s most often-just got used to this subconsciously over the years to not risk sounding 'posh'-ish or pretentious because the z is just so much more common. Though the word emphasis has no z so it makes sense for it to be left untouched. But on the other hand the phonetic z is simpler but it can be pronounced both ways even as emphasised. (and i just got a red autocorrect-frown under this :D, autocorrect clearly hates the already underrepresented British part of the English language-down with the false autocorrector!)
I never knew that I was saying 'cure' differently from others. I say it the dictionary way. I would use 'et' in some contexts and 'ate' in others, depending on where the stress came in the sentence. The first E in 'interest' gets fully sounded or not depending on whether it is an announcement of bank rates, or whether is it an unstressed word in a sentence talking about a level of fascination. I was brought up with two separate pronunciations for ''garage'. One rhymed(ish) with 'barrage', and the other 'carriage' [garidge']. I say 'HArass', and find the sound of 'haRASS' very grating. 'Drawing' without the R is difficult to say. I might use 'gotten' reflexively as in "He probably would have gotten himself killed", but otherwise 'got'. In a recent political poster was the phrase "Has anything gotten better?" and many people in Britain derided the bad grammar. With 'trip' and 'drip' I attempt to say the words as written, but in haste they may come out as 'chrip' and 'jrip' simply because the as-spelled sounds are difficult to produce at speed. One I have noticed is that old people often say 'necess'ry' whereas younger folk tend towards the more as-spelled 'necessAry'. British people say important words in sentence clearly, and unimportant ones get skipped, shortened, or slurred, therefore all words have alternative pronunciations. I might choose to say "Th't SOMEWHAT dipnds 'n WHAT y're saying," or I might say "THAT s'mwh't DEPENDS on w't YOU are saying."
strangely enough, I differentiate between the noun and verb by how I pronounce the "pro" however the emphasis remains on the first syllable in either I feel like I've always thought of those as two words, never quite noticed before now
Fancy seeing you here, Mr Lloyd. I am a member of the British diaspora in South Africa, and I also say cure the dictionary way. In fact, there are a lot of older pronunciations left-over here, as is often the case with former colonies. With Afrikaans the effect is still more exaggerated. I'm told its vocabulary is positively antique compared to modern Dutch. For example there Netherlands uses a Dutchified version of the word giraffe, where the Afrikaans word is "kameelperd", camel-horse.
had to stop around 11:20 to comment that as a lifelong midwestern American, I’m fairly certain I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it like “process-eez” so I was shocked to hear it’s a common pronunciation. very interesting!
Sadly, I have heard the pronunciation ending in -eez way too often for my liking. I am from the PNW, US. It's a pet peeve of mine. The singular is not processis, therefore it's not a crisis/crises situation.
From a Frenchman, thank you so much for sharing your expertise on English pronunciation. No other youtube channel comes even close to this depth of analysis and nuance. Your channel alone made me totally question my command of spoken English.
@@ek-nz Actually, both are OK. I say both. Technically, "even" modifies the word after it. So "comes even close" tells where it comes, while "even comes close" tells that it comes. I think I like the original "comes even close" better in this sentence; it's more precise so it has more impact.
My 43 year old self realizing that all of my pronunciations are extremely situational and often determined by what I'm talking about, who I'm talking to, or how I'm using the word.
On "got" and "gotten", I use both depending on meaning. "Got" is used to mean "possess": I've got a cold. "Gotten" is used when the meaning is "become" or "acquired": I've gotten tired. I've gotten a new book. Thus, there's a difference between "I've got ten books" (I have ten books in my collection.) and "I've gotten ten books" (I recently acquired ten new books for my collection."
I’ve finally found someone else who gets it (and maybe explains it better than me). The depth of my linguistic knowledge is fairly shallow so I could be wrong here but it seems like got is a perfective whereas gotten is an imperfective.
The question isn't whether one uses exclusively one or the other. Everyone who uses "gotten" also uses "got" in the manner you describe. In the video, he's asking specifically the British speakers whether they _ever_ use "gotten," because in the past, the British used "got" for both meanings. "Gotten" was formerly used only by Americans.
I agree with the OP, but all good Linguists do that. Linguistics is a pretty interesting subject. All subjects have both dry parts and fascinating parts. I believe that in universities, Linguistics is a part of the Anthropology Dept., which is 1 of the Humanities, although I wasn't fortunate enough to be able to go to any university.
@@cattymajivGreat point about prescriptivism not being stressed in linguistics. That being said, I’d disagree about linguistics being under anthropology typically. Aside from my univ being a counterexample, linguistics itself is a massive discipline that probably wouldn’t fit neatly under anthropology. There’s massive overlaps in psychology (i.e. linguistic relativity, the weaker form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), cognitive/neuroscience (i.e. the exact mechanisms behind how children acquire language), and computer science (i.e. syntax and its overlap with context-sensitive languages; languages in the CS meaning of a set of strings that can be generated by some ruleset).
@@cattymajiv Why does linguistics have to be a mere matter of anthropology? Why can't it be a set of rules that govern a language, just as we have rules for law, for sports, for academics, etc, etc? This anarchic and iconoclastic opposition to "prescriptive linguistics" reigns almost utterly unopposed today, because we live in a society that hates standards, because it is full of people incapable of following them. Standards were a way to uphold a level of competence and intelligence. But those are bad words in this age of Idiocracy.
@@KerithanosRules for law, sports, and academics also change and fluctuate with time, and it's the same with language, and even food. Often these rules come from the society first, and since human societies change and fluctuate with time, these rules are updated. The changes are not a new thing - languages (as well as food, sports, academics) have been fluid and changing not just in the past century, but across hundreds of years. We see this in written form too, in how different the language is between something like Le Morte D'Arthur, and any of Jane Austen's works, or Chaucer to Shakespeare to us. And we see this in other languages and media too: Korean TV shows, Bollywood movies, and Japanese anime all sound different in the way things are spoken now vs 50-60 years ago, and sometimes you can pick out specific pronunciation differences too. And many modern languages have changed from ancient times to middle ages, to modern times - Chinese, Arabic, and Greek for example - particularly in the way the common person speaks the language. Today we have so much more documentation, as well as new types of media (eg. video vs just books) that it can seem like things are changing so fast.
I'm a 49-year-old British English speaker and recognised myself in some of the "young" pronunciations and some of the "old". The two that were most interesting for me were "homage" and "harass", because I use both pronunciations, but for different meanings. A new film may be an omázh to a golden oldie, but minor lords paid hommidge to their king under the feudal system. All responsible employers have a policy for preventing sexual harássment in the workplace, but if I'm just feeling a bit wound-up and stressed, I'm hárassed (or more accurately, "harrised"). If I said I was feeling harássed, I'd probably want to speak to HR about it.
I am exactly the same. I also use “protest” with two different meanings: “PROtest” for the act of participating in an organised political action such as a march or a sit-in, and “proTEST” for simply objecting to something verbally.
My dad does something similar whereby he parks a car in a ‘garridge’ but sometimes calls a car showroom a ‘garrahzh’. I just say ‘garridge’ and ‘hommidge’ in all contexts though.
But what bit of Britain... Southern British has that neutral accent you might find in Reading, then there's Essex/east London, west country, Welsh accent but then the valleys accent is different to say Cardiff or Newport.
@@thegorgon7063 my dad’s from Staffordshire and I’m from nearby Warwickshire ( but originally from the part where the accent is basically Brummie). I’m not sure how typical the Garrij/gurahzh distinction is in the area though - a linguist shoukk on d do a scientific study
As a non native speaker it's fascinating trying out every pronunciation before the native speaker says it and contrasting them to find out from where I've picked up each word. I noticed I have a great mish mash of accents lol
Same! Though I've learned a lot from native speakers on the internet, I actively practiced speaking in classroom settings for the most part. I mostly either mispronounce in a way typical for non-natives of my background or use the old-fashioned pronunciation that I learned. I need to find a game where I can bear the average voice-chatter...
Online gaming has given me a colourful of regional accents, like dutch, german, french, italian, danish, norwegian, swedish, russian, ukrainian. Along with a mishmash of australian, northern english and american through entertainment media.
I'm Australian, my girlfriend's family is english. I was in the UK a few years ago visiting her family, and one day her grandma said 'et' during a conversation. I was so confused I almost asked her what she meant, but I figured it out through the context of the conversation. I had no idea that was even an option, and I'm very interested in history and linguistics. That form is completely non-existent in Australia.
OMG same I'm Australian too and I was so surprised that et was listed as the main British pronunciation. I watch a lot of British TV and I was really surprised when watching QI to here Stephen Fry say et because I'd never even heard that on British TV before. I thought he'd made it up.
@@DrGeoffLindsey well the lady in question is a retired English teacher, in the moment I almost corrected her and said "do you mean ate?", but I'm glad I held back the impulse, she would've ended up being the one correcting me
I've lived my whole life in the US. I would say that here, the only people who pronounce "ate" as "et" would be people who could be stereotyped or characterized as rural, southern, backwoods, and/or hillbilly. For example, on the 1960s TV show "The Beverly Hillbillies" (a sitcom about a Tennessee hillbilly family that gets rich and moves to Beverly Hills), the main character, Jed Clampett, says "et" for "ate", if I'm not mistaken. And that makes sense, because the rural southern and Appalachian dialects tend to preserve some of the older British usages and pronunciations that most Americans have lost, or at least I think that's true.
This was one of the most fascinating, fun and informative videos I've watched on YT. As an English teacher/tutor since around 1989, I've encountered so many of these issues with students and myself. I do appreciate how difficult it is to 'loosen up' your own approach to pronunciation, learning and teaching, though. It's far easier for me to tell students: 'Language is fluid - it changes constantly' than to adopt new ways of pronouncing, spelling and speaking English. And that's why videos like this are so important. Thanks Geoff, for continuing to inspire, educate and entertain.
>>Geoff (Jeff) and Jail (Gaol) is enormously amusing to me (I'm born in Brooklyn (a city coterminous w/ Kings County, now a borough (sp?); County of, and Queensborough, County of --; raised in the state of confusion. -~Norman Mailer who ran for NYC Mayor, me thinks).🙂
Nicky is my teacher, she is incredible! Very encouraging, always gives me very detailed feedbacks, material to work with and she simply is an expert ❤❤
I'm a native English speaker but I know I would enjoy discussing the language - especially current usage - with such an intelligent and thoughtful tutor. Best wishes for your further enlightenment!
Wow I never realized that there were so many differences in pronunciation even in a generation to the next. As a non native speaker, it seems much easier now to justify my pronunciation I could just say it was the correct one at some point 😂
Most people in the UK should be able to figure out what you're trying to say quite easily, regardless of pronunciation. We have so many wildly divergent accents that almost any given pronunciation of a word is the usual way of saying it somewhere. The most common thing I see with a lot of ESOL students struggling with, is actually trying to understand highly divergent regional accents. A Southern English accent like Geoff's is good to learn because everybody here understands it, so you'll always be understood regardless of who you speak to. But if you go to someplace like Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen, or Belfast, you'll most likely to struggle to understand anything, unless you've put work into learning something about the accents beforehand. I'm from the North East of Scotland, and I remember having to translate for my Greek partner her first two years of living here. She was fluent in English, but struggled to understand anybody North of Leicester.
@@ilovesparky13 Understandable. You probably live in a bit of a linguistic bubble, and almost never have exposure to any accents other than Southern British English or General American English. (Not a criticism, just something I've regularly observed in people who struggle with our accents) Thats why so many of us who speak non-standard varieties have to code switch in order to be understood by most southerners or Americans. You speak a Standard variety of English because it's the only dialect you know. We also speak Standard variety of English English because its the only dialect you know. 😉
@@Safetysealed I was sent on a practise teaching round to Harlow, Essex, England back in 1973 with a group of Newfoundland education faculty students. We were at the local pub shortly after arriving in Harlow. One young lady who had been to England before told us that Skol was the beer to order since it was most like Canadian or Newfoundland beer. The person taking our order couldn't understand what she was ordering. He said, "Small?" to her when she ordered, "Skol" for us all. "No! no!' she said, "Skol." So the server brought us pints. Later, a group of workers came in who said they were "spider men". "You call us "steeple jacks" in North America. I didn't know what that occupation was at the time either. LOLOL! Now, I do. People who work painting tall structures such as bridges and so forth. In any case, one of them said on seeing us drinking from pints commented, ''I've never seen women drinking pints before." I guess he'd never visited the pub where Harry lost his cherry. LOLOL! A day or so later, the pub owner asked us not to come around any more because we were too boisterous. I guess he didn't realize that education faculty students are as quiet as Newfoundlanders get.
40ish year old American here: "Processes" depends on which usage it is. If you're talking about someone transforming/handling materials (He processes soy to be used in commercial food production), it's prah-se-sez. If you're talking about the steps/procedures the worker is following (The factory has specific processes in place to prevent contamination), it's prah-se-zeez. As I think on it, I do think the prah-se-zeez pronunciation is newer; I seem to recall materials from the '80s using the prah-se-sez version for everything.
The only evidence I have to back this up is anecdotal, but I'm fairly certain the -eez version isn't so much generational as it is occupational. Basically, it's part of the business-speak or corporate jargon dialect, used primarily to signal that one has bought into that depressing bureaucratic culture. As such, I avoid saying it at all costs.
I agree that this is probably how I would use the two pronunciations. I also had this thought about cure. If I'm curing (cjyring) a cold or if I'm curing (cjöring) (salting) food I might pronounce it differently. But English is not my first language and it might be influenced by whom I've learnt about the different subjects from.
67 year old born and raised in Northern California here, and in my world “process-eez” was never a verb it was only ever a noun. I do, though, agree that it was almost exclusively used in “ corporate speak”.
@@roadfood1 Hey neighbor! I'm just a couple of years from you, and was born & raised in the Bay Area. I recall hearing the verb "process" as a computing term at elementary school in the 60s, because of those punch cards we had to blacken squares on with a #2 pencil. It was also used at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley in the early '70s. Just a guess, I think it may have become corporate jargon next, as businesses naturally found value in computers, and then "process" entered the vernacular.
This has made me realize that being a child with no friends and shoved into the deepest halls of a library has meant I pronounce things based on how a dictionary stated them. With time I've been "corrected" by peers, but this video has brought up some I never noticed!
Another really common one that you might not know about: "often" In my experience, people who started reading a lot from an early age pronounce the 't' clearly, while more traditional speakers pronounce it like "soften" (without the 't'). They both pronounce the 't' in "oft" (exactly like "soft"), however.
@@halleyorion - Haha, this is a sore spot for me. I got my early education (K-8) in a Catholic school back in the day, and the nuns laid down the rules with a figurative iron hand (and a literal ruler, lol), and one rule that was drilled into me early on was that in the word "often," the "t" was silent. I find it very difficult to this day to pronounce it, so I sort of cherish it as an idiosyncratic memory. Also, I'm curious. Yes, in "soft" the final "t" is pronounced, but do you pronounce it in "soften," (as in "fabric softener") or do you say "soffen?"
@lovepuppy2242 - Hah, I too learned to read early on and lost myself in books that were probably well above my grade level, which had a tendency to trip me up when it came to pronunciation. I can remember writing a report in my freshman general science class in which I used the word "façade," and the teacher actually read a portion of it aloud to the class. When he started out, I thought, "OMG, he's reading MY work!" But when he came to the "façade" portion, I thought disappointedly "Oh, no, that's not mine, I don't even know that word." You see, in my head, I was pronouncing that word "fa-kayd."
I have both pronunciations of homage in my dialect, but with slightly different meanings. “oumage” is a literary term for a reference to another author (or very commonly film director) and “homidge” is the archaic feudal term for fealty to a lord. “Oumage” is also countable while “homidge” is not.
I feel exactly the same. Or like, hommidge is an object, and homáj isnan adjective. You pay something (hommidge), but a film has the quality of being an homáj.
omg I was sitting here thinking I've never heard "hommidge" it sounds absolutely silly, but in the case of fealty or something religious you're definitely right. I guess since those uses are much rarer for me they completely slipped my mind.
I think a lot of people regard "(h)omarzh" as correct because they think it's a French word - but note the correct spelling of the French *hommage*. The word homage has existed independently in English for many centuries (unlike garage or montage). I regard the "French" pronunciation of homage as pretentious, but it's very rapidly becoming the norm and will have been completely assimilated within another generation
@@halcharles9995 I mean, I think people naturally want to pronounce similarly-spelled words similarly, and at this point there are enough words like "montage" (descended from French but definitely part of English by now) that it feels like a normal way to pronounce English words ending in "-age".
Man the difference between West Australian English vs Queensland English vs NSW/Victorian English is crazy, I’d love to see an analysis of those differences
Yeah I didn't realise the difference between NSW and Qld until I made a friend from NSW. It's not big enough that a foreigner would notice but to me it's really interesting
This!!! There is not enough research on different Australian accents. Most academic sources say we only have 3. If I was an academic I'd write about and study this!!
Yeah and as an example theres a massive vowel shift when you go north of the vic/nsw border. I hadn’t noticed it but my partner noted that when I was back in albury Wodonga I spoke differently to locals subconsciously compared to when I was in Melbourne. So interesting theres such a difference between pronunciation
When I was a younger West Australian (late 60s, early 70s) we took it for granted that Queenslanders (at least) could be distinguished from other Australians (partly speed of speech, but also pronunciation) - wasn’t something consciously analysed - you just knew as you listened
@Amazatastic 😂😂 The difference between accents is very noticeable between outback NSW and the coast, but the north south differences are also quite discernible. My north Queensland granddaughter (an adult) has that unique NQ accent where, for instance, the word "yes" becomes a high pitched, almost nasal "yee". Fascinating. 😊😊
I had “mischievious” gaslit out of me by spellcheck. I thought I was the crazy one and had totally made up that pronunciation! I say “mischievous” now but it feels validating to know how widespread “mischievious” is. I’m a native American English speaker, as a data point :)
me too! english speaker too. i started hearing people say mischievous and tried to get myself to say it that way because thats how its spelled, but mischievious feels more right
I'm a 30 year old American who says homage "oh-mahzh", and I was apparently completely backwards on which way it was changing. I assumed the "hah-midge" I was hearing some people say was a newer pronunciation and that I was old-fashioned for saying it the French way.
