Quotes About Pronunciation

Bono (singer, musician, activist): People were very good to me. I was walking with [my wife] Ali, and Freddie Mercury pulled me aside and said, 'Oh, Bo-No … Is it Bo-No or Bon-O?' I told him, 'It's Bon-O.

The word for woman is Gy (pronounced hard, as in Guy); it forms itself into Gy-ei for the plural, but the G becomes soft in the plural like Jy-ei. They have a proverb to the effect that this difference in pronunciation is symbolical, for that the female sex is soft in the concrete, but hard to deal with in the individual.

How do you spell relief? R-O-L-A-I-D-S.

Lymph, v.: to walk with a lisp.

Remember: "I" before "E," except in Budweiser.

Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right.

The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah," the lost r's migrate southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his car and invest in "erl wells."

Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.

In the middle of the 20th century, aspirations to sound 'proper' were passionately pursued. Dictionaries as late as the Seventies include many pronunciations that could cut the proverbial glass.

You may hear from my fabulous accent that I'm French!

I get a different pronunciation at least every week. I think the worst one, or the funniest one I got, somebody called me, 'Oh-gooz-man.'

English is clipped in speech. Texas is exactly the opposite.