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I need a word to describe a phenomenon in which my son often uses words which he has read, but not heard, and consequently mispronounces them, even though he understands their meanings and usage. Examples just from today include pronouncing 'sieve' as 'seeve', 'clergy' as 'clerGy' with a hard 'g' and 'rhesus' as 'rehus'. I'm tempted to call this dyslalia, but is there a recognised term for this form of mispronunciation?
Chris
Chris, it's called spelling pronunciation.
Not to be confused with pronunciation spelling! Or eye dialect.
Boy, spelling pronunciation brings back memories of fourth grade, when I was reading a story about someone named Penelope and kept mentally pronouncing her name so that it sort of rhymed with "envelope."
And I think I was in high school before I realized "epitome" had more than three syllables.
What about the rest of you? What words did you learn from reading and mentally mispronounce?
"Mummerset" is fake west country English. Full of "Ooh Argh" and mangle-wurzels. I have a translation of Madame Bovary in which the translator's notes describe his decision to represent the rural yokels' French as Mummerset English to give the right impression to an English reader of their incorrect and unsophisticated French.
Chris
When my mother first saw the word “nowhere” she read it as “now-here”!
When I was in third grade, I stayed up in bed reading a book (with no information about pronunciation) about moal-kyools only to find out the next day that we were being taught about molecules! This was sheer coincidence, as our teacher hadn't mentioned anything about them before, nor was mention given to them in any class assignments heretofore! Believe it or not! (Sorry about the corniness…)
Garrison Keillor tells of how, when he young, he encountered the word Egyptian and applied it to a mummy that he had seen by calling him (the mummy) Gippy (with a hard ‘g'). He later said that readers aquire alot of mispronunciations and speakers aquire alot of mispellings.
Oh, I just love English (and language in general), don't you?
I was an avid reader growing up, so my reading vocabululary was WAY higher than my speaking vocabulary. I remember being corrected on “ethereal” (ethe -real). I was in college before I was corrected on “facade” (fa-cade). After I took Spanish, I always seemed to be emphasizing the wrong syllable on words I didn't know how to pronounce. Esoteric was one (es - AH- teric) as well as analogous (AN a LOG us).
After taking German, I got even worse, because then I was always trying to pronounce unknown words with German language rules. (ie. always pronounce the second vowell of a dipthong). Needless to say, that didn't work out either. (aka. New York's Mr. StiEnbrenner)
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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