I'm American and have rarely heard the word so I say "HOME-ij" like it's written. I've heard a few different pronunciations, but none of them often enough to say "That's the right one" or "That's my dialect". In the 20th century Americans started de-nativizing recent loanwords. Lindsey has a video on it, "Who pronounces foreign words like PASTA right?"
Hommage and homage both exist together. My gut feeling is hommage is the feudal term like a vassal's bowing to his lord. O Mazh French pronunciation is an artistic creative work or part thereof that acknowledges and shows reverence to another person or work. There are other French doublets that are the same word that get used differently chef/chief
Brit here...if I'm paying homage I pronounce it homidge but if something is an homage to someone or something, then I use the French pronunciation of omarj.
Fascinating video! I'm a middle aged Australian speaker and I often use more than one pronunciation for different meanings and circumstances. First example, for me, homage pronounced the French way is used when talking about modern films and the arts, whereas I'd use the more Anglicised pronunciation when talking about history (meaning something like fealty). Also I find different pronunciations can be perceived as more or less educated/formal, so I might change depending on whether I want to sound knowledgeable and cultured vs down to earth and casual.
I share your divide re homage - I'd say such-and-such a scene is an homage (no aspirated h, pronounced to rhyme with brie) but I pay hommidge to my lord. Intriguingly the former sense doesn't even have an entry in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which (with the hommidge pronunciation) only refers to the sense of medieval law.
As a fellow Aussie i absolutely agree, different pronunciations here will put you forward as, frankly, more or less bogan. Or possibly signal you're from Adelaide if you pronounce graph as "graaaf" instead of "graff"
Seventy-year old Aussie here. Me too with homage. Never realised it until I saw your comment. As for the trip/drip business, I can't even begin to comprehend how you can possibly get your tongue around anything other than a hard 't' or hard 'd'.
@@claremiller9979 This "cahsl" v "cassl" for castle can be fun when an Adelaide person goes to Malbun, as the locals pronounce Melbourne. There is a large shopping centre at Doncaster - so naturally when I went to Melbourne I pronounced Doncaster more or less as the folk in Yorkshire pronounce it - much to the amusement of the locals. Doncaster in Victoria is Doncaaahster.
Approximately 60-70 years ago, children and adults who mispronounced mischievous, usually couldn’t spell the word either! It seems they weren’t big readers, so they never saw the written word, and copied what they had heard at one time, even though most people were not mispronouncing it.
In Australian (at least) to me mischievious (4 syllables) sounds like it reflects the concept of mischief better. Mischievous is not as naughty sounding 😅 I don't know why.
NSW/Victorian Australian here, and I'm desperate to know Tom's background! His "i" sounds stood out to me as super atypical, and almost more Northern English than Aussie. It stood out to me so much that I can't believe there aren't more comments about it! And I would hazard a guess that his "KOala" is really quite atypical too.
I’m from NSW (Sydney, but I live in the Southern Tablelands now) and his accent sounds quite weird to me, too. My wife was half listening and wondered out loud who on earth pronounced KOala that way. A number of his other words sounded weird too.
I'm from Southwest WA and I thought he sounded like he either moved here from another country as a child or had lived overseas for an extended period of time before returning. He definitely didn't have a typical Australian accent.
This channel is incredibly fascinating to me as a non-native English speaker, it made me realize that my pronunciation is a strange mix of American and British English, depending on where I first learned it. French is my second language, so it adds another weird quality to it, where I sometimes don't know how a loan word should sound like in English and either pronounce it in French, or make up a weird Frankensteinian version of it. I would really love to see a video on that, as there's a lot of people out there from around the world who learned English just from using the internet and consuming English media, I really wonder what these people tend to sound like, although I'm guessing there's a heavy bias towards sounding more American given how dominating American media is on the internet, and if so, does it sound sort of "generic", is there some bias towards any regional American English variations, or is it just all over the place? Love your videos, learned so much from them, cheers!
I am much the same, I first learnt English from Americans and then I moved to the UK for a while, so my pronunciation is all over the place (with, to my great consternation, quite a bit of my own Hungarian accent remaining). By mentioning French you reminded me of something interesting. My dad only speaks a little English and acquired mostly from reading. So his pronunciation is a matter of guesswork. What I've noticed is that he keeps trying to pronounce French loanwords in what he assumes is closer to a French way. Has my dad ever studied French? No, but he did learn Russian as a kid, which has a bunch of French loanwords that he would be familiar with. It's WILD to me how the languages we're familiar with affect the ways we can learn new ones. I am currently trying to learn Serbian through English, and it tickles me how differently you'd explain Serbian grammar to an assumed English-speaking audience. Often I am reading a lesson that goes to great lengths to explain a concept that seems utterly trivial to a Hungarian. ‘Same here, moving on.’
My (non-native) pronunciation is very weird; it's southern British English as a baseline, but with /ɻ/ everywhere (unless I consciously omit it) and no linking-r, and sometimes monophthongized GOOSE and FLEECE. THOUGHT is often (usually down to true mid), but LOT is always rounded for me and homophonous with CLOTH. I generally have the TRAP-BATH split, though I might accidentally pronounce TRAP like STRUT.
My roommate in the 1990s was a Russian refugee who knew no English when he arrived. He learned English from ice hockey and Beavis and Butthead on TV. When I met him his vocabulary and grammar were limited. Everything was "cool" or "sucks", or in the past tense, "it was sucks". After four years I noticed a significant improvement, although never to the level of a few other Russian emigres.
I narrate a program for DIscovery called Mysteries of the Abandoned. I am originally from Canada, now living in the UK, and the show is meant for an American audience, even though the writers are all from the UK. We are in are 9th season, and every season I get emails from the pronunciation police back in the US. A lot of the confusion comes from words that have multiple pronunciation options: anti, missile, Caribbean, nuclear, but recently I was hit by "macabre" which I think is one of lingustics dirty tricks. For me it can get very confusing. I grew up in Canada, watching American TV, but now I live in the UK and I find myself trying to remember how I pronounced things as a child, and then I see this video and I'm like... oh my stars... i could be wrong again, lol. thank you for putting this together though. fascinating topic.
I'd say there can be a difference in the last syllable, not like "bray" but whether it is pronounced at all or not - as a clear "bre" or more as a breathy "b" (sort of French, perhaps?)
@@jenniferpearce1052 interesting isn't it. Like this video shows, it all depends on where you live. I found 3 different pronciations in 3 different dictionaries: there is a pronounciation that doesn't sound anything after the final B, there is the one where you end with "bruh" and there is a third one in which the RE is voiced, like at the end of "centre" or "theatre". there are probably more, lol. It all depends on where you live.
That’s a tough one indeed. The origin of « macabre » in the English vocabulary is loaned from the French version of the word, but the etymology gets back most probably to Latin or Spanish or Arabic. I have almost always heard English speaking people pronounce it the exact same way we French do, sometimes even exaggeratedly French. I think that’s the kind of word English loaned from us because it sounded dramatically cool, so not pronouncing it with a French accent kinda ruins the effect. In French we pronounce it « makkabrruh ». Incidentally, « brrrh » is the onomatopoeia we use for expressing shivers, either from cold or fear. So it befits the spooky theme of the word.
As a child I had an old (American English) joke book from the 1950s -- it used to be my mother's -- and I only just now realized the last rhyme here doesn't work anymore: 'Twas in a restaurant they met Romeo and Juliet. He had no dough to pay the debt So Romy owed What Julie ate.
As a non native who picked up the language through media it was really interesting to learn more about my weird mix of English as its cobbled together not only from American, British and Australian but also old an new pronunciations (a lot of the old one probably stemming from the formal education that I had in Germany)
I'm southern British, but raised with a foreign mum, and since watching your videos I've realised that in imitating her, I've ended up with quite a few rp pronunciations 😂.
I've had exactly the same 'problem', except I live in Scotland. Everyone around me speaks with a Scottish accent and I speak with a sort of RP/ English sounding accent due to having a foreign mother. Everybody thinks I'm English despite not having any connection.
I've only just recently realised that some of my pronunciation is influenced by my Italian family. My mum was born in England but my Nana in Italy. Italian wasn't even her first language. It was Friulian. So my Italian is terrible too 😂
I grew up in Spain with a British mum. I’ve lived in the UK since 2010 and I always get asked where I’m from, as I sound native but they can’t place my accent. Bets are usually on South Africa 😂
My parents were strict about how we spoke, and I still use rp pronunciation a lot. My best friend from secondary school, said her parents liked me because I was posh, which they were not. I was also rather serious, and wore glasses.
I'm half English, half Cantonese, only ever known and spoken RP because I've never lived in the UK, only went to international schools throughout Asia. I've been in Australia for 20 years (I'm 41 now), I'm an English teacher, and I definitely say ee-ons. In fact, I cannot remember anyone ever saying ay-ons. Really surprised at that one. I'm looking for the rock I've been living under. 😅
I'm about a decade younger and I just realised that I pronounce aeon as ay-on and eon as ee-on, not realising that this is a British/American spelling difference. However, I know exactly why I do this. It's because Final Fantasy X released when I was young, and they used "Aeon" with the ay-on pronunciation. Can't speak on how many other people were possibly influenced by this, but the game sold millions of copies and was insanely popular among people my age, so I'm probably not the only one...?
@@Eralealea I basically had the opposite happen because of Pokemon. I didn't know "ae" could make an "ee" sound until I learned that Aegislash gets its name from "aegis" (pronounced ee-jiss), so I assumed "aeons" was the same way
The "trip" and "drip" thing is wild to me. I didn't even know that was a thing at all until I recently watched your video about it. Once I did, I soon discovered that while I don't use the thrip and jrip variants, and neither do most people who grew up in this corner of the US (I think), there are plenty of people around me who do use those forms! I just never noticed that difference in how we pronounce a whole bunch of words.
I'm fascinated by how much information you can glean from pronunciation and common usage of 'standardized' language. Although given the current culture of digital transmission of data, that information has become diluted, since everyone everywhere is tossing their personal usage data into the ring so quickly that tracking idiomatic usage is no longer a matter of actual geographic and cultural transmission.
I grew up in the north of England. I always assumed I pronounced "trip" and "drip" the way they were spelt. But when my son was learning to read English he asked me why train began with a T and not with a CH. After saying it to myself over and over I realised he was right. It's quite subtle, but definitely there in my speech. It makes me wonder if it has always been a feature of my speech or just developed in the last couple of decades.
@@markjones1500 Personally I pronounce trip and drip with the t and d sound but I can see ch and j being used by people if they think that makes them easier to pronounce because they are very similar sounding and will get the word across just fine.
US speaker in his mid-60s here. I was blown away by trip/drip, because I'm usually pretty sensitive to language change, but I'd never registered this pronunciation before hearing it on this video (though I'll be listening for it now).
Yes and the long e in processes and biases? I don't think I've ever heard that. So odd to me to hear a younger person saying that most Americans say them that way.
Dr. Linsdey has an entire video about this trip/drip thing (and other similar pronunciations). I had never noticed it either until I watched that video. I pronounce "tr" and "dr" words with "t" and "d" sounds rather than "ch" and "j", but I can see how the "t" and "d" could easily slide into "ch" and "j". I perceive the "ch" and "j" as a bit more of a lazy pronunciation, and I would advise anyone who does public speaking to develop the habit of using the "t" and "d" pronunciations, especially since that keeps the pronunciation in line with the spelling. But maybe I'm too much of a stickler for such things.
As an Englishman from London, aged 73 who has lived 25 years in the US, I realize that I belong in a museum. When I go back home, I feel nobody is speaking the RP I picked up from my mother, nor the cockney of my friends at school, nor the Liverpool accent of my father. . There is some weird sing-song Thames Valley mishmash everywhere. Here in the US people ask me if I am an Australian. As the song goes: “Ain’t got no home in this world anymore.”
My father-in-law had a similar experience with Dutch. He emigrated to New Zealand after the war. When he returned to the Netherlands after 25 years he noticed that nobody spoke "proper" Dutch any more. It's amazing to me how quickly language changes. It's like watching children growing - if you see them every day you don't notice the changes, but if you see them again after a few years you hardly recognise them.
@garthly I guess if you leave to move abroad, in some ways your way of speaking in your home country is retained like a time capsule... My partner's Mum is the same age as you but has continued living in Britain, and we recently listened to a recording of her reading a short story on the radio in the late 80s - OH MY GOD how much her accent has changed. She used to essentially use RP and now she uses a somewhat more neutral southern English middle-class accent, with maybe a tinge of RP left. But I wonder if she'd left and moved abroad around the time of the original recording, how much of her original RP accent she'd have retained today.
As a songwriter, I love words like mischievous/mischievious, because they're the same word, everyone knows they're the same word, but they have different rhyme/stress/syllable patterns. Far from being a mistake, we should have more words like this!
@@Mortimer50145 It's tricky to say what is "actually a word". I would say the traditional or prescriptive answer is no, it's not. But if people are using it (including publishing the word for the past 100 years) then there's a strong argument that it's a valid variant of the word. I'm Canadian and most of my life I heard "mischievious" and read "mischievous", which never matched up.
Just as another data point: I clearly remember using "gotten" in a written test in standard 4 junior school, so aged 10 in 1977, and my teacher (who must've been fairly progressive for the time) mentioning that this was an "Americanism", but not in a critical way. He wanted to know what I was reading (Peter Benchley, natch).
@@biscuit715 Possibly the difference is between the state of owning something, e.g. I have got a pen, and the action of getting something, e.g. It has gotten worse.
@@biscuit715 Same. Something I noticed in the video is that "it's got better" sounds really weird to me. I would either say "it's gotten better" or "it got better" but never "it's got better"
@@biscuit715 Definitely, yeah. I'd never say I've gotten a cold; either I've got a cold or I've caught a cold, but would say I've gotten better, it's gotten worse. (but I would say it got worse or it got better). Not sure why I'd use either - but, like @iout - it gotten better or it's got better both feel fundamentally wrong.
As a non-native English speaker I'd really like to thank Agerian for his help :) Seriously, as easy as English has been to learn for me, it's truly mindboggling to see how hard/impossible it is to reach a native speaker level. Never before have I given a single thought to that "dz" sound instead of a plain "d" sound in words like drive, draw etc. because IT ISN'T TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS. I initially thought it might be one of the things that give away me being non-native, but then I just listened to the way I pronounce them and I seem to have picked it up correctly from anglophone entertainment! I can now see that accents from native speakers of languages with a more sensible pronunciation system where a letter corresponds to a sound tend to neglect the sh or z sounds from words starting with tr or dr. It's simply because our languages weren't designed to keep foreigners guessing ;) Also, "drawring" and other similar pronounced extra r:s sound a bit "rednecky" to my ear, which I find quite funny given that it's much rather a British pronunciation than a south state American one :D Again, one of the things in Bri_ish accents that I have probably heard many times but never realized having heard :)
Trying to get you away from _pyurrr?_ Well, you could wander off to New England. And try to distinguish "khakis" and "car keys." Ask me why I remember sometime...
The jrip pronunciation is something that I brought up to some friends some years ago precisely because I didn't see it in any dictionaries. I'm very happy to see you bring attention to it.
@@ralphedwards9839 Scranton, PA. The conversation I was referring to took place with a diverse group of Pennsylvanians, including another Scrantonian who had transplanted to the area at a young age, and none there seemed to be able to tell the difference, including myself. Everyone else claimed to be pronouncing it as dr while I was the only one claiming it as jr. I've used this phoneme for as long as I can remember and I'd always heard others using the same phoneme, apparently even if they weren't. This is only anecdotal but it seems that the same (or a similar) psychological phenomenon is happening here as when native English speakers have trouble disturbing the Spanish dh phoneme from the English t or d phonemes.
@@juliansmith4295 Same here. I am a New Englander, and have only ever heard "drip" and "trip" in this part of the US. Moreover, I have friends from all over the age spectrum, and have not heard "djrip" or "chrip" from anyone.
With the verb "contrast", there's a kind of weird distinction for me (an American) between when I use /ˈkɑntʃɹæst/ vs /kənˈtʃɹæst/. I think what happened is I picked up the word in natural day-to-day speech with the accent on the first syllable, but then in school, we were taught to "compare and contrast", and the teacher put the accent on the second syllable, so I ended up acquiring that as a different word without really thinking about the fact that they were the same word. So I use the two almost like two different words with very similar meanings. If I'm talking about a single noun being contrasted with another single noun, I almost always put the accent on the second syllable, but when explaining a complex scenario and contrasting it to another complex scenario, I'm more likely to put the accent on the first syllable (but it's less absolute of a split).
For the verb prótest, US (northeast), I will always put the accent on the first syllable if protesters are doing it. But to describe a retort, I will use the verb protést. The weird thing is, though, I feel like I'm describing a vaguely British schoolroom when I use it. And of course, "The lady doth protest too much," or however the saying goes.
I really need to beg to differ on the frequency in the US of "processes" with a long "ee" in the final syllable. It's very rare in my experience (including in the tech space), to the point that hearing an American use it would be jarring. The mental image it conjures with me is that of a self-important, older academic aiming to sound "British."
The ‘ee’ version sounds distinctly Scottish to me (an Englishman), so you’re not wrong that it sounds British but it’s not remotely a posh pronunciation!
I also think it depends on noun or verb usage. As an older US citizen, the long-ee is rare but still occasionally heard for a plural noun. But the long ee is never present when used as a verb conjugated into 3rd person singular (he/she/it processes).
