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Look up the word voila on http://www.ahdictionary.com. Click the speaker icon to hear the pronunciation. It sounds very different. Is it correct?
Thanks!
kk
That was a surprise to me, but I checked it also at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/voila
It seems I've been pronouncing it incorrectly all my life, by using a short "a" sound. Perhaps that the Anglicized pronunciation of the original French, as I have never heard it with a long "a" sound. Until today that is.
Did the thefreedictionary.com steal ahdictionary.com's sound sample, or the other way around? They're identical.
I'm not sure you're wrong, Heimhenge. Merriam-Webster's sample pronounciation is more in line with what I'm used to hearing and saying - ending in a short "a". http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/voila
Dictionary.com's sound sample also uses the short "a" sound but the pronounciation guide lists both:
([vwah-lah; Fr. vwa-la] - does this mean that the long "a" pronounciation is French and the short "a" pronounciation is the anglicized version?
Wictionary.com lists the long "a" as the UK pronounciation and the short "a" as the US pronounciation. Its sound sample uses the short "a" sound.
In a quick Google research, I found 5 hits that gave the pronunciation with a short "a" and no hits with the long "a." I also found some sites that claim to give a French pronunciation and the only difference is that they have the accent on the first syllable rather than the last. I think the references above are just wrong, and I agree with telemath that the two incorrect sound samples are identical.
That robo-voice pronunciation is simply WRONG. I wouldn't give it a second thought. The sounds don't even match the phonetic transcription given in these dictionaries. (You can see that the two vowels in the two syllables are identical as phonetically described, but certainly not identical as spoken by robo-voice.)
It is most likely an inputting error to the speech synthesis engine.
Gotta wonder who created that speech synthesis engine. It's certainly not a real voice. Who'd have the time to do all those words? I had always trusted online dictionary pronunciations, and never gave it a second thought. Now I wonder how many other words I pronounce incorrectly because of that sloppy synthesis? Not like I use that feature very often … maybe a couple times a year.
I use a text-to-speech app called TextAloud, and it does a pretty good job with English words. But when I enter "voila" it chokes too, pronouncing the word as "voy-lah." At least it has an editor, where I can provide the correct pronunciation via phonetic spelling. When I edited it as "vwalah" it sounded just fine.
Maybe these online dictionaries should add an "edit this pronunciation" option, allowing Wiki-like self correction.
Glenn said:
But in this case, there were multiple sources. It is a common problem, growing with the internet. Misinformation proliferates wildly.
Jeez … maybe Al Gore can do something about that? 
But seriously, that's why sites like Snopes.com have proliferated. Where there's a need, there's an online solution. Usually. That's the way Tim Berners-Lee (the real inventor of the internet) envisioned it would work. Unfortunately, sometimes it takes time for that solution to emerge. Doubt it'll happen anytime soon with online dictionary pronunciations. I have a feeling that, once those sites are built, the creators pretty much back off and just harvest their click-through money.
Glenn said:
But in this case, there were multiple sources.
I hang my head, hung up on semantics.
Misinformation proliferates wildly.
The internet knows everything – except whether what it knows is true.
Back on the subject of voila, I looked for – but couldn't find – a clip of a scene that always comes to mind when I hear "voila!" In the 1978 Superman movie, Lex Luthor rips a page out of a book, exclaims, "Voila!" and hands the page to his assistant. His assistant then hands it to someone else and blandly states, "walla." I often want to say, "walla" after someone else says "voila!", but I don't think anyone would get it.
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