Pronouncing “Won”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Amy from Texas.

Hi, Amy.

Hi, Amy. Where in Texas are you?

Well, right now I’m at work in Fort Worth, but I’m actually from Springtown.

Okay. Well, welcome to the show. How can we help?

Well, I realized recently that I’ve given my husband a complex about the way he pronounces a word, and we decided that if you guys could maybe tell us why he pronounces the word this way, he might get over it.

Get over the complex or get over saying the word that way?

Hopefully both.

He actually told me it’s gotten to the point when he realizes he’s about to have to pronounce the word. He thinks it’s almost like the words are coming at him out of a tunnel the way he’s used to pronouncing it, the way I say it needs to be pronounced, and he can’t pick and he panics.

Oh, okay.

Very familiar.

He’s tongue-tied. He’s trying to be helpful, but his inner nature is getting in the way.

Exactly.

What’s the word?

It’s won, W-O-N, as in I won an award.

What does he do to it?

Won.

Won?

Won, which, you know, the little translator in my head makes either a Spanish gentleman or somebody who’s very pale and won.

Yeah.

I’ve never heard anybody pronounce it like this before.

So he’ll say one, two, three, four?

Or he’ll say, I won the race.

No, it’s one, two, three, four, but I won the race.

Okay.

Wow.

Ever heard of that?

That’s really interesting.

This is, is there anything else he says that’s strange?

The only other thing that’s kind of odd is it’s actually a proper name. There’s a restaurant that we occasionally go to. And I’ll just, I’ll give you the actual name, but not the whole name of the restaurant. We’ll just call it Rosa’s Tacos.

Mm—

He says Rosa’s, and he cannot pronounce the A on it for some reason. So he makes it sound like plural Rose and not like possessive Rosa.

Right.

So he says roses instead of rosas.

Right.

Which makes me go, we don’t need roses. We have roses.

And so you’re like Hermione Granger trying to teach everyone to pronounce spells. You’re like, Wingardium Leviosa.

That’s exactly what he said to me.

He did?

He called you Hermione?

He did, but that’s okay because she had her strong points.

She did.

She did.

I get called Hermione all the time. Don’t worry. She’s a mascot of ours. We like her. Brainy and nerdy and, you know, hangs out with the cool kids.

Wow.

This is interesting.

I have a few theories about this. Let me ask you one more question, though, just another diagnostic question.

All right.

Does he say, does he aspirate words like when and where?

He does do that a little bit.

Well, the Juan thing might just be a function of his idiolect, but there are some, is he from Texas?

That’s another question. Is he from that part of Texas?

We both threw up a city from each other.

Okay, and basically we’re talking North Texas, right?

Right, North Central.

North Central, okay.

There is a southern vowel that is similar to what he’s doing there, and I don’t want to get into the whole phonetics of it here for fear of boring everybody’s tears, but we’ll put a little information online about this, where sometimes that schwa sound is, I might call it a hypercorrection to another vowel sound. So instead of sun, you might say son. So one and one, you know, and it’s and the things I’m expecting, Amy, that if you pay a little more attention to this in the speech of people around you in your community, at the grocery store, the post office, that sort of thing, that you will hear some more of this.

I mean, stand by the lottery counter at the grocery store and see what people say when they did or didn’t win. How do they say I won? I won. I won. Right.

But but it sounds like that’s what he’s doing here. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but we all have little things in our speech. This is what the idiolect is. These are the little peculiarities that we have, a little bit from our mother, a little bit from our father, some from our friends, some things that we just accidentally do, some things that we never learned to do well.

And this is what makes our idiolect, our own personal speech pattern. But he’s got a problem because now that you’ve corrected him, he’s self-conscious about it, and he can’t avoid that word. It’s the pink elephant for him.

I’ve ruined him.

Oh, no.

I wonder if you can offer him another word to use instead. It’s kind of one of the techniques that people try to do when they’re stuttering. They try to come up with words that they don’t stutter on that they can replace the troublesome word with. So instead of one, maybe you can say, I am victorious. I was not victorious. Rejoice, I come.

That’s so much more impressive.

Winnie, weedy, weaky or something.

Yeah, yeah.

All right.

Well, I don’t have anything more to offer you than I just suspect that he’s got something interesting happening that’s a part of the regional vowel pronunciation there. And I suspect it’s not common, but I think you’ll hear it in other speakers if you just listen for it.

I will do that.

Okay.

Cool.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for calling.

Amy, thanks for calling. It was a real pleasure to talk to you.

All right.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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