There is one dictionary that shows affrication of "t" and "d" when they're followed by "r" as an alternative pronunciation, it is "Wiktionary". For the word "trust", for example, Wiktionary gives the following pronunciations: /tɹʌst/, [tɹʌst], [tɹɐst], [t͡ʃɹ-]
In New Zealand (and Australia) we still pronounce the 'u' in cure and mature. 'Kyor' and 'matyor' seems odd to me - although familiar in British and US accents now you mention it.
I'm British (RP accent) and I also found the 'cure' pronunciation of those younger Brits odd. I definitely say /kju@/ - last sound is schwa. (But I am 50!)
There's still a difference though between that Australian/New Zealander pronunciation of yours and the old [ʊə] pronunciation dictionaries love so much. As shown at 13:10 when Geoff asked the Australian speaker how many syllables "cure" has, in Australia and New Zealand, "cure" has two syllables, rhyming perfectly with "sewer". That doesn't happen with the old British (RP) [ʊə] pronunciation which takes only one syllable and so wouldn't rhyme with "sewer".
Very interesting. As a non native, trying to mimick as best as I can, this casts a light on some of the variations I may have heard along the decades. And i am surrounded by non natives using English all day, so it's hugely helpful. Also, I'm the sort of person who learns how to ride a bike from a book.
This is fascinating. As an Australian from a long term Tasmanian family I and everyone I know tend towards the apparently defunct pronunciations, or a variant that isn't mentioned here at all. Bear in mind I'm not a linguist and might have fluffed some of the accepted terminology, but we say 'cure' as CUE -er', we say 'garage' as 'GARR ahje' but with the stress on 'garr', we say 'koala' as 'KOH -a-la' , and we say processes as 'PRO -cess - ehs'. And mature to me is definitely three syllables. 'ma-TUE-er'. It brings to mind a time in primary school when our teacher insisted that 'verandah' was a two syllable word and all of us were extremely puzzled by that because it's clearly three syllables spoken very distinctly, 'va-RAN-dah'. I feel the same about 'mature'. That said though, do we want or need that much homogeneity with language? I do get that second language speakers need to be able to communicate, but this seems extreme. Aren't the various pronunciations the best thing about travelling and speaking with other people?
Being from Tasmania I was confused a little because I also use pronuncuations not mentioned here. I think it does make sense though, Tasmania is isolated and has not had the same linguistic influences from new Australians coming over, at least until the last 10 years or so. A big pronunciation difference I can think of is we use a different pronunciation of trough when talking about the laundry sink. I do think, linguistics here in Australia are underserved when it comes to research, studies here seem adamant about the broad-general-refined accent spectrum when there probably is more going on. Ive even seen some people on reddit suggest there is accent differences between Hobarts eastern and western shores!
I’m Victorian, and I thought the Australian here spoke more of a British style than what I usually hear or say myself. It sounded like he was being very careful to pronounce every word a more “traditional” way rather than how we speak every day.
Australian (Sydney) speaker here. I've never pronounced "trip" or "drip" with "ch" or "j" noises. They've always been a definite "t" and "d" noise for me. I'll have to pay attention to my friends and see how they say it, but I've certainly never noticed anyone else pronouncing them with "ch" and "j" sounds.
Australian from Hobart here, and I say trip and trip pronouncing the 't' and 'd' too, and also haven't ever noticed other Aussies pronouncing them different to me either.
6 месяцев назад+4
Did you actually record yourself and listen closed, on half-speed? Chances are you actually do say "ch" or at least something closer to "ch" than to "t-r". Because that's what the mouth naturally wants to do, and that's why people do it. Same goes for people who pronounce "street" as "shreet". "str" has a tendency to turn in "shr" if you're not very careful. We humans aren't, although going full "shreet" is avoidable.
You must be from a different English speaking country as it's not natural for most Australians to to pronounce as you wrote here. Our mouths don't want to do as you suggest, we do pronounce "t"s clearly. Only exceptions would be when drunk, tired or sedated perhaps causing speech to be slurred/difficulty in speaking, but even then the t sound is there to a large extent.
As a fellow Sydneysider I came here to say this or find someone else saying it. Drip and trip definitely Dr and Tr. However I have the feeling I may unwittingly do it the words like drawer and drawing.
I've started playing video games with random people around the world, and as someone who speaks no other languages I was started how quickly I started to pick up bits of other languauges. And I felt like I COULD learn it, because there was just some real guy in my ears trying to communicate, and we HAD to communicate to play well, and neither of us was 'teacher'. Necessity is the mother and all that
I found this video fascinating! Thank you for publishing it. Combat, in particular, really caught my attention. To me, the different stresses and pronunciations mean different things. For example one goes into COMbat (noun) to comBAT(verb form) something. I am American, but I speak several languages and grew up in a household with much older parents compared to other people my age -- perhaps that has something to do with my pronunciation choices.
My Mother lived most of her life in England, she moved to Australia about 14 years ago and is now an author. I find it interesting that whenever she uses the word got in the way that she was taught all her life, which is also the way I have always used, when her books go for editing they are always "corrected" to gotten, to such an extent that even when she puts it back to got it is recorrected to gotten, she has since sadly given up the fight. I say sadly as she isn't wrong just, it seems, old fashioned.
It’s so interesting, the examples that he spoke about in the video and used “got” I thought sounded completely wrong. I hadn’t really noticed but I absolutely use gotten in a number of contexts and absolutely could not replace it with “got” without it sounding completely wrong.
Love bringing up how to learn the language. I've studied Spanish, Arabic, and Japanese. Arabic I had the benefit of being in an Egyptian family but with this I can hear and understand Egyptian dialect perfectly but if it's more of a Gulf dialect (Kuwait, Iraq, etc) or even Moroccan which has a more French accent, I struggle and have to listen carefully to really understand. Spanish I still struggle with but can hear time to time and Japanese I had the benefit of having our Japanese TA do outside tutoring sessions which really was watching movies and when I went to Japan I noticed I really could pick up most of the conversation. I had a bit of a struggle but it definitely helped. And as an English example, my mom came from Egypt with a formal grasp of English that she learned in school but she still struggled. She told me it was watching TV with my cousin and later on Sesame Street with me that really helped her grasp the language. So I agree 1000% that the local media really helps and finding friends to talk with as well!
As a non-native speaker of English, I love your videos so much. For the longest time, I was under the impression that certain words can only be pronounced one particular way and it is incredibly interesting to me to see that it is not the case! I am always surprised when I learn what pronunciation of a particular word I picked up, for example this was the first time I heard "mischievous" pronounced without the long vowel. Keep up the great work, Dr Lindsey!
One of the most interesting things for me in these sorts of videos, is realising how much of northern english accents and dialects are old language features that are less used in other places, rather than new regional developments
I'm Irish and it's similar. I always knew that Hiberno-English had retained a lot of older usages and pronunciations that were lost in many other dialects, but videos like this really do hammer it home.
I'm from the US and so many of my fellow Americans would pride themselves on American English being conservative of the old way English speakers used to pronunciate when it's not like that at all, except in Down East North Carolina, Okracoke Island, Smith and Tangier Islands, and maybe in the Appalachians.
It's always very interesting to get Dr. Lindsey's insights on these phenomena. I wish one or more Hiberno-English speakers had been included in this comparison. Given how long English has been in use in Ireland, I'm led to believe that a lot of Hiberno-English vocabulary, and perhaps pronunciations, may be reflective of even earlier English pronunciations, perhaps pre-RP. Certain terms discussed here, like "gotten", may also have survived in Ireland even while becoming outmoded in British and American English as discussed in the video.
That was my sense as well - 'gotten' in particular doesn't seem to have ever been out of use here. Certainly my grandparents use it and my great-grandparents (that I remember) did also. It feels like Hiberno-English (and Scottish English to a similar extent) might well represent the difference between periphery and core, the heavy influence from Irish notwithstanding. After all, there were a few very notable 18th century Irish elocutionists like Thomas Sheridan whose takes might be interesting to compare with modern British- and Hiberno-English to see some of those divergences.
There's a video around here of a clip from a television show in the 50s where a language -- or rather, dialect -- expert sits down with people from different regions on the US and guesses where they grew up based on how they pronounced different words. A couple were really fascinating to me: some speakers pronounced "greasy" with a voiced "s", like "greazy"; another marker he used was whether people pronounced "marry," "Mary," and "merry" differently (some did, some didn't).
My dad pronounced "greasy" as "greazy" and I did, too, until I was in college and my now-wife got annoyed by it. He didn't grow up in the areas that American Heritage says pronounce it that way and neither did I, but his mother did. My mom and my other three grandparents all pronounce it with the "s" sound. My dad was the main cook in our household, and his mom was the cook in theirs when he was growing up. I suspect it'd because the person who does the most cooking uses the word the most often, so my dad and I picked up the pronunciation due to that.
I'm American from the southwest of Virginia (so, Southern with an Appalachian twang). Around here "greaZy" is standard, and "greaSy" sounds odd. Our "marry-Mary-merry" vowels are completely merged as well, and thinking back to my grandparents' Virginia Piedmont speech (born around 1912), they used "greaZy" also, and their "marry-Mary-merry" was either merged or almost merged, so those pronunciations have been stable for awhile.
I found it interesting that (as a 25 year old person from London) I match the 'younger' pronunciation for almost all these, except the 'ure' phoneme in cure, mature etc where I definitely say it in the 'old-fashioned' way, like oo-er, and was surprised to hear you describe it as largely outmoded. I guess my accent is more conservative than I thought!
Do you say it as one continuously gliding diphthong vowel, or as two distinct syllables like the Australian guy here? The former is the old way and the latter (which of course also descended from that) is a pronunciation I'd associate more with Cockney and its modern descendent Estuary English, which is why I'm thinking this might be relevant. There's also a third way not mentioned in this video for people who retain the vowel (as opposed to those who merge it with THOUGHT), which is to pronounce it as a long vowel similar to the short vowel in "PUT"; I find that a lot of Standard Southern British speakers who have lost the vowel in words like "cure" and "mature" have this third version in words like "rural", "jury", and sometimes "tourist" (but usually not "tour").
@Muzer0 interesting question, and I would say I definitely don't pronounce it as two distinct syllables, and probably match the third pronunciation you listed here - with a sound that is very similar to how I would also pronounce jury, rural and tourist! A very astute observation, and I thank you for providing some interesting context
@@F1nnyF6 I'm in my mid-thirties. I grew up in Hertfordshire and live in London. I pronounce cure and mature exactly the same way that you do. Very surprised to learn that my accent is facing extinction.
@Joe_AK I mean it's definitely possible he's a bit mistaken on this one, I dont know if he specifically polled on it or referenced poll data, but we also may be more rare than we previously thought 🤣
I was 13 when I moved to the US and I notice that I do so much mirroring of the accents and pronunciations of my conversational partners. All of these register as mostly valid if at times unfamiliar options for pronouncing words. I only get tripped up by accents that I have not heard a lot of like South African, or New Zealander.
A Newfoundlander speaking pre-Confederation Newfoundland English would really throw you. It did me in 1970. By the time I went back to Ontario in 1974, I was afraid that my Ontario English would never re-establish itself, but it did very quickly.
I personally say mischievous without a second i precisely because of the spelling justification, but seeing the publishing of "mischievious" with an extra i in 1867 *blew my mind*
Thank you for explaining the got/gotten divide. I'm a 59 year old American woman and my late husband was from Lancashire, UK. He said "got" and it always sounded wrong to me. I thought it was a class or education thing. I didn't realize it was a cultural difference. Now I know! He also used "do" differently. "I didn't do" in places I would say "I didn't."
@dinkster1729 I'm trying to think of a good example. If I asked something like "Did you make dinner?" He might say "I didn't do." Where I would just say "I didn't."
That 'trip' example really suprised me; I subtly, occasionally use the 'ch' version subconsciously! Great video!!! Would love another like this, just to convince my parents (in their 50s) that some of the pronunciation habits I have (in my 20s) aren't just made up!
Because I studied French years ago and still read it, I sometimes lean toward French pronunciations. "homage" is a good example. I believe it also forced me to become much more conscience of word order; in both languages.
Regarding "trip" and "drip", I'm a young person from the western US, and these words are overwhelmingly pronounced with "ch" and "j" sounds. When I was a kid it drove me insane, because my mom taught me to pronounce basically all the letters in words. My TR or DR sounds still sound local, as most people's R's are very rhotic in this region, but I have had several people say I sound very fancy or formal, mostly owing to my crisp plosives.
It's very interesting hearing about this from being from New England, which is a very linguistically conservative region where we've resisted prerhotic palatalization, the caught-cot merger and even the northern cities vowel shift and ash raising, but then realizing that we (or perhaps just I) have invented me distinctions, like intransitive proCESSing at a ceremony but transitive PROcessing of foods and other goods.
I have never heard "ch" and "j" coming from the Midwest. I had generally associated those sound changes with "sounding British" and didnt know this was also an American thing in some places.
@@andrew_ray I am also from New England, and that seemed completely strange to me as well. Not sure whether you are are saying caught/cot is common here or not, but I all these words have the same vowel sound when I hear them and no idea if they actually do or not, (caught, cot, dawn, don). Not sure what processing means at a ceremony, but I would say proCESSion, probably proCESSing too, if it means to move. I guess proGRESSing too, I wouldn't say PROgressing. I also say PROcess(ing) when I mean a transformation of some sort.
Brave indeed. OTOH it would have been extremely weird, even surreal, if suddenly Dr Lindsey started to go all prescriptivist on their ass and shame their accent.
As a native English speaker who's lived in the UK his whole life (27M) I find these videos fascinating! Gotten was a strange one for me because I've heard people use it, I knew exactly what it meant when I saw it, but I don't think I've ever used it. Rather than drawing a distinction between "got" and "gotten" as some people have in the comments I've read, I tend to swtich between "I've got" to mean 'have' (e.g. 'I've got a cat' or 'I've got to go') and 'I got' as the past tense of acquisition or understanding (e.g. 'I got a new cat yesterday' or 'I got what you meant')
Great video! I'm American (as are my parents), but my mom scolded me the first time I said de-VY-sive. She insisted it's di-VIZ-ive, and she used the dictionary (who knows which one) to "prove" it. A complicating factor: She was raised in Japan, by American parents.
I think the natural progression/tendency for any given word is to minimize the amount of movement of the mouth, tongue, and jaw over time so the word can be said more quickly. It will also transition based on the type of word it is. For example, an adjective might be paired frequently with certain nouns but not other nouns. Depending on the noun it connects with, it may take more or less movement of the mouth to transition to the adjective and then to the noun. That will impact how it is pronounced in context and over time.
It's not just that, but also how people mishear the quicker pronunciation. A lot of people here comment on the "trip" and "drip" thing, saying it's a "ch" and "j" sound, but you can say both the way they're spelled with the same amount of mouth movement, but the "t" and "d" get less distinct and sound more like "ch" and "j" without actually making those same sounds. But then people, especially kids, hear the less-distinct sounds as "ch" and "j" and grow up saying it that way. But I am unusual in that I almost always pronounce words the way they're spelled while making them sound as close to how others pronounce them as possible. I add a tiny bit of extra breathiness to "wh" sounds as opposed to "w" alone, for example. Not enough that anyone would comment on it, but enough that the two are distinct in my mind. Likewise, most people pronounce the "tt" in "pretty" and similar words as "dd," but some people really emphasize the "tt." I do neither, just giving some extra sharpness to a "dd" sound so it is a "t" but not a hard or emphatic one. Same with "trip" and "drip."
I just watched this video -- and no matter how I perceive myself as pronouncing the words discussed, I was not suprised by any of the differences until the very end, when you got to "trip" and "drip". As a 72 year old American, I am completely floored to learn that young people are pronouncing "tr" with the "ch" sound of "chance" and "dr" with the "j" sound of "John". My biggest shock in the whole video was when the young American man named Adrian said he was always confused that his name was NOT spelled with a "J" in it! The idea that he pronounces his name as if the first syllable was the word "Age" is just amazing to me. I just have not perceived people of any age using those pronunciations. My own expertise is in the history of the use of given names. A name which has started showing up for girls in the USA the last few years is "Jream". It was #776 on the list of the top thousand names for American newborn girls published by Social Security for 2022. I had been assuming this was actually pronounced as "Jay-reem", but after this video realize it must just be a phonetic respelling of how many younger people believe they are pronouncing the word "dream". I have put up a question on the discussion board of the behindthename.com site asking the posters there how old they are, where they were living at age 14, and if they pronounce names like Tristan, Patrick, Drew, Tracy, Drake, etc. with the "CH" or "j" sounds. I will report back on results. But again, it has been a big shock to me to learn this particular change is in progress.
55 year old American, with 23 years living in London and I'm with you!! I was horrified. I couldn't pronounce Adrian with a 'j' sound if I tried!! And they're teaching this to non native learners?? I know language, and pronunciation, is ever evolving but this one is just bizarre.
6 месяцев назад+1
@@redsoxexpat Did you record yourself saying "Adrian" and listen *very* closely to that recording? Preferably at half speed? A lot of people think they pronounce something a certain way, are *CONVINCED* they do (or don't do) a certain thing, but then a recording shows that they very much do it. Geoff often has slowed-down pronunciation examples in his video because of that.
On no planet is there a J sound in Adrian, at least there shouldn't be. I know and Adrian in London and neither he, nor any of his friend's, say Ajrian.
6 месяцев назад
@@redsoxexpat I see you didn't actually reply to me.
One thing I find very interesting is at 22:00 when you're talking about trip and drip. As a Polish person growing up in the UK I've heard many different sounds unique to both languages. I find it interesting that the 'j' in jog is treated as the same sounds as 'd' in drip. I pronounce 'drip' with a voiced retroflex affricate, and 'trip' with voiceless retroflex affricate, whereas jog is pronounced with a voiced alveolo-palatal affricative.
As a Taiwanese American who grew up speaking Mandarin, I find this a very interesting observation. I also use retroflex affricates for “tr” and “dr”, and now I’m wondering if it’s due to the influence of Mandarin phonology like yours might be from Polish phonology.
