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Article in the online Guardian today: "8 pronunciation errors that made the English language what it is today"
Rare example of perfection in popular writing about language. Gets everything right, especially in phonetics!
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/11/pronunciation-errors-english-language
Among the pronunciation errors that annoy me most are teat. victual, voila, and harassment. They are NOT supposed to sound like teet, vict-u-oll, voy-la, and harris-mint. They sound like tit, vittle. vwa-lah. and her-ass-meant.
And at this point. I don't know if it's pro-teen or pro-tea-un.
deaconB said: And at this point. I don't know if it's pro-teen or pro-tea-un.
For "protein" I go with "pro-teen" (2 syllables). This avoids confusion with "protean," pronounced as three syllables. It has a totally different meaning, and could be grammatically interchangeable with "protein" in some sentences. For example: That structure in the cell is protean.
Reminds me of my eighth-grade science teacher, who pronounced "acetic" as "acidic". Took the better part of a semester to figure out what he was trying to say when he'd refer to "acidic acid".
It really ticks me off when teachers get that stuff wrong. Sad commentary on the profession, but all too often true. When I was teaching physics, and introduced the periodic table, I had some students saying "That's not how you pronounce 'Mendeleev' ... it's Mendel - leeve." After some investigation, I found that was how the chemistry teacher (who shall remain unnamed) was telling them how to pronounce the name. I hesitated to correct her on such a basic thing, and never did, but fortunately she moved on to another job the next year.