Quotes About Pronunciation

My nine-year-old was trying to read my spiel. When she tried to pronounce the word 'pharmaceutical,' it was frightening. She would love to argue in the Supreme Court one day. My son asked me, 'Mommy, why do you have to have so many arguments? Why can't you have agreements?'

I remember thinking, in Kansas my name will be Evett - which is my middle name. I didn't want to explain to anyone how to say Em-a-yat-zee.

Why isn't the word "phonetically" spelled with an "f"?

My mother says I was two and a half when I first mentioned I wanted to be an actor. My father said, 'The word is pronounced 'Doctor!'

Io. My name is Io." She pronounced the name "eye-oh" as if there perfectly ordinary. Which was ridiculous, because no one he knew bore a name with only vowels.

McNamara leaned over to the microphone and tried to say "Vietnam muôn n?m," but, because he wasn't aware of the tonal difference, the crowd practically disintegrated on the cobblestones. What he was saying was something like "The little duck, he wants to lie down.

When you don't know how to pronounce words, when you don't know the meaning of the words, how will you imbibe a song with feeling?

There are some sounds that English singers find quite difficult to manipulate.

When I am driving to an audition, I listen to the 'Hamilton: The Musical' soundtrack. It's super inspiring, but also, if I kind of sing-slash-rap along to it, it helps me with my pronunciation and dialect.

My accent is... sort of an Edinburgh sort of soft southwest Scottish accent. It could almost be English.

We hear a voice that tends to be modulated with an intensity appropriate to the situation and with clear pronunciation

schwa : The faint vowel sound in many unstressed syllables in the English language. It is signified by the pronunciation uh and represented by the symbol upside down e. For example, the e in overlook , the a in forgettable , and the o in run-of-the-mill . It is the most common vowel sound in the English language.

I remember hearing other models talk about going to castings for Givenchy, and I was like, 'What are they saying?' And then I realized and was like, 'Oh, the Give-in-chee one.' I had been calling it Give-in-chee the whole time. I was shocked.

When I was doing preliminary research on this case, I remembered the story about Tlazolteotl.' [Mulder] glanced at the old archaeologist. 'Am I pronouncing it correctly? It sounds like I'm swallowing a turtle.

Webster's dislike of words that weren't pronounced the way they looked led him to decree that words such as centre and theatre should be spelled center and theater; he also dropped the silent u from words such as colour, favour and honour. In fact, Webster was single-handedly responsible for most of the differences between British and American spelling that survive to this day.

Honestly, you stretch those vowels out any longer and we're going to have to put you on life support." - Ivie

That's my ultimate goal: to get people to say my name right.

The best scheme of Phonetics is a stiff uncertain thing.

My girlfriend at the time wasn't keen on meeting Celestial; even she could tell from the way I pronounced her name that my feelings were more than friendly.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger was pronouncing it 'Cal-LEE-fornia,' he was right - he just didn't realize he was accidentally speaking Spanish.

Actually, between Colombian and Mexican Spanish, there's not a huge difference, but it is a different accent.

In Buenos Aires, I have a very close friend who speaks very good English, and she taught me. It was quite difficult because the muscles of your mouth are used to your language, and then when you want to speak another language, they don't go to the place they need to go to make the sound.

I think the hardest accent for me to do is what I end up trying a lot of times, and it's like some sort of a general American sound. So not Southern and not east-coast or west-coast, but just a general American sound that no one really speaks, actually.

Readers in general are not fond of dialect, and I don't blame them. I've read books myself that I've had to put down because sounding out every speech gave me a headache.