You want say you pronounce drip as "dżryp", trip as "czryp" and jog as "dźog"? Because I would say "dryp", "tryp" and "dżog". Sometimes I may say "dżryp", "czryp" but definitely not "dźog". But I have never been in an English speaking country.
The "mischievous" vs "mischiev[i]ous" example actually reminds me of "homogeneous" vs "homogen[e?]ous", where it kind of goes the other way. Etymologically you would derive "homogeneous" with an "-ious" suffix from the Latin "homogeneus", but a lot of people pronounce it as if it's spelled "homogenous", stressed on the second instead of the third syllable, too. I suspect the stress shift might actually be the cause.
I’m American, based on the West Coast, and something I’ve noticed is that with the verb “to contrast”: if I’m using it by itself then the stress will fall on the first syllable, however if I use it in the phrase: “compare and contrast” the stress falls on the last syllable. I know in English we generally stress the last syllable when something is a verb and the first syllable when it’s a noun: suspect, to suspect; record, to record, etc. but it’s strange that contrast and to contrast in American English seems to have lost that distinction except for in that set phrase.
That's a good point. And I always find it interesting when there's just one phrase that gets an unusual pronunciation of a word. Like I always say Caribbean as cuh-RIH-bee-in unless it's the Pirates of the care-ih-BEE-in
When I studied English at school during the seventies and eighties, RP was definitely the model. My last English teacher (1986-1989) had probably started her teaching career in the fifties, and held proper pronunciation at high esteem - and that pronunciation was of course upper middle class. The same applied for vocabulary, too. Her opinion was that using that kind of language would result in us being treated well in the English speaking world. Using language learnt from the cinema would naturally not yield the same desired results. My pronunciation has since been influenced with role models other than the likes of sir Humphrey Appleby, but when you asked about the pronunciation examples ("How should you pronounce these?") brings the dictionary examples shown in the video immediately on my mind.
The discussion about mischievous vs mischievious was interesting to me. I'm a native American English speaker in my 50's. I wasn't surprised to hear that mischievious had been around for a while because I tend to associate it with speakers older than myself. It was interesting to hear that it's regaining traction with younger speakers. It was also interesting that it draws the ire of so many prescriptivists, because I associate it with a somewhat elevated register despite the spelling not matching the pronunciation. If I had been asked to guess before watching this, I would have expected the common criticism to be that pronouncing it as spelled is "lazy". Just shows further how little one person's intuition can reflect reality
Hi, American English speaker in my 50s from near Washington, DC. Growing up here, learned the word without the i in the last syllable, but with the i doesn't sound wrong to me.
I admit that I (in my 50s) tend to think of 'mischievious' as...well, as stereotypical Wild West cowboy talk, I guess. I do think of it as old-fashioned, but I also expect to see someone who pronounces it that way wearing a Stetson, and probably tipping it to me while calling me 'ma'am.' It's only very recently that I've started to notice that many, *many* young people pronounce it that way and so begun to shed that mental image. But for many years, it was definitely something I thought of as a late 19th century Wild West idiom. So perhaps that's the stereotype that is fueling some prescriptivist rage: a sense that mischievious is more rural, as opposed to urban[e]? Just a thought.
@@dcseainalso in my 50s, from central Illinois, and somewhere along the way we were specifically taught that the extra letter was incorrect. I wonder how many people who add the i to mischievous also drop the i from “poinsettia”. Added note, my device suggested the “correct” spelling of both words.
Im a 54 yr old Midwestern American English speaker. Thanks for makng me frel old 😉😁 Anyhow my odd things is about mischievous/ious. I use both, but use one over another based on context. My "usual" is the ious, (its more "fun", or, "mischevious", lol) but in formal circumstances I'll change (perhaps a code switch?) to the ous pronunciation. Anyhow, great vid, as always!
i'm 26, but same here about mischievous! interestingly, it's the same for words like "processes" or "biases". at work, i sometimes use the "iz" ending, but casually, i use "əz".
Hi Dr Lindsey, this might be quite contrary of me, but I’m trying to research the British ‘standard’ (Conservative RP?) pronunciation of words in the early part of the 20th century. Are there any dictionaries or pronunciation guides of the time you would recommend which has phonetic transcription? Thank you!
Ironically with "got/gotten", Americans wouldn't say "I've gotten a cold" **unless** they're talking about process. When talking about _possession_ , we say (and it's across ages): "I've got a cold". I'm making reference also to your past video on the difference between "get" in American English to signal possession versus to signal process, where UK speakers used to merge them one way (as "got" in both cases) and now merging them the _other_ way (as "gotten" in both cases). Wow.
As an American, I'm very unlikely to use "have got" in any but the most jocular and informal contexts at this point. I wonder whether that holds true for other formally educated Americans.
@@sluggo206 Pretty common to omit the "have" altogether instead though. "I got nothin going on". Which, gives us the fun construction with "got" being treated as an infinitive, i.e. "What do you got goin on?" "I don't got anything going on until 5".
Thank you! Lived my entire life on west coast of USA. I watch many RUclips videos from England and by ex-pat Brits (e.g. Lawrence in "Lost in the Pond"). I have found myself unconsciously adopting British pronunciation of some words, sometimes to the amusement of my friends.
I'm surprised so many people even in the US pronounce it "chrip" and not "trip," but on closer examination, yeah, a lot of us do at least in some parts of the US. For myself who does pronounce it with a "t," it sounds very British kind of like "chewsday" for Tuesday. But I have heard both chrip and trip here in the US
Dr. Geoff this was fascinating. I find that I pronounce words differently when I'm looking at them, rather than when I'm just speaking them. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, pronunciation was a big deal. Now it seems, not so much. I do recommend to English learners here in the USA that they learn what I call "standard American English", often used by news casters in the USA. However, accents creep in and are ubiquitous. Thank you so much for sharing this approach used by the native speakers in the UK, USA, and Australia.
I pronounce "psalm" and "caulk" differently depending on how I'm thinking. If I'm remembering what I heard in childhood, I say them without the l. But if I'm picturing the written word, then I include the l. I think it's because I rarely say them. I always say "salmon" without the l because it's such a common word (at least in the northwestern US where they're local). I usually say "calm" without the l, but I might include it if I'm reading it.
@@sluggo206 I've gotten into deep conversations about whether the "l" should be pronounced in such words. I pronounce the "l" in most words where an "l" appears before another consonant (talk, chalk, caulk, psalm, palm, calm, almond, yolk, folk, golf, etc.), and I never noticed that many people don't pronounce the "l" in those words, until I got into a big argument/discussion about rhyming words. (I think it was about whether "poke" rhymes with "folk" and "yolk". For me, it clearly doesn't, but for others it clearly does.) After that, I started to notice that many people don't pronounce the "l" in those words.
@@Paul71H See "l-dropping" in Wikipedia. It's a common process in English that has advanced in some words and dialects more than others. walk/talk have fully lost the l everywhere. psalm/caulk have lost it in some dialects including mine, although Wikipedia says it really disappeared everywhere and came back in some areas as spelling pronuciation, which is how it is with me (Western American). To me palm/alm/chalk/calm/almond/yolk are the same as psalm/caulk: I don't pronounce the l if I'm thinking about how I heard it in childhood, but I sometimes pronounce it if I'm reading it or picturing the written word.
The "Length and linking" video two episodes ago at 7:57 has an example of walk/wok. In this case he's focusing on the o, and pointing out that Americans say walk/wok the same, while Brits have different o's. (And I may have been wrong that Brits don't pronounce the l in walk; it sounds to me like Lindsey's accent may replace it with w (l-vocalization), whereas mine deletes it entirely.)
@@sluggo206 Thanks for the reply. I would quibble with one thing only -- about walk and talk. I do pronounce the "l" in those words, and I'm pretty sure that I've heard some other people pronounce it too, so I wouldn't agree that those words have fully lost the "l" everywhere. But I do agree that many people don't pronounce the "l" in those words.
glad you included debris 🙏 i had a conversation with my dad where we found out, the dictionary we used didn't include what I always hear when watching minecraft videos, but did include what my father claimed was the correct pronunciation, being that the first time I heard it
I find it interesting that my grandmother and I pronounce "wh" differently. I would pronounce the beginning of "wheel" and "week" identically, while my grandmother makes an effort to pronounce the H.
And there a also people that start almost all words starting with W with and h-sound e.g. why = hwy, with = hwith, wheel = hweel and week = hweek. It just sound wrong to me.
There's something comforting about discussing the differences of English pronunciations without dictating what's "correct". It's sort of a benign way to shine a spotlight on how different we can be while still being unified by something in common (language in this case) without things like ego and pride getting in the way.
I'm an online English teacher, myself, but I left the United States 32 years ago and haven't been back. A lot of this video surprised me. One you didn't address, however, also surprised me - the WH in words like "what" or "why". Before COVID, I was a classroom teacher at training centers in various countries. Once some years ago, I was just chatting with a colleague, another native English speaker, when suddenly another younger (British) colleague started making fun of me in a mean-spirited way. My pronunciation obviously really annoyed her. I had to be told what she was laughing at. I gave full value to the WH pronouncing them /hwa (shwa)t/ and /hwai/. She found this utterly risible, but it had to be pointed out to me. I've since heard many older British speakers pronounce these words as I did but younger Brits as well as pretty much everyone else pronounce these words /wat/ and /wai/.
I'm someone from the southern U.S. with a very 'General American' accent and I don't distinguish between drip and dʒrip, I can easily slide between both when saying a sentence. Though, I think drip is more likely when Im carefully annunciating (i.e. saying 'drip, drop, drip, drop') and will probably say dʒrip if I'm speaking quickly or informally, *especially* if I'm using 'drip' in the slang sense to refer to someone's outfit.
I have trouble saying [tɹ] and [dɹ] at all. It just feels _so wrong!_ I can do it if I intentionally try to roll the r as [tr] and [dr], but that just makes it even more obvious that I'm putting on a fake accent.
@@angeldude101 exactly! As I mentioned in the video, ever since I was a kid, I didn't even think of "tr" and "dr" actually being [tɹ] or [dɹ] at all but rather [tʃɹ] and [dʒɹ]. It's quite hard for me to say it without that affrication
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Lessons from $5, Geoff? With a human teacher? How long is that for, and how much are they paying the teacher? 🤔
@@frmcfThere are teachers from all over the world. Italki teachers generally rate it highly, or I wouldn't have taken the sponsorship.
Most americans do NOT say Pro-sess-EEs. Most of us do say: Prah-sess-esz
How the hell does he keep insisting that 80-90% of Americans pronounce that word like that? I'm all over the place with verbal communication. You only have people in universities using that pronunciation. He's wrong 11:31.
@@NinjaNezumi"You only have people in universities using that pronunciation" - But isn't "processes" the type of word that is more commonly used in an academic setting? It's hard to imagine people throwing that word around in casual conversation about a football game or something like that.
American English: I treat GOT and GOTTEN as two different verbs. "I've got a cat" means I have a cat, while "I've gotten a cat" means I just acquired a cat. "I've got it" means I understand, or more broadly that I have it without making reference to it being recent, while "I've gotten it" means I received it, probably recently.
Yes in British English we could say "I've got a cat" vs. "I got a cat" and "I've got it" vs. "I got it" to make the distinctions you list.
@@subplantant I"d understand all 4 of your sentences the way you meant them so I guess that means they are all correct.
I'm from the US also and I've never said, "I've gotten a cat" but rather "I got a cat" or "I just got a cat" to mean "I just acquired a cat." Maybe you're a younger speaker or from a different area than me.
@@edwardmiessner6502 Yeah I'm in the US and can't really imagine someone saying "I've gotten a cat" - it sounds extremely unnatural to me. Definitely seems like an age or area thing probably.
Sort of depends. I'd say, for instance, "I've gotten used to hearing the word 'gotten'". I'd never say, "I've got used to.." Grammatically that's more British, I think.
As a non native speaker it's always fun to see how my pronunciations and vocabulary seem to come from all over the the place and apparently from different generations as well haha
same 😂😂😂
Same.
America is a melting pot, after all.
I’m a native speaker who grew up watching lots of international content, so while I mostly speak in my regional accent there are quite words/sounds I say “weird”
Same.
I thought for the koala the kwala pronunciation was THE correct one in English but in my native language it's pronounced as it's written.
I hear the kwala variant most often.
Processes sounds more natural and simple than varying the end of the word into Processeez, the former rolls off the tongue better-this one might be my personal bias showing and maybe other non-native speakers are used to the other pronunciation, probably mainly ones who lived in the US. (but sometimes i might also subconsciously use the latter if the sentence has other words with a similar ending so i might not be consistent with that one)
Mature-i pronounce this word extremely inconsistently but mostly as maetshoor or maetsher (like the -cher in teacher)which is wrong ofc., it comes down to me not being used to the phonetic inconsistencies in English.
Misshiv-misshiv(i)ous, sometimes i spell the c, sometimes not.
I never heard about drawring and didn't notice it ever as a common thing, thought it was a dialect thing for when you put too much emphasis on spelling out every character to the point you start creating nonexistent ones-so basically accent-related.
Trip i just say t as t most of the time without forming it into shrip so it's more like thrip, people paying attention might perceive this as a mild accent but as far as i'm aware some native speakers also pronounce it as just a t or close to it.
I generally tend to default to British-English pronunciations unless it sounds more natural in the US version, the reason for that some of the sounds-characters in British-English are similar to what i'm used to so they got a more 'correct' feel to them.
For example Brits often spell an A as just that, an A instead of an AE which for me is an E and É.
I also used to study German even before i started learning English from the then English Cartoon Network so i might mix up a few things here and there where i just default to that when a word is similar.
Like how in the word Machine there's more of an emphasis on the A and in German Maschine the longer sch and e are emphasized.
Even here in the word Emphasized it makes little sense to me to use the US variety of the word, but i hear this more often even though i remember i used to write it with an s most often-just got used to this subconsciously over the years to not risk sounding 'posh'-ish or pretentious because the z is just so much more common.
Though the word emphasis has no z so it makes sense for it to be left untouched.
But on the other hand the phonetic z is simpler but it can be pronounced both ways even as emphasised. (and i just got a red autocorrect-frown under this :D, autocorrect clearly hates the already underrepresented British part of the English language-down with the false autocorrector!)
As a noun, I say 'PRO[rhymes with 'go']cesses', but as a verb, the stress pattern changes, and it becomes 'proCESSes'.
I never knew that I was saying 'cure' differently from others. I say it the dictionary way.
I would use 'et' in some contexts and 'ate' in others, depending on where the stress came in the sentence.
The first E in 'interest' gets fully sounded or not depending on whether it is an announcement of bank rates, or whether is it an unstressed word in a sentence talking about a level of fascination.
I was brought up with two separate pronunciations for ''garage'. One rhymed(ish) with 'barrage', and the other 'carriage' [garidge'].
I say 'HArass', and find the sound of 'haRASS' very grating.
'Drawing' without the R is difficult to say.
I might use 'gotten' reflexively as in "He probably would have gotten himself killed", but otherwise 'got'. In a recent political poster was the phrase "Has anything gotten better?" and many people in Britain derided the bad grammar.
With 'trip' and 'drip' I attempt to say the words as written, but in haste they may come out as 'chrip' and 'jrip' simply because the as-spelled sounds are difficult to produce at speed.
One I have noticed is that old people often say 'necess'ry' whereas younger folk tend towards the more as-spelled 'necessAry'.
British people say important words in sentence clearly, and unimportant ones get skipped, shortened, or slurred, therefore all words have alternative pronunciations. I might choose to say "Th't SOMEWHAT dipnds 'n WHAT y're saying," or I might say "THAT s'mwh't DEPENDS on w't YOU are saying."
strangely enough, I differentiate between the noun and verb by how I pronounce the "pro"
however the emphasis remains on the first syllable in either
I feel like I've always thought of those as two words, never quite noticed before now
both stressed on the first syllable for me, and in free variation whether I do /ˈpɹoʊ.sɛs(iːz)/ vs /ˈpɹɔ.sɛs(ɪz|iːz))/
Fancy seeing you here, Mr Lloyd.
I am a member of the British diaspora in South Africa, and I also say cure the dictionary way. In fact, there are a lot of older pronunciations left-over here, as is often the case with former colonies.
With Afrikaans the effect is still more exaggerated. I'm told its vocabulary is positively antique compared to modern Dutch. For example there Netherlands uses a Dutchified version of the word giraffe, where the Afrikaans word is "kameelperd", camel-horse.
Slight variation: If it's a set of directions/insructions then it's proCESS. If it's a formal entry/walk then it's PROcess.
"Processes" ending in /i:z/ has to be a hypercorrection based on plurals like "analyses".
had to stop around 11:20 to comment that as a lifelong midwestern American, I’m fairly certain I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it like “process-eez” so I was shocked to hear it’s a common pronunciation.
very interesting!
As a texan who moved to the pnw, I also have never heard the "common" pronunciation in this video.
Agreed. I’ve never heard biasees either. I am also from the Midwest though.
Sadly, I have heard the pronunciation ending in -eez way too often for my liking. I am from the PNW, US.
It's a pet peeve of mine. The singular is not processis, therefore it's not a crisis/crises situation.
I've never heard this pronunciation either and I'm on the West Coast (CA)
I think processeez is a pseudo-intellectualism based on real Greek and Latin plurals of "-is" nouns (crisis, basis, analysis, &c).
What really stood out for me was "dictionary" pronounced "dikshun-ry." As a Canadian, I've always said "dikshun-airy."
same here as an australian
Same here as an American.@@aekibunnie9746
Same as an American!
As an American, I say "dickshinAIRee"
Oh yeah, bud. DIHK-shun-air-ee.
From a Frenchman, thank you so much for sharing your expertise on English pronunciation. No other youtube channel comes even close to this depth of analysis and nuance. Your channel alone made me totally question my command of spoken English.
