When English is the second language, one of the problems that I and many others face is that we would have seen and read the written word before knowing how it is pronounced. This always trips us up at conversations.
Take an everyday, simple word like "locate." Not a big deal of a word. A word that won't ever be asked at a Spelling Bee.
But, until I came to the US, I had no idea that there is way more to pronouncing it than what I had been doing back in India. Because ... it turned out that the "loc" of "locate" has a lengthier sound like with the "loc" in "locusts." The "o" is stretched out in the pronunciation.
That is merely a simple example of the many that I can offer, and there are quite a few examples that completely mess up the communication itself because the other party simply had no idea what I was referring to. Like "mishap" that I never imagined being mis-hap, and I was merely adding an ending "p" sound to "misha." The emPHAsis in multi-sylLABle ...
Those who are raised with the language have a different kind of a problem--they know the sound, but have a tough time spelling some words. For instance, in papers that I have graded, native students have spelled "parity" as "parody."
English is not like Tamil or Sanskrit where the pronunciation is no different from how the word is spelled. If all these sound "ghoti-y" it is because the bastard language has drawn words from other other languages makes life difficult for all of us. Imagine one's horror when incorrectly pronouncing "hors d’oeuvre" at a "soiree"!
This post resulted from reading this column. Read the comments there; says a lot about the bloody language!
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