His previous video "short i - long i - solved for French speakers" may also help.
😂
“even comes close” is better than “comes even close” - not nitpciking but you seem interested to learn!
@@ek-nz Actually, both are OK. I say both. Technically, "even" modifies the word after it. So "comes even close" tells where it comes, while "even comes close" tells that it comes. I think I like the original "comes even close" better in this sentence; it's more precise so it has more impact.
For what it's worth, I'm American and his videos make me question my command of spoken English.
My 43 year old self realizing that all of my pronunciations are extremely situational and often determined by what I'm talking about, who I'm talking to, or how I'm using the word.
On "got" and "gotten", I use both depending on meaning.
"Got" is used to mean "possess": I've got a cold.
"Gotten" is used when the meaning is "become" or "acquired": I've gotten tired. I've gotten a new book.
Thus, there's a difference between "I've got ten books" (I have ten books in my collection.) and "I've gotten ten books" (I recently acquired ten new books for my collection."
I’ve finally found someone else who gets it (and maybe explains it better than me). The depth of my linguistic knowledge is fairly shallow so I could be wrong here but it seems like got is a perfective whereas gotten is an imperfective.
I use it daily but when I write it, it looks wrong. 🤔
Does anyone say "Ill got gains" instead of "Ill gotten gains?" I tend to think of got/gotten as having different meanings too.
The question isn't whether one uses exclusively one or the other. Everyone who uses "gotten" also uses "got" in the manner you describe. In the video, he's asking specifically the British speakers whether they _ever_ use "gotten," because in the past, the British used "got" for both meanings. "Gotten" was formerly used only by Americans.
er, that's just use of tense?
I "love" your non-prescriptive approach to pronunciation, you treat it almost as anthropology rather than dictating what "should" be said.
the antonym is descriptive👍
I agree with the OP, but all good Linguists do that. Linguistics is a pretty interesting subject. All subjects have both dry parts and fascinating parts. I believe that in universities, Linguistics is a part of the Anthropology Dept., which is 1 of the Humanities, although I wasn't fortunate enough to be able to go to any university.
@@cattymajivGreat point about prescriptivism not being stressed in linguistics. That being said, I’d disagree about linguistics being under anthropology typically. Aside from my univ being a counterexample, linguistics itself is a massive discipline that probably wouldn’t fit neatly under anthropology. There’s massive overlaps in psychology (i.e. linguistic relativity, the weaker form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), cognitive/neuroscience (i.e. the exact mechanisms behind how children acquire language), and computer science (i.e. syntax and its overlap with context-sensitive languages; languages in the CS meaning of a set of strings that can be generated by some ruleset).
@@cattymajiv Why does linguistics have to be a mere matter of anthropology? Why can't it be a set of rules that govern a language, just as we have rules for law, for sports, for academics, etc, etc?
This anarchic and iconoclastic opposition to "prescriptive linguistics" reigns almost utterly unopposed today, because we live in a society that hates standards, because it is full of people incapable of following them. Standards were a way to uphold a level of competence and intelligence. But those are bad words in this age of Idiocracy.
@@KerithanosRules for law, sports, and academics also change and fluctuate with time, and it's the same with language, and even food.
Often these rules come from the society first, and since human societies change and fluctuate with time, these rules are updated.
The changes are not a new thing - languages (as well as food, sports, academics) have been fluid and changing not just in the past century, but across hundreds of years. We see this in written form too, in how different the language is between something like Le Morte D'Arthur, and any of Jane Austen's works, or Chaucer to Shakespeare to us.
And we see this in other languages and media too: Korean TV shows, Bollywood movies, and Japanese anime all sound different in the way things are spoken now vs 50-60 years ago, and sometimes you can pick out specific pronunciation differences too. And many modern languages have changed from ancient times to middle ages, to modern times - Chinese, Arabic, and Greek for example - particularly in the way the common person speaks the language.
Today we have so much more documentation, as well as new types of media (eg. video vs just books) that it can seem like things are changing so fast.
I'm a 49-year-old British English speaker and recognised myself in some of the "young" pronunciations and some of the "old". The two that were most interesting for me were "homage" and "harass", because I use both pronunciations, but for different meanings. A new film may be an omázh to a golden oldie, but minor lords paid hommidge to their king under the feudal system. All responsible employers have a policy for preventing sexual harássment in the workplace, but if I'm just feeling a bit wound-up and stressed, I'm hárassed (or more accurately, "harrised"). If I said I was feeling harássed, I'd probably want to speak to HR about it.
I am exactly the same. I also use “protest” with two different meanings: “PROtest” for the act of participating in an organised political action such as a march or a sit-in, and “proTEST” for simply objecting to something verbally.
My dad does something similar whereby he parks a car in a ‘garridge’ but sometimes calls a car showroom a ‘garrahzh’. I just say ‘garridge’ and ‘hommidge’ in all contexts though.
But what bit of Britain... Southern British has that neutral accent you might find in Reading, then there's Essex/east London, west country, Welsh accent but then the valleys accent is different to say Cardiff or Newport.
@@thegorgon7063 my dad’s from Staffordshire and I’m from nearby Warwickshire ( but originally from the part where the accent is basically Brummie). I’m not sure how typical the Garrij/gurahzh distinction is in the area though - a linguist shoukk on d do a scientific study
@@FifthCat5I would say the distinction is between the verb and the noun: to protEST something by going on a PROtest.
that trip/drip stuff just blew my mind, I've pronounced it that way my whole life without realizing I don't use a T or D sound
I'd like to see part 2 with a Canadian, an Irish person, a New Zealander and a South African.
Yes please, but make sure there's someone from Glasgow also!
And India! There are a huge number of English speakers there.
@@katherinec2759 People in Glasgow speak English?!
Just kidding. Yes, I'd include Scots for sure.
would be interesting to see a followup on different areas in america, since it’s not one monolithic accent
@@morgan0 No country has one single accent. Imagine doing one with every accent in the UK. It would take hours.
As a non native speaker it's fascinating trying out every pronunciation before the native speaker says it and contrasting them to find out from where I've picked up each word. I noticed I have a great mish mash of accents lol
That is fascinating!
same here lol
It's what happens when I watch British, Scottish, Irish media as an American.
Same! Though I've learned a lot from native speakers on the internet, I actively practiced speaking in classroom settings for the most part. I mostly either mispronounce in a way typical for non-natives of my background or use the old-fashioned pronunciation that I learned.
I need to find a game where I can bear the average voice-chatter...
Online gaming has given me a colourful of regional accents, like dutch, german, french, italian, danish, norwegian, swedish, russian, ukrainian. Along with a mishmash of australian, northern english and american through entertainment media.
I'm Australian, my girlfriend's family is english. I was in the UK a few years ago visiting her family, and one day her grandma said 'et' during a conversation. I was so confused I almost asked her what she meant, but I figured it out through the context of the conversation. I had no idea that was even an option, and I'm very interested in history and linguistics. That form is completely non-existent in Australia.
I have heard et but used more as a tongue in cheek form when someone is playing with how they say a word. Certainly not in normal conversation though
OMG same I'm Australian too and I was so surprised that et was listed as the main British pronunciation. I watch a lot of British TV and I was really surprised when watching QI to here Stephen Fry say et because I'd never even heard that on British TV before. I thought he'd made it up.
I use it. I'm so oooold
@@DrGeoffLindsey well the lady in question is a retired English teacher, in the moment I almost corrected her and said "do you mean ate?", but I'm glad I held back the impulse, she would've ended up being the one correcting me
I've lived my whole life in the US. I would say that here, the only people who pronounce "ate" as "et" would be people who could be stereotyped or characterized as rural, southern, backwoods, and/or hillbilly. For example, on the 1960s TV show "The Beverly Hillbillies" (a sitcom about a Tennessee hillbilly family that gets rich and moves to Beverly Hills), the main character, Jed Clampett, says "et" for "ate", if I'm not mistaken. And that makes sense, because the rural southern and Appalachian dialects tend to preserve some of the older British usages and pronunciations that most Americans have lost, or at least I think that's true.
This was one of the most fascinating, fun and informative videos I've watched on YT. As an English teacher/tutor since around 1989, I've encountered so many of these issues with students and myself. I do appreciate how difficult it is to 'loosen up' your own approach to pronunciation, learning and teaching, though. It's far easier for me to tell students: 'Language is fluid - it changes constantly' than to adopt new ways of pronouncing, spelling and speaking English. And that's why videos like this are so important. Thanks Geoff, for continuing to inspire, educate and entertain.
>>Geoff (Jeff) and Jail (Gaol) is enormously amusing to me (I'm born in Brooklyn (a city coterminous w/ Kings County, now a borough (sp?); County of, and Queensborough, County of --; raised in the state of confusion. -~Norman Mailer who ran for NYC Mayor, me thinks).🙂
Nicky is my teacher, she is incredible! Very encouraging, always gives me very detailed feedbacks, material to work with and she simply is an expert ❤❤
Thank you Myriam! ❤
I'm a native English speaker but I know I would enjoy discussing the language - especially current usage - with such an intelligent and thoughtful tutor.
Best wishes for your further enlightenment!
Wow I never realized that there were so many differences in pronunciation even in a generation to the next. As a non native speaker, it seems much easier now to justify my pronunciation I could just say it was the correct one at some point 😂
Most people in the UK should be able to figure out what you're trying to say quite easily, regardless of pronunciation. We have so many wildly divergent accents that almost any given pronunciation of a word is the usual way of saying it somewhere.
The most common thing I see with a lot of ESOL students struggling with, is actually trying to understand highly divergent regional accents. A Southern English accent like Geoff's is good to learn because everybody here understands it, so you'll always be understood regardless of who you speak to. But if you go to someplace like Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen, or Belfast, you'll most likely to struggle to understand anything, unless you've put work into learning something about the accents beforehand.
I'm from the North East of Scotland, and I remember having to translate for my Greek partner her first two years of living here. She was fluent in English, but struggled to understand anybody North of Leicester.
@@SafetysealedAs a native English speaker, I also struggle to understand anyone north of Leicester 🥴
@@ilovesparky13 Understandable. You probably live in a bit of a linguistic bubble, and almost never have exposure to any accents other than Southern British English or General American English. (Not a criticism, just something I've regularly observed in people who struggle with our accents)
Thats why so many of us who speak non-standard varieties have to code switch in order to be understood by most southerners or Americans.
You speak a Standard variety of English because it's the only dialect you know.
We also speak Standard variety of English English because its the only dialect you know.
😉
Just say what you want. There will always be someone who understands. The differences in pronunciation is just ridiculous in today's internet era.
@@Safetysealed I was sent on a practise teaching round to Harlow, Essex, England back in 1973 with a group of Newfoundland education faculty students. We were at the local pub shortly after arriving in Harlow. One young lady who had been to England before told us that Skol was the beer to order since it was most like Canadian or Newfoundland beer. The person taking our order couldn't understand what she was ordering. He said, "Small?" to her when she ordered, "Skol" for us all. "No! no!' she said, "Skol." So the server brought us pints. Later, a group of workers came in who said they were "spider men". "You call us "steeple jacks" in North America. I didn't know what that occupation was at the time either. LOLOL! Now, I do. People who work painting tall structures such as bridges and so forth. In any case, one of them said on seeing us drinking from pints commented, ''I've never seen women drinking pints before." I guess he'd never visited the pub where Harry lost his cherry. LOLOL! A day or so later, the pub owner asked us not to come around any more because we were too boisterous. I guess he didn't realize that education faculty students are as quiet as Newfoundlanders get.
This was one of my favourite videos I've seen recently, I really hope you do another one of these soon!
40ish year old American here: "Processes" depends on which usage it is. If you're talking about someone transforming/handling materials (He processes soy to be used in commercial food production), it's prah-se-sez. If you're talking about the steps/procedures the worker is following (The factory has specific processes in place to prevent contamination), it's prah-se-zeez. As I think on it, I do think the prah-se-zeez pronunciation is newer; I seem to recall materials from the '80s using the prah-se-sez version for everything.
The only evidence I have to back this up is anecdotal, but I'm fairly certain the -eez version isn't so much generational as it is occupational. Basically, it's part of the business-speak or corporate jargon dialect, used primarily to signal that one has bought into that depressing bureaucratic culture. As such, I avoid saying it at all costs.
I agree that this is probably how I would use the two pronunciations. I also had this thought about cure. If I'm curing (cjyring) a cold or if I'm curing (cjöring) (salting) food I might pronounce it differently. But English is not my first language and it might be influenced by whom I've learnt about the different subjects from.
67 year old born and raised in Northern California here, and in my world “process-eez” was never a verb it was only ever a noun. I do, though, agree that it was almost exclusively used in “ corporate speak”.
the eeez ending just sound foolish to this American. I guess if I hear it ,I refuse to imitate it.
@@roadfood1 Hey neighbor! I'm just a couple of years from you, and was born & raised in the Bay Area. I recall hearing the verb "process" as a computing term at elementary school in the 60s, because of those punch cards we had to blacken squares on with a #2 pencil. It was also used at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley in the early '70s. Just a guess, I think it may have become corporate jargon next, as businesses naturally found value in computers, and then "process" entered the vernacular.
This has made me realize that being a child with no friends and shoved into the deepest halls of a library has meant I pronounce things based on how a dictionary stated them. With time I've been "corrected" by peers, but this video has brought up some I never noticed!
Another really common one that you might not know about: "often"
In my experience, people who started reading a lot from an early age pronounce the 't' clearly, while more traditional speakers pronounce it like "soften" (without the 't').
They both pronounce the 't' in "oft" (exactly like "soft"), however.
@@halleyorion - Haha, this is a sore spot for me. I got my early education (K-8) in a Catholic school back in the day, and the nuns laid down the rules with a figurative iron hand (and a literal ruler, lol), and one rule that was drilled into me early on was that in the word "often," the "t" was silent. I find it very difficult to this day to pronounce it, so I sort of cherish it as an idiosyncratic memory.
Also, I'm curious. Yes, in "soft" the final "t" is pronounced, but do you pronounce it in "soften," (as in "fabric softener") or do you say "soffen?"
@lovepuppy2242 - Hah, I too learned to read early on and lost myself in books that were probably well above my grade level, which had a tendency to trip me up when it came to pronunciation. I can remember writing a report in my freshman general science class in which I used the word "façade," and the teacher actually read a portion of it aloud to the class. When he started out, I thought, "OMG, he's reading MY work!" But when he came to the "façade" portion, I thought disappointedly "Oh, no, that's not mine, I don't even know that word." You see, in my head, I was pronouncing that word "fa-kayd."
@@halleyorionyou hit the nail right on the head! Thank you. I do pronounce often as off-ten, never noticed that one.
I have both pronunciations of homage in my dialect, but with slightly different meanings. “oumage” is a literary term for a reference to another author (or very commonly film director) and “homidge” is the archaic feudal term for fealty to a lord. “Oumage” is also countable while “homidge” is not.
I feel exactly the same. Or like, hommidge is an object, and homáj isnan adjective. You pay something (hommidge), but a film has the quality of being an homáj.
In my experience, 'omage is everyday (a callback or tribute) , homej is religeous (honor to a diety).
omg I was sitting here thinking I've never heard "hommidge" it sounds absolutely silly, but in the case of fealty or something religious you're definitely right. I guess since those uses are much rarer for me they completely slipped my mind.
I think a lot of people regard "(h)omarzh" as correct because they think it's a French word - but note the correct spelling of the French *hommage*. The word homage has existed independently in English for many centuries (unlike garage or montage). I regard the "French" pronunciation of homage as pretentious, but it's very rapidly becoming the norm and will have been completely assimilated within another generation
@@halcharles9995 I mean, I think people naturally want to pronounce similarly-spelled words similarly, and at this point there are enough words like "montage" (descended from French but definitely part of English by now) that it feels like a normal way to pronounce English words ending in "-age".
Man the difference between West Australian English vs Queensland English vs NSW/Victorian English is crazy, I’d love to see an analysis of those differences
Yeah I didn't realise the difference between NSW and Qld until I made a friend from NSW. It's not big enough that a foreigner would notice but to me it's really interesting
This!!! There is not enough research on different Australian accents. Most academic sources say we only have 3. If I was an academic I'd write about and study this!!
Yeah and as an example theres a massive vowel shift when you go north of the vic/nsw border. I hadn’t noticed it but my partner noted that when I was back in albury Wodonga I spoke differently to locals subconsciously compared to when I was in Melbourne. So interesting theres such a difference between pronunciation
When I was a younger West Australian (late 60s, early 70s) we took it for granted that Queenslanders (at least) could be distinguished from other Australians (partly speed of speech, but also pronunciation) - wasn’t something consciously analysed - you just knew as you listened
@Amazatastic 😂😂 The difference between accents is very noticeable between outback NSW and the coast, but the north south differences are also quite discernible.
My north Queensland granddaughter (an adult) has that unique NQ accent where, for instance, the word "yes" becomes a high pitched, almost nasal "yee". Fascinating. 😊😊
I had “mischievious” gaslit out of me by spellcheck. I thought I was the crazy one and had totally made up that pronunciation! I say “mischievous” now but it feels validating to know how widespread “mischievious” is. I’m a native American English speaker, as a data point :)
me too! english speaker too.
i started hearing people say mischievous and tried to get myself to say it that way because thats how its spelled, but mischievious feels more right
"Mischievious" isn't a word.
Same! I’ve always said and heard “mischevious.” It was only when spellcheck kept writing it wrong that I realized the truth.
@@slowanddeliberate6893🤓
Hey just cause this is a language related comment, data point or datum point? 👀
i would be so amused as an online tutor for some highly qualified expert in my field to come give me a little lecture
I'm a 30 year old American who says homage "oh-mahzh", and I was apparently completely backwards on which way it was changing. I assumed the "hah-midge" I was hearing some people say was a newer pronunciation and that I was old-fashioned for saying it the French way.
I'm American and have rarely heard the word so I say "HOME-ij" like it's written. I've heard a few different pronunciations, but none of them often enough to say "That's the right one" or "That's my dialect". In the 20th century Americans started de-nativizing recent loanwords. Lindsey has a video on it, "Who pronounces foreign words like PASTA right?"
Hommage and homage both exist together. My gut feeling is hommage is the feudal term like a vassal's bowing to his lord. O Mazh French pronunciation is an artistic creative work or part thereof that acknowledges and shows reverence to another person or work. There are other French doublets that are the same word that get used differently chef/chief
Americans still use the French pronunciation. It’s only the British who decided to Anglicize French words.
Brit here...if I'm paying homage I pronounce it homidge but if something is an homage to someone or something, then I use the French pronunciation of omarj.
@@sluggo206 I didn’t say Americans Anglicize.
Fascinating video!
I'm a middle aged Australian speaker and I often use more than one pronunciation for different meanings and circumstances. First example, for me, homage pronounced the French way is used when talking about modern films and the arts, whereas I'd use the more Anglicised pronunciation when talking about history (meaning something like fealty). Also I find different pronunciations can be perceived as more or less educated/formal, so I might change depending on whether I want to sound knowledgeable and cultured vs down to earth and casual.
I share your divide re homage - I'd say such-and-such a scene is an homage (no aspirated h, pronounced to rhyme with brie) but I pay hommidge to my lord. Intriguingly the former sense doesn't even have an entry in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which (with the hommidge pronunciation) only refers to the sense of medieval law.
I'm middle aged Australian too. There are several words I pronounce differently for no apparent reason.
As a fellow Aussie i absolutely agree, different pronunciations here will put you forward as, frankly, more or less bogan. Or possibly signal you're from Adelaide if you pronounce graph as "graaaf" instead of "graff"
Seventy-year old Aussie here. Me too with homage. Never realised it until I saw your comment. As for the trip/drip business, I can't even begin to comprehend how you can possibly get your tongue around anything other than a hard 't' or hard 'd'.
@@claremiller9979
This "cahsl" v "cassl" for castle can be fun when an Adelaide person goes to Malbun, as the locals pronounce Melbourne.
There is a large shopping centre at Doncaster - so naturally when I went to Melbourne I pronounced Doncaster more or less as the folk in Yorkshire pronounce it - much to the amusement of the locals. Doncaster in Victoria is Doncaaahster.
I like with the whole mischievious/mischievous thing; it just fits with its own definition. Causing a little mischief...
Approximately 60-70 years ago, children and adults who mispronounced mischievous, usually couldn’t spell the word either! It seems they weren’t big readers, so they never saw the written word, and copied what they had heard at one time, even though most people were not mispronouncing it.
Miss-chiv-ous sounds so wrong to me. I've never heard it pronounced as such 😂😂😂
In Australian (at least) to me mischievious (4 syllables) sounds like it reflects the concept of mischief better. Mischievous is not as naughty sounding 😅 I don't know why.
NSW/Victorian Australian here, and I'm desperate to know Tom's background! His "i" sounds stood out to me as super atypical, and almost more Northern English than Aussie. It stood out to me so much that I can't believe there aren't more comments about it! And I would hazard a guess that his "KOala" is really quite atypical too.
He sounds South African to me. I am from Perth.
Just added a similar remark@@aussie405
@@aussie405 Likewise. I'm from Perth and he sounds like there is some South African in the mix.
I’m from NSW (Sydney, but I live in the Southern Tablelands now) and his accent sounds quite weird to me, too. My wife was half listening and wondered out loud who on earth pronounced KOala that way. A number of his other words sounded weird too.
I'm from Southwest WA and I thought he sounded like he either moved here from another country as a child or had lived overseas for an extended period of time before returning. He definitely didn't have a typical Australian accent.
This channel is incredibly fascinating to me as a non-native English speaker, it made me realize that my pronunciation is a strange mix of American and British English, depending on where I first learned it. French is my second language, so it adds another weird quality to it, where I sometimes don't know how a loan word should sound like in English and either pronounce it in French, or make up a weird Frankensteinian version of it.
I would really love to see a video on that, as there's a lot of people out there from around the world who learned English just from using the internet and consuming English media, I really wonder what these people tend to sound like, although I'm guessing there's a heavy bias towards sounding more American given how dominating American media is on the internet, and if so, does it sound sort of "generic", is there some bias towards any regional American English variations, or is it just all over the place?
Love your videos, learned so much from them, cheers!
I am much the same, I first learnt English from Americans and then I moved to the UK for a while, so my pronunciation is all over the place (with, to my great consternation, quite a bit of my own Hungarian accent remaining).
By mentioning French you reminded me of something interesting. My dad only speaks a little English and acquired mostly from reading. So his pronunciation is a matter of guesswork. What I've noticed is that he keeps trying to pronounce French loanwords in what he assumes is closer to a French way. Has my dad ever studied French? No, but he did learn Russian as a kid, which has a bunch of French loanwords that he would be familiar with.
It's WILD to me how the languages we're familiar with affect the ways we can learn new ones. I am currently trying to learn Serbian through English, and it tickles me how differently you'd explain Serbian grammar to an assumed English-speaking audience. Often I am reading a lesson that goes to great lengths to explain a concept that seems utterly trivial to a Hungarian. ‘Same here, moving on.’
Are you me lol
My (non-native) pronunciation is very weird; it's southern British English as a baseline, but with /ɻ/ everywhere (unless I consciously omit it) and no linking-r, and sometimes monophthongized GOOSE and FLEECE. THOUGHT is often (usually down to true mid), but LOT is always rounded for me and homophonous with CLOTH. I generally have the TRAP-BATH split, though I might accidentally pronounce TRAP like STRUT.
Thanks. You got me pronouncing "Frankensteinian" to myself over and over again for 30 seconds
My roommate in the 1990s was a Russian refugee who knew no English when he arrived. He learned English from ice hockey and Beavis and Butthead on TV. When I met him his vocabulary and grammar were limited. Everything was "cool" or "sucks", or in the past tense, "it was sucks". After four years I noticed a significant improvement, although never to the level of a few other Russian emigres.
I narrate a program for DIscovery called Mysteries of the Abandoned. I am originally from Canada, now living in the UK, and the show is meant for an American audience, even though the writers are all from the UK. We are in are 9th season, and every season I get emails from the pronunciation police back in the US. A lot of the confusion comes from words that have multiple pronunciation options: anti, missile, Caribbean, nuclear, but recently I was hit by "macabre" which I think is one of lingustics dirty tricks. For me it can get very confusing. I grew up in Canada, watching American TV, but now I live in the UK and I find myself trying to remember how I pronounced things as a child, and then I see this video and I'm like... oh my stars... i could be wrong again, lol. thank you for putting this together though. fascinating topic.
Is there more than one way to pronounce macabre? Do people end it like a donkey with bray? I'm baffled!
I'd say there can be a difference in the last syllable, not like "bray" but whether it is pronounced at all or not - as a clear "bre" or more as a breathy "b" (sort of French, perhaps?)
@@jenniferpearce1052 interesting isn't it. Like this video shows, it all depends on where you live. I found 3 different pronciations in 3 different dictionaries: there is a pronounciation that doesn't sound anything after the final B, there is the one where you end with "bruh" and there is a third one in which the RE is voiced, like at the end of "centre" or "theatre". there are probably more, lol. It all depends on where you live.
Some people obviously don’t have enough to do.
That’s a tough one indeed. The origin of « macabre » in the English vocabulary is loaned from the French version of the word, but the etymology gets back most probably to Latin or Spanish or Arabic.
I have almost always heard English speaking people pronounce it the exact same way we French do, sometimes even exaggeratedly French. I think that’s the kind of word English loaned from us because it sounded dramatically cool, so not pronouncing it with a French accent kinda ruins the effect.
In French we pronounce it « makkabrruh ». Incidentally, « brrrh » is the onomatopoeia we use for expressing shivers, either from cold or fear. So it befits the spooky theme of the word.
As a child I had an old (American English) joke book from the 1950s -- it used to be my mother's -- and I only just now realized the last rhyme here doesn't work anymore:
'Twas in a restaurant they met
Romeo and Juliet.
He had no dough to pay the debt
So Romy owed
What Julie ate.
As a non native who picked up the language through media it was really interesting to learn more about my weird mix of English as its cobbled together not only from American, British and Australian but also old an new pronunciations (a lot of the old one probably stemming from the formal education that I had in Germany)
When you read the James Nicolle epigram on the origin and purity of English -- you will plotz!
I'm southern British, but raised with a foreign mum, and since watching your videos I've realised that in imitating her, I've ended up with quite a few rp pronunciations 😂.
I've had exactly the same 'problem', except I live in Scotland. Everyone around me speaks with a Scottish accent and I speak with a sort of RP/ English sounding accent due to having a foreign mother. Everybody thinks I'm English despite not having any connection.
I've only just recently realised that some of my pronunciation is influenced by my Italian family. My mum was born in England but my Nana in Italy. Italian wasn't even her first language. It was Friulian. So my Italian is terrible too 😂
That’s good, RP is a nice pronunciation.
I grew up in Spain with a British mum. I’ve lived in the UK since 2010 and I always get asked where I’m from, as I sound native but they can’t place my accent. Bets are usually on South Africa 😂
My parents were strict about how we spoke, and I still use rp pronunciation a lot. My best friend from secondary school, said her parents liked me because I was posh, which they were not. I was also rather serious, and wore glasses.
I'm half English, half Cantonese, only ever known and spoken RP because I've never lived in the UK, only went to international schools throughout Asia. I've been in Australia for 20 years (I'm 41 now), I'm an English teacher, and I definitely say ee-ons. In fact, I cannot remember anyone ever saying ay-ons. Really surprised at that one. I'm looking for the rock I've been living under. 😅
As an Australian of a similar age I've always heard it pronounced eons too.
I'm about a decade younger and I just realised that I pronounce aeon as ay-on and eon as ee-on, not realising that this is a British/American spelling difference. However, I know exactly why I do this. It's because Final Fantasy X released when I was young, and they used "Aeon" with the ay-on pronunciation.
Can't speak on how many other people were possibly influenced by this, but the game sold millions of copies and was insanely popular among people my age, so I'm probably not the only one...?
I'm Australian too, and I can't remember anyone saying "ay-ons" - "ee-ons" seems to be the standard pronunciation here but perhaps I'm wrong.
There’s a credit card company and a department store chain in Hong Kong having this word as their name and the ads always pronounce it as “ee-yawn”
@@Eralealea I basically had the opposite happen because of Pokemon. I didn't know "ae" could make an "ee" sound until I learned that Aegislash gets its name from "aegis" (pronounced ee-jiss), so I assumed "aeons" was the same way
That trip and drip one.... never realized I was saying 'ch' my whole life
The "trip" and "drip" thing is wild to me. I didn't even know that was a thing at all until I recently watched your video about it. Once I did, I soon discovered that while I don't use the thrip and jrip variants, and neither do most people who grew up in this corner of the US (I think), there are plenty of people around me who do use those forms! I just never noticed that difference in how we pronounce a whole bunch of words.
I'm fascinated by how much information you can glean from pronunciation and common usage of 'standardized' language. Although given the current culture of digital transmission of data, that information has become diluted, since everyone everywhere is tossing their personal usage data into the ring so quickly that tracking idiomatic usage is no longer a matter of actual geographic and cultural transmission.
I grew up in the north of England. I always assumed I pronounced "trip" and "drip" the way they were spelt. But when my son was learning to read English he asked me why train began with a T and not with a CH. After saying it to myself over and over I realised he was right. It's quite subtle, but definitely there in my speech. It makes me wonder if it has always been a feature of my speech or just developed in the last couple of decades.
@@markjones1500 Personally I pronounce trip and drip with the t and d sound but I can see ch and j being used by people if they think that makes them easier to pronounce because they are very similar sounding and will get the word across just fine.
US speaker in his mid-60s here. I was blown away by trip/drip, because I'm usually pretty sensitive to language change, but I'd never registered this pronunciation before hearing it on this video (though I'll be listening for it now).
Same! That really stood out to me.
Yes and the long e in processes and biases? I don't think I've ever heard that. So odd to me to hear a younger person saying that most Americans say them that way.
Sounds similar enough to me, couldn't care if it went either way.
I'm in my 20s and never noticed it lol. Always t and d for me.
Dr. Linsdey has an entire video about this trip/drip thing (and other similar pronunciations). I had never noticed it either until I watched that video. I pronounce "tr" and "dr" words with "t" and "d" sounds rather than "ch" and "j", but I can see how the "t" and "d" could easily slide into "ch" and "j". I perceive the "ch" and "j" as a bit more of a lazy pronunciation, and I would advise anyone who does public speaking to develop the habit of using the "t" and "d" pronunciations, especially since that keeps the pronunciation in line with the spelling. But maybe I'm too much of a stickler for such things.
Great video as always! As an EFL teacher I would have a heart attack if I logged in to see Dr Lindsey as a student!
Thankfully he did give us prior notice 😃
As an Englishman from London, aged 73 who has lived 25 years in the US, I realize that I belong in a museum. When I go back home, I feel nobody is speaking the RP I picked up from my mother, nor the cockney of my friends at school, nor the Liverpool accent of my father. . There is some weird sing-song Thames Valley mishmash everywhere. Here in the US people ask me if I am an Australian. As the song goes: “Ain’t got no home in this world anymore.”
My father-in-law had a similar experience with Dutch. He emigrated to New Zealand after the war. When he returned to the Netherlands after 25 years he noticed that nobody spoke "proper" Dutch any more. It's amazing to me how quickly language changes. It's like watching children growing - if you see them every day you don't notice the changes, but if you see them again after a few years you hardly recognise them.
That’s incredibly sad to me. A bit bittersweet maybe
@garthly I guess if you leave to move abroad, in some ways your way of speaking in your home country is retained like a time capsule... My partner's Mum is the same age as you but has continued living in Britain, and we recently listened to a recording of her reading a short story on the radio in the late 80s - OH MY GOD how much her accent has changed. She used to essentially use RP and now she uses a somewhat more neutral southern English middle-class accent, with maybe a tinge of RP left. But I wonder if she'd left and moved abroad around the time of the original recording, how much of her original RP accent she'd have retained today.
Isn't is pretty nifty how fast languages evolve? We can actually notice quite a lot changes in a single lifetime if not in a single decade.
I moved back to the South after thirty years in the Midwest. Southern accents are largely gone. I have an idea of how you feel
it was the longest iTalki ad I've seen 🤣 but also, Ias a non native speaker, learned A LOT from these simple interactions. Thanks!!!
As a songwriter, I love words like mischievous/mischievious, because they're the same word, everyone knows they're the same word, but they have different rhyme/stress/syllable patterns. Far from being a mistake, we should have more words like this!
That's a cool perspective!
I think mischievious is a more devious kind of mischief than mischievous. I don't know why, besides the fact that they rhyme.
Is "mischievious" (with a second i) actually a word? Or is it influenced by "devious"?
@@SineN0mine3 I love it. Makes sense to me; probably explains its persistence.
@@Mortimer50145 It's tricky to say what is "actually a word". I would say the traditional or prescriptive answer is no, it's not. But if people are using it (including publishing the word for the past 100 years) then there's a strong argument that it's a valid variant of the word. I'm Canadian and most of my life I heard "mischievious" and read "mischievous", which never matched up.
Just as another data point: I clearly remember using "gotten" in a written test in standard 4 junior school, so aged 10 in 1977, and my teacher (who must've been fairly progressive for the time) mentioning that this was an "Americanism", but not in a critical way. He wanted to know what I was reading (Peter Benchley, natch).
Because I'm sure other people are wondering it too: "gotten" is in Richard II (act 5).
gotten is a funny one because it sounds completely fine in some sentences and very strange in others. I use both but I can't pinpoint when and why...
@@biscuit715 Possibly the difference is between the state of owning something, e.g. I have got a pen, and the action of getting something, e.g. It has gotten worse.
@@biscuit715
Same.
Something I noticed in the video is that "it's got better" sounds really weird to me. I would either say "it's gotten better" or "it got better" but never "it's got better"
@@biscuit715 Definitely, yeah. I'd never say I've gotten a cold; either I've got a cold or I've caught a cold, but would say I've gotten better, it's gotten worse. (but I would say it got worse or it got better). Not sure why I'd use either - but, like @iout - it gotten better or it's got better both feel fundamentally wrong.
As a non-native English speaker I'd really like to thank Agerian for his help :)
Seriously, as easy as English has been to learn for me, it's truly mindboggling to see how hard/impossible it is to reach a native speaker level. Never before have I given a single thought to that "dz" sound instead of a plain "d" sound in words like drive, draw etc. because IT ISN'T TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS. I initially thought it might be one of the things that give away me being non-native, but then I just listened to the way I pronounce them and I seem to have picked it up correctly from anglophone entertainment! I can now see that accents from native speakers of languages with a more sensible pronunciation system where a letter corresponds to a sound tend to neglect the sh or z sounds from words starting with tr or dr. It's simply because our languages weren't designed to keep foreigners guessing ;)
Also, "drawring" and other similar pronounced extra r:s sound a bit "rednecky" to my ear, which I find quite funny given that it's much rather a British pronunciation than a south state American one :D Again, one of the things in Bri_ish accents that I have probably heard many times but never realized having heard :)
Aussie living in London, so now I know why my workmates were teasing the way I said pure. They were all like "pyu-ah, pyu-ah, say it again Tim"
Trying to get you away from _pyurrr?_
Well, you could wander off to New England. And try to distinguish "khakis" and "car keys." Ask me why I remember sometime...
This video needs to be a series! Thank you for your hard work.
Also, the Australian at the end does know his Mexican Slang for sure, hahahaha
This is so fun to learn how many words are changing over time! I love how celebratory you are to descriptive linguistics!
Obsessed with this video i wish i could watch it for another 2 hours. Its so interesting to analyse your own speech like this and learn more.
The jrip pronunciation is something that I brought up to some friends some years ago precisely because I didn't see it in any dictionaries. I'm very happy to see you bring attention to it.
Where are you from? Like another older American who commented here, I had no idea this was happening, and I pay a lot of attention to pronunciation.
@@ralphedwards9839 Scranton, PA.
The conversation I was referring to took place with a diverse group of Pennsylvanians, including another Scrantonian who had transplanted to the area at a young age, and none there seemed to be able to tell the difference, including myself. Everyone else claimed to be pronouncing it as dr while I was the only one claiming it as jr.
I've used this phoneme for as long as I can remember and I'd always heard others using the same phoneme, apparently even if they weren't. This is only anecdotal but it seems that the same (or a similar) psychological phenomenon is happening here as when native English speakers have trouble disturbing the Spanish dh phoneme from the English t or d phonemes.
I've never heard djrip (instead of drip) nor chrip (instead of trip) until I saw this video.
@@juliansmith4295 Same here. I am a New Englander, and have only ever heard "drip" and "trip" in this part of the US. Moreover, I have friends from all over the age spectrum, and have not heard "djrip" or "chrip" from anyone.
@@LibraOwl That's from people from two countries then (I'm from British Columbia) who've never heard it.
With the verb "contrast", there's a kind of weird distinction for me (an American) between when I use /ˈkɑntʃɹæst/ vs /kənˈtʃɹæst/. I think what happened is I picked up the word in natural day-to-day speech with the accent on the first syllable, but then in school, we were taught to "compare and contrast", and the teacher put the accent on the second syllable, so I ended up acquiring that as a different word without really thinking about the fact that they were the same word. So I use the two almost like two different words with very similar meanings. If I'm talking about a single noun being contrasted with another single noun, I almost always put the accent on the second syllable, but when explaining a complex scenario and contrasting it to another complex scenario, I'm more likely to put the accent on the first syllable (but it's less absolute of a split).
Same here! Actually just left a comment on it, but yeah the "compare & contrast" example is very established in my mind.
I think I say the verb both ways.
Yeah for me /ˈkɑntʃɹæst/ is always a noun, /kənˈtʃɹæst/ is always a verb! So interesting to see how different people end up saying it.
Seems that many controversially pronounced English words are those loaned from us French… Sorry about that.
For the verb prótest, US (northeast), I will always put the accent on the first syllable if protesters are doing it.
But to describe a retort, I will use the verb protést. The weird thing is, though, I feel like I'm describing a vaguely British schoolroom when I use it. And of course, "The lady doth protest too much," or however the saying goes.
I really need to beg to differ on the frequency in the US of "processes" with a long "ee" in the final syllable. It's very rare in my experience (including in the tech space), to the point that hearing an American use it would be jarring. The mental image it conjures with me is that of a self-important, older academic aiming to sound "British."
The ‘ee’ version sounds distinctly Scottish to me (an Englishman), so you’re not wrong that it sounds British but it’s not remotely a posh pronunciation!
Oh, thank you. I died a little bit inside when the American tutor said that it was common.
I also think it depends on noun or verb usage. As an older US citizen, the long-ee is rare but still occasionally heard for a plural noun. But the long ee is never present when used as a verb conjugated into 3rd person singular (he/she/it processes).
I have never heard an American use a long we in processes. And I an an American.
I use it, and I am American, but I am also known for talking a bit fancy at times, and other people around me use -iz not -eez
There is one dictionary that shows affrication of "t" and "d" when they're followed by "r" as an alternative pronunciation, it is "Wiktionary". For the word "trust", for example, Wiktionary gives the following pronunciations:
/tɹʌst/, [tɹʌst], [tɹɐst], [t͡ʃɹ-]
In New Zealand (and Australia) we still pronounce the 'u' in cure and mature. 'Kyor' and 'matyor' seems odd to me - although familiar in British and US accents now you mention it.
I'm British (RP accent) and I also found the 'cure' pronunciation of those younger Brits odd. I definitely say /kju@/ - last sound is schwa. (But I am 50!)
There's still a difference though between that Australian/New Zealander pronunciation of yours and the old [ʊə] pronunciation dictionaries love so much.
As shown at 13:10 when Geoff asked the Australian speaker how many syllables "cure" has, in Australia and New Zealand, "cure" has two syllables, rhyming perfectly with "sewer".
That doesn't happen with the old British (RP) [ʊə] pronunciation which takes only one syllable and so wouldn't rhyme with "sewer".
That's not American, especially the way they said it.
@@naufalzaid7500 100%. I think you'll find that the vast majority of Australians say kyoo-wah, and ma-choo-wa.
@@francisnopantses1108 I wonder what it is in the (few) non-rhotic American accents?
Very interesting. As a non native, trying to mimick as best as I can, this casts a light on some of the variations I may have heard along the decades. And i am surrounded by non natives using English all day, so it's hugely helpful.
Also, I'm the sort of person who learns how to ride a bike from a book.
LOLOL! I do like to confirm what I think and have learned from others from a book, but I give it my own subtle twist sometimes.
I know what you mean; I learned to read from a bike.
@@RFC3514 Bikes have a very limited vocabulary, and a lot of repetitions! 🙂
This is fascinating. As an Australian from a long term Tasmanian family I and everyone I know tend towards the apparently defunct pronunciations, or a variant that isn't mentioned here at all. Bear in mind I'm not a linguist and might have fluffed some of the accepted terminology, but we say 'cure' as CUE -er', we say 'garage' as 'GARR ahje' but with the stress on 'garr', we say 'koala' as 'KOH -a-la' , and we say processes as 'PRO -cess - ehs'. And mature to me is definitely three syllables. 'ma-TUE-er'. It brings to mind a time in primary school when our teacher insisted that 'verandah' was a two syllable word and all of us were extremely puzzled by that because it's clearly three syllables spoken very distinctly, 'va-RAN-dah'. I feel the same about 'mature'. That said though, do we want or need that much homogeneity with language? I do get that second language speakers need to be able to communicate, but this seems extreme. Aren't the various pronunciations the best thing about travelling and speaking with other people?
Being from Tasmania I was confused a little because I also use pronuncuations not mentioned here. I think it does make sense though, Tasmania is isolated and has not had the same linguistic influences from new Australians coming over, at least until the last 10 years or so.
A big pronunciation difference I can think of is we use a different pronunciation of trough when talking about the laundry sink.
I do think, linguistics here in Australia are underserved when it comes to research, studies here seem adamant about the broad-general-refined accent spectrum when there probably is more going on. Ive even seen some people on reddit suggest there is accent differences between Hobarts eastern and western shores!
Same here, and I’m a born and bred West Australian. And I HATE the word “Straya”!
@dragoneer121 how was the teacher pronouncing verandah? V'ran-dah? That's so odd.
@@dragoneer121re: Hobart’s eastern and western shore, you could be right!!
I’m Victorian, and I thought the Australian here spoke more of a British style than what I usually hear or say myself. It sounded like he was being very careful to pronounce every word a more “traditional” way rather than how we speak every day.
Australian (Sydney) speaker here. I've never pronounced "trip" or "drip" with "ch" or "j" noises. They've always been a definite "t" and "d" noise for me.
I'll have to pay attention to my friends and see how they say it, but I've certainly never noticed anyone else pronouncing them with "ch" and "j" sounds.
i'm a non native speaker and i have no idea how i say it now 😭😭😭 both sound very natural to me
Australian from Hobart here, and I say trip and trip pronouncing the 't' and 'd' too, and also haven't ever noticed other Aussies pronouncing them different to me either.
Did you actually record yourself and listen closed, on half-speed? Chances are you actually do say "ch" or at least something closer to "ch" than to "t-r". Because that's what the mouth naturally wants to do, and that's why people do it.
Same goes for people who pronounce "street" as "shreet". "str" has a tendency to turn in "shr" if you're not very careful. We humans aren't, although going full "shreet" is avoidable.
You must be from a different English speaking country as it's not natural for most Australians to to pronounce as you wrote here. Our mouths don't want to do as you suggest, we do pronounce "t"s clearly. Only exceptions would be when drunk, tired or sedated perhaps causing speech to be slurred/difficulty in speaking, but even then the t sound is there to a large extent.
As a fellow Sydneysider I came here to say this or find someone else saying it. Drip and trip definitely Dr and Tr. However I have the feeling I may unwittingly do it the words like drawer and drawing.
I've started playing video games with random people around the world, and as someone who speaks no other languages I was started how quickly I started to pick up bits of other languauges. And I felt like I COULD learn it, because there was just some real guy in my ears trying to communicate, and we HAD to communicate to play well, and neither of us was 'teacher'. Necessity is the mother and all that
I found this video fascinating! Thank you for publishing it. Combat, in particular, really caught my attention. To me, the different stresses and pronunciations mean different things. For example one goes into COMbat (noun) to comBAT(verb form) something. I am American, but I speak several languages and grew up in a household with much older parents compared to other people my age -- perhaps that has something to do with my pronunciation choices.
My Mother lived most of her life in England, she moved to Australia about 14 years ago and is now an author. I find it interesting that whenever she uses the word got in the way that she was taught all her life, which is also the way I have always used, when her books go for editing they are always "corrected" to gotten, to such an extent that even when she puts it back to got it is recorrected to gotten, she has since sadly given up the fight. I say sadly as she isn't wrong just, it seems, old fashioned.
She should find better editors.
It’s so interesting, the examples that he spoke about in the video and used “got” I thought sounded completely wrong. I hadn’t really noticed but I absolutely use gotten in a number of contexts and absolutely could not replace it with “got” without it sounding completely wrong.
I might say gotten, but I would never write it because it is too informal. I'm old school and still use the Oxford comma. 😊
As an Aussie, I may vocalise *gotten but I would never write it . I must say, I'm shocked by the editors.
Love bringing up how to learn the language. I've studied Spanish, Arabic, and Japanese. Arabic I had the benefit of being in an Egyptian family but with this I can hear and understand Egyptian dialect perfectly but if it's more of a Gulf dialect (Kuwait, Iraq, etc) or even Moroccan which has a more French accent, I struggle and have to listen carefully to really understand. Spanish I still struggle with but can hear time to time and Japanese I had the benefit of having our Japanese TA do outside tutoring sessions which really was watching movies and when I went to Japan I noticed I really could pick up most of the conversation. I had a bit of a struggle but it definitely helped. And as an English example, my mom came from Egypt with a formal grasp of English that she learned in school but she still struggled. She told me it was watching TV with my cousin and later on Sesame Street with me that really helped her grasp the language. So I agree 1000% that the local media really helps and finding friends to talk with as well!
As a non-native speaker of English, I love your videos so much. For the longest time, I was under the impression that certain words can only be pronounced one particular way and it is incredibly interesting to me to see that it is not the case! I am always surprised when I learn what pronunciation of a particular word I picked up, for example this was the first time I heard "mischievous" pronounced without the long vowel. Keep up the great work, Dr Lindsey!
One of the most interesting things for me in these sorts of videos, is realising how much of northern english accents and dialects are old language features that are less used in other places, rather than new regional developments
I'm Irish and it's similar. I always knew that Hiberno-English had retained a lot of older usages and pronunciations that were lost in many other dialects, but videos like this really do hammer it home.
I'm from the US and so many of my fellow Americans would pride themselves on American English being conservative of the old way English speakers used to pronunciate when it's not like that at all, except in Down East North Carolina, Okracoke Island, Smith and Tangier Islands, and maybe in the Appalachians.
It's always very interesting to get Dr. Lindsey's insights on these phenomena. I wish one or more Hiberno-English speakers had been included in this comparison. Given how long English has been in use in Ireland, I'm led to believe that a lot of Hiberno-English vocabulary, and perhaps pronunciations, may be reflective of even earlier English pronunciations, perhaps pre-RP. Certain terms discussed here, like "gotten", may also have survived in Ireland even while becoming outmoded in British and American English as discussed in the video.
That was my sense as well - 'gotten' in particular doesn't seem to have ever been out of use here. Certainly my grandparents use it and my great-grandparents (that I remember) did also. It feels like Hiberno-English (and Scottish English to a similar extent) might well represent the difference between periphery and core, the heavy influence from Irish notwithstanding.
After all, there were a few very notable 18th century Irish elocutionists like Thomas Sheridan whose takes might be interesting to compare with modern British- and Hiberno-English to see some of those divergences.
That could even explain why it came back into fashion in American English, as Irish emmigration to America rose in the 18th and 19th centuries.
There's a video around here of a clip from a television show in the 50s where a language -- or rather, dialect -- expert sits down with people from different regions on the US and guesses where they grew up based on how they pronounced different words. A couple were really fascinating to me: some speakers pronounced "greasy" with a voiced "s", like "greazy"; another marker he used was whether people pronounced "marry," "Mary," and "merry" differently (some did, some didn't).
My dad pronounced "greasy" as "greazy" and I did, too, until I was in college and my now-wife got annoyed by it. He didn't grow up in the areas that American Heritage says pronounce it that way and neither did I, but his mother did. My mom and my other three grandparents all pronounce it with the "s" sound.
My dad was the main cook in our household, and his mom was the cook in theirs when he was growing up. I suspect it'd because the person who does the most cooking uses the word the most often, so my dad and I picked up the pronunciation due to that.
I'm American from the southwest of Virginia (so, Southern with an Appalachian twang). Around here "greaZy" is standard, and "greaSy" sounds odd. Our "marry-Mary-merry" vowels are completely merged as well, and thinking back to my grandparents' Virginia Piedmont speech (born around 1912), they used "greaZy" also, and their "marry-Mary-merry" was either merged or almost merged, so those pronunciations have been stable for awhile.
I found it interesting that (as a 25 year old person from London) I match the 'younger' pronunciation for almost all these, except the 'ure' phoneme in cure, mature etc where I definitely say it in the 'old-fashioned' way, like oo-er, and was surprised to hear you describe it as largely outmoded. I guess my accent is more conservative than I thought!
Do you say it as one continuously gliding diphthong vowel, or as two distinct syllables like the Australian guy here? The former is the old way and the latter (which of course also descended from that) is a pronunciation I'd associate more with Cockney and its modern descendent Estuary English, which is why I'm thinking this might be relevant. There's also a third way not mentioned in this video for people who retain the vowel (as opposed to those who merge it with THOUGHT), which is to pronounce it as a long vowel similar to the short vowel in "PUT"; I find that a lot of Standard Southern British speakers who have lost the vowel in words like "cure" and "mature" have this third version in words like "rural", "jury", and sometimes "tourist" (but usually not "tour").
@Muzer0 interesting question, and I would say I definitely don't pronounce it as two distinct syllables, and probably match the third pronunciation you listed here - with a sound that is very similar to how I would also pronounce jury, rural and tourist! A very astute observation, and I thank you for providing some interesting context
@@F1nnyF6 I'm in my mid-thirties. I grew up in Hertfordshire and live in London. I pronounce cure and mature exactly the same way that you do. Very surprised to learn that my accent is facing extinction.
It's barely a diphthong in my pronunciation, but definitely not the o: pronunciations in the video
@Joe_AK I mean it's definitely possible he's a bit mistaken on this one, I dont know if he specifically polled on it or referenced poll data, but we also may be more rare than we previously thought 🤣
As a native English (American) speaker, the trip/drip discussion blew my mind.
I was 13 when I moved to the US and I notice that I do so much mirroring of the accents and pronunciations of my conversational partners. All of these register as mostly valid if at times unfamiliar options for pronouncing words. I only get tripped up by accents that I have not heard a lot of like South African, or New Zealander.
A Newfoundlander speaking pre-Confederation Newfoundland English would really throw you. It did me in 1970. By the time I went back to Ontario in 1974, I was afraid that my Ontario English would never re-establish itself, but it did very quickly.
I personally say mischievous without a second i precisely because of the spelling justification, but seeing the publishing of "mischievious" with an extra i in 1867 *blew my mind*
Thank you for explaining the got/gotten divide. I'm a 59 year old American woman and my late husband was from Lancashire, UK. He said "got" and it always sounded wrong to me. I thought it was a class or education thing. I didn't realize it was a cultural difference. Now I know! He also used "do" differently. "I didn't do" in places I would say "I didn't."
Could you give a complete sentence of how your late husband would use "I didn't do" and you would say, "I didn't."
@dinkster1729 I'm trying to think of a good example. If I asked something like "Did you make dinner?" He might say "I didn't do." Where I would just say "I didn't."
Re: 'gotten': it's also an Irish usage, which is likely where it came to the US from, and possibly also a source for its rise in the UK
That 'trip' example really suprised me; I subtly, occasionally use the 'ch' version subconsciously!
Great video!!! Would love another like this, just to convince my parents (in their 50s) that some of the pronunciation habits I have (in my 20s) aren't just made up!
Because I studied French years ago and still read it, I sometimes lean toward French pronunciations. "homage" is a good example. I believe it also forced me to become much more conscience of word order; in both languages.
I say that word differently based on context
Paying 'hahm-edge' (pronouncing the h)
It was an 'oh-mahj' (No h)
Never really thought about it till now
“Oh-MAZH” sounds fancy and has always been used in contexts to sound fancy, that I’ve seen. Usually I say “AH-midzh.”
*conscious. (“Conscience” is the noun, not adjective.)
The majority pronunciation of "trip" and "drip" amazed me. I never would have thought it would be an advantage for FL learners.
Regarding "trip" and "drip", I'm a young person from the western US, and these words are overwhelmingly pronounced with "ch" and "j" sounds. When I was a kid it drove me insane, because my mom taught me to pronounce basically all the letters in words. My TR or DR sounds still sound local, as most people's R's are very rhotic in this region, but I have had several people say I sound very fancy or formal, mostly owing to my crisp plosives.
It's very interesting hearing about this from being from New England, which is a very linguistically conservative region where we've resisted prerhotic palatalization, the caught-cot merger and even the northern cities vowel shift and ash raising, but then realizing that we (or perhaps just I) have invented me distinctions, like intransitive proCESSing at a ceremony but transitive PROcessing of foods and other goods.
I have never heard "ch" and "j" coming from the Midwest. I had generally associated those sound changes with "sounding British" and didnt know this was also an American thing in some places.
@@andrew_ray I am also from New England, and that seemed completely strange to me as well. Not sure whether you are are saying caught/cot is common here or not, but I all these words have the same vowel sound when I hear them and no idea if they actually do or not, (caught, cot, dawn, don). Not sure what processing means at a ceremony, but I would say proCESSion, probably proCESSing too, if it means to move. I guess proGRESSing too, I wouldn't say PROgressing. I also say PROcess(ing) when I mean a transformation of some sort.
@@TheKeksadler I'm in the midwest and I only hear ch
@@PrincessNinja007 which part of the Midwest, out of curiosity? Wonder if it's a heartland/plains thing
I've been learning French through italki since August and it's been really great!
Well done to these young teachers for being brave enough to do this video with an expert in their field
Brave indeed. OTOH it would have been extremely weird, even surreal, if suddenly Dr Lindsey started to go all prescriptivist on their ass and shame their accent.
Oh, but he´s anything but a prescriptivist! He welcomes change more than anyone!@@syntheretique385
Thank you! Dr Lindsey made us feel comfortable so it was OK :)
As a native English speaker who's lived in the UK his whole life (27M) I find these videos fascinating!
Gotten was a strange one for me because I've heard people use it, I knew exactly what it meant when I saw it, but I don't think I've ever used it. Rather than drawing a distinction between "got" and "gotten" as some people have in the comments I've read, I tend to swtich between "I've got" to mean 'have' (e.g. 'I've got a cat' or 'I've got to go') and 'I got' as the past tense of acquisition or understanding (e.g. 'I got a new cat yesterday' or 'I got what you meant')
27m???
@@jessicajohn1962 He's 27 meters tall, he had a early growth spurt.
Great video! I'm American (as are my parents), but my mom scolded me the first time I said de-VY-sive. She insisted it's di-VIZ-ive, and she used the dictionary (who knows which one) to "prove" it. A complicating factor: She was raised in Japan, by American parents.
What a wonderful word to have a falling out over!
@@derekmills5394 Hahaha, great point
I think the natural progression/tendency for any given word is to minimize the amount of movement of the mouth, tongue, and jaw over time so the word can be said more quickly. It will also transition based on the type of word it is. For example, an adjective might be paired frequently with certain nouns but not other nouns. Depending on the noun it connects with, it may take more or less movement of the mouth to transition to the adjective and then to the noun. That will impact how it is pronounced in context and over time.
It's not just that, but also how people mishear the quicker pronunciation. A lot of people here comment on the "trip" and "drip" thing, saying it's a "ch" and "j" sound, but you can say both the way they're spelled with the same amount of mouth movement, but the "t" and "d" get less distinct and sound more like "ch" and "j" without actually making those same sounds. But then people, especially kids, hear the less-distinct sounds as "ch" and "j" and grow up saying it that way.
But I am unusual in that I almost always pronounce words the way they're spelled while making them sound as close to how others pronounce them as possible. I add a tiny bit of extra breathiness to "wh" sounds as opposed to "w" alone, for example. Not enough that anyone would comment on it, but enough that the two are distinct in my mind. Likewise, most people pronounce the "tt" in "pretty" and similar words as "dd," but some people really emphasize the "tt." I do neither, just giving some extra sharpness to a "dd" sound so it is a "t" but not a hard or emphatic one. Same with "trip" and "drip."
I just watched this video -- and no matter how I perceive myself as pronouncing the words discussed, I was not suprised by any of the differences until the very end, when you got to "trip" and "drip". As a 72 year old American, I am completely floored to learn that young people are pronouncing "tr" with the "ch" sound of "chance" and "dr" with the "j" sound of "John". My biggest shock in the whole video was when the young American man named Adrian said he was always confused that his name was NOT spelled with a "J" in it! The idea that he pronounces his name as if the first syllable was the word "Age" is just amazing to me. I just have not perceived people of any age using those pronunciations. My own expertise is in the history of the use of given names. A name which has started showing up for girls in the USA the last few years is "Jream". It was #776 on the list of the top thousand names for American newborn girls published by Social Security for 2022. I had been assuming this was actually pronounced as "Jay-reem", but after this video realize it must just be a phonetic respelling of how many younger people believe they are pronouncing the word "dream". I have put up a question on the discussion board of the behindthename.com site asking the posters there how old they are, where they were living at age 14, and if they pronounce names like Tristan, Patrick, Drew, Tracy, Drake, etc. with the "CH" or "j" sounds. I will report back on results. But again, it has been a big shock to me to learn this particular change is in progress.
I have apparently been living under a rock. This is the first instance i have seen "Jreem"
55 year old American, with 23 years living in London and I'm with you!! I was horrified. I couldn't pronounce Adrian with a 'j' sound if I tried!! And they're teaching this to non native learners?? I know language, and pronunciation, is ever evolving but this one is just bizarre.
@@redsoxexpat Did you record yourself saying "Adrian" and listen *very* closely to that recording? Preferably at half speed? A lot of people think they pronounce something a certain way, are *CONVINCED* they do (or don't do) a certain thing, but then a recording shows that they very much do it. Geoff often has slowed-down pronunciation examples in his video because of that.
On no planet is there a J sound in Adrian, at least there shouldn't be. I know and Adrian in London and neither he, nor any of his friend's, say Ajrian.
@@redsoxexpat I see you didn't actually reply to me.
As a non native English speaker, it is very interesting to discover that I have a mix of new and old fashioned Brittish and American pronunciations
One thing I find very interesting is at 22:00 when you're talking about trip and drip.
As a Polish person growing up in the UK I've heard many different sounds unique to both languages. I find it interesting that the 'j' in jog is treated as the same sounds as 'd' in drip.
I pronounce 'drip' with a voiced retroflex affricate, and 'trip' with voiceless retroflex affricate, whereas jog is pronounced with a voiced alveolo-palatal affricative.
As a Taiwanese American who grew up speaking Mandarin, I find this a very interesting observation. I also use retroflex affricates for “tr” and “dr”, and now I’m wondering if it’s due to the influence of Mandarin phonology like yours might be from Polish phonology.
a fresh slant
You want say you pronounce drip as "dżryp", trip as "czryp" and jog as "dźog"? Because I would say "dryp", "tryp" and "dżog". Sometimes I may say "dżryp", "czryp" but definitely not "dźog". But I have never been in an English speaking country.
@@Hadar1991 Yes I use 'dż' like in 'dżdżownica', 'dź' like in 'dźwignia' and 'cz' like in 'czołg'.
@@Patryk-vs1ww But never in my life I heard somebody saying "dzioging" with a "dź" sound.
The "mischievous" vs "mischiev[i]ous" example actually reminds me of "homogeneous" vs "homogen[e?]ous", where it kind of goes the other way. Etymologically you would derive "homogeneous" with an "-ious" suffix from the Latin "homogeneus", but a lot of people pronounce it as if it's spelled "homogenous", stressed on the second instead of the third syllable, too. I suspect the stress shift might actually be the cause.
I’m American, based on the West Coast, and something I’ve noticed is that with the verb “to contrast”: if I’m using it by itself then the stress will fall on the first syllable, however if I use it in the phrase: “compare and contrast” the stress falls on the last syllable.
I know in English we generally stress the last syllable when something is a verb and the first syllable when it’s a noun: suspect, to suspect; record, to record, etc. but it’s strange that contrast and to contrast in American English seems to have lost that distinction except for in that set phrase.
That's a good point. And I always find it interesting when there's just one phrase that gets an unusual pronunciation of a word. Like I always say Caribbean as cuh-RIH-bee-in unless it's the Pirates of the care-ih-BEE-in
It’s not about the set phrase, CONtrast is a noun and conTRAST is a verb. (American)
Twenty something from North West England here, the "u" cure and mature sound is very much alive in my accent
Me too.
I am a fifty something and also from the North West and I agree.
Same in the North East.
When I studied English at school during the seventies and eighties, RP was definitely the model. My last English teacher (1986-1989) had probably started her teaching career in the fifties, and held proper pronunciation at high esteem - and that pronunciation was of course upper middle class. The same applied for vocabulary, too. Her opinion was that using that kind of language would result in us being treated well in the English speaking world. Using language learnt from the cinema would naturally not yield the same desired results. My pronunciation has since been influenced with role models other than the likes of sir Humphrey Appleby, but when you asked about the pronunciation examples ("How should you pronounce these?") brings the dictionary examples shown in the video immediately on my mind.
Another belter from Dr Lindsey. Thank you so much for your services to linguistic descriptivism😄❤
The discussion about mischievous vs mischievious was interesting to me. I'm a native American English speaker in my 50's. I wasn't surprised to hear that mischievious had been around for a while because I tend to associate it with speakers older than myself. It was interesting to hear that it's regaining traction with younger speakers. It was also interesting that it draws the ire of so many prescriptivists, because I associate it with a somewhat elevated register despite the spelling not matching the pronunciation. If I had been asked to guess before watching this, I would have expected the common criticism to be that pronouncing it as spelled is "lazy". Just shows further how little one person's intuition can reflect reality
Hi, American English speaker in my 50s from near Washington, DC. Growing up here, learned the word without the i in the last syllable, but with the i doesn't sound wrong to me.
I admit that I (in my 50s) tend to think of 'mischievious' as...well, as stereotypical Wild West cowboy talk, I guess. I do think of it as old-fashioned, but I also expect to see someone who pronounces it that way wearing a Stetson, and probably tipping it to me while calling me 'ma'am.' It's only very recently that I've started to notice that many, *many* young people pronounce it that way and so begun to shed that mental image. But for many years, it was definitely something I thought of as a late 19th century Wild West idiom.
So perhaps that's the stereotype that is fueling some prescriptivist rage: a sense that mischievious is more rural, as opposed to urban[e]? Just a thought.
@@dcseainalso in my 50s, from central Illinois, and somewhere along the way we were specifically taught that the extra letter was incorrect. I wonder how many people who add the i to mischievous also drop the i from “poinsettia”. Added note, my device suggested the “correct” spelling of both words.
Your videos are fascinating, and so well done. Great guests, great content, great editing. Thank you Dr. Geoff.
Im a 54 yr old Midwestern American English speaker. Thanks for makng me frel old 😉😁
Anyhow my odd things is about mischievous/ious. I use both, but use one over another based on context. My "usual" is the ious, (its more "fun", or, "mischevious", lol) but in formal circumstances I'll change (perhaps a code switch?) to the ous pronunciation.
Anyhow, great vid, as always!
i'm 26, but same here about mischievous! interestingly, it's the same for words like "processes" or "biases". at work, i sometimes use the "iz" ending, but casually, i use "əz".
Hi Dr Lindsey, this might be quite contrary of me, but I’m trying to research the British ‘standard’ (Conservative RP?) pronunciation of words in the early part of the 20th century. Are there any dictionaries or pronunciation guides of the time you would recommend which has phonetic transcription? Thank you!
Ironically with "got/gotten", Americans wouldn't say "I've gotten a cold" **unless** they're talking about process. When talking about _possession_ , we say (and it's across ages): "I've got a cold". I'm making reference also to your past video on the difference between "get" in American English to signal possession versus to signal process, where UK speakers used to merge them one way (as "got" in both cases) and now merging them the _other_ way (as "gotten" in both cases).
Wow.
As an American, I'm very unlikely to use "have got" in any but the most jocular and informal contexts at this point. I wonder whether that holds true for other formally educated Americans.
Right, "'I've got" means "I have", so people usually say the simpler "I have". "I've gotten" means "I've acquired" or starting to have.
@@sluggo206 I think "I've gotten" is almost always used to reference the past. Like "I've gotten sick before".
@@sluggo206 Pretty common to omit the "have" altogether instead though. "I got nothin going on". Which, gives us the fun construction with "got" being treated as an infinitive, i.e. "What do you got goin on?" "I don't got anything going on until 5".
Thank you! Lived my entire life on west coast of USA. I watch many RUclips videos from England and by ex-pat Brits (e.g. Lawrence in "Lost in the Pond"). I have found myself unconsciously adopting British pronunciation of some words, sometimes to the amusement of my friends.
I'm surprised so many people even in the US pronounce it "chrip" and not "trip," but on closer examination, yeah, a lot of us do at least in some parts of the US. For myself who does pronounce it with a "t," it sounds very British kind of like "chewsday" for Tuesday. But I have heard both chrip and trip here in the US
I'm from the US and I've always pronounced Tuesday as "chews-day" and not "tooze-day". The latter to me is just completely wrong!
The chrip thing sounds very alien to my US ears. I have to listen carefully now to others
Dr. Geoff this was fascinating. I find that I pronounce words differently when I'm looking at them, rather than when I'm just speaking them. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, pronunciation was a big deal. Now it seems, not so much. I do recommend to English learners here in the USA that they learn what I call "standard American English", often used by news casters in the USA. However, accents creep in and are ubiquitous. Thank you so much for sharing this approach used by the native speakers in the UK, USA, and Australia.
I pronounce "psalm" and "caulk" differently depending on how I'm thinking. If I'm remembering what I heard in childhood, I say them without the l. But if I'm picturing the written word, then I include the l. I think it's because I rarely say them. I always say "salmon" without the l because it's such a common word (at least in the northwestern US where they're local). I usually say "calm" without the l, but I might include it if I'm reading it.
@@sluggo206 I've gotten into deep conversations about whether the "l" should be pronounced in such words. I pronounce the "l" in most words where an "l" appears before another consonant (talk, chalk, caulk, psalm, palm, calm, almond, yolk, folk, golf, etc.), and I never noticed that many people don't pronounce the "l" in those words, until I got into a big argument/discussion about rhyming words. (I think it was about whether "poke" rhymes with "folk" and "yolk". For me, it clearly doesn't, but for others it clearly does.) After that, I started to notice that many people don't pronounce the "l" in those words.
@@Paul71H See "l-dropping" in Wikipedia. It's a common process in English that has advanced in some words and dialects more than others. walk/talk have fully lost the l everywhere. psalm/caulk have lost it in some dialects including mine, although Wikipedia says it really disappeared everywhere and came back in some areas as spelling pronuciation, which is how it is with me (Western American). To me palm/alm/chalk/calm/almond/yolk are the same as psalm/caulk: I don't pronounce the l if I'm thinking about how I heard it in childhood, but I sometimes pronounce it if I'm reading it or picturing the written word.
The "Length and linking" video two episodes ago at 7:57 has an example of walk/wok. In this case he's focusing on the o, and pointing out that Americans say walk/wok the same, while Brits have different o's. (And I may have been wrong that Brits don't pronounce the l in walk; it sounds to me like Lindsey's accent may replace it with w (l-vocalization), whereas mine deletes it entirely.)
@@sluggo206 Thanks for the reply. I would quibble with one thing only -- about walk and talk. I do pronounce the "l" in those words, and I'm pretty sure that I've heard some other people pronounce it too, so I wouldn't agree that those words have fully lost the "l" everywhere. But I do agree that many people don't pronounce the "l" in those words.
glad you included debris 🙏
i had a conversation with my dad where we found out, the dictionary we used didn't include what I always hear when watching minecraft videos, but did include what my father claimed was the correct pronunciation, being that the first time I heard it
Hehe, my mind went straight to ancient debris as soon as the word appeared on screen :)
I find it interesting that my grandmother and I pronounce "wh" differently. I would pronounce the beginning of "wheel" and "week" identically, while my grandmother makes an effort to pronounce the H.
It seems all old people do this and I don’t understand wHy!
And there a also people that start almost all words starting with W with and h-sound e.g. why = hwy, with = hwith, wheel = hweel and week = hweek. It just sound wrong to me.
My sixteen year old son pointed out this difference to me, I would never have noticed otherwise. (Canadian with high range hearing loss.)
There's something comforting about discussing the differences of English pronunciations without dictating what's "correct". It's sort of a benign way to shine a spotlight on how different we can be while still being unified by something in common (language in this case) without things like ego and pride getting in the way.
I'm an online English teacher, myself, but I left the United States 32 years ago and haven't been back. A lot of this video surprised me. One you didn't address, however, also surprised me - the WH in words like "what" or "why". Before COVID, I was a classroom teacher at training centers in various countries. Once some years ago, I was just chatting with a colleague, another native English speaker, when suddenly another younger (British) colleague started making fun of me in a mean-spirited way. My pronunciation obviously really annoyed her. I had to be told what she was laughing at. I gave full value to the WH pronouncing them /hwa (shwa)t/ and /hwai/. She found this utterly risible, but it had to be pointed out to me. I've since heard many older British speakers pronounce these words as I did but younger Brits as well as pretty much everyone else pronounce these words /wat/ and /wai/.
I'm someone from the southern U.S. with a very 'General American' accent and I don't distinguish between drip and dʒrip, I can easily slide between both when saying a sentence. Though, I think drip is more likely when Im carefully annunciating (i.e. saying 'drip, drop, drip, drop') and will probably say dʒrip if I'm speaking quickly or informally, *especially* if I'm using 'drip' in the slang sense to refer to someone's outfit.
Me too, except I'm from South West England!
What’s the slang sense of “drip” relating to an outfit??? Perhaps I’m too old or fashion-challenged to know this.
"drip" is looking well put together, good fashion sense, etc.@@mehill00
I have trouble saying [tɹ] and [dɹ] at all. It just feels _so wrong!_ I can do it if I intentionally try to roll the r as [tr] and [dr], but that just makes it even more obvious that I'm putting on a fake accent.
@@angeldude101 exactly! As I mentioned in the video, ever since I was a kid, I didn't even think of "tr" and "dr" actually being [tɹ] or [dɹ] at all but rather [tʃɹ] and [dʒɹ]. It's quite hard for me to say it without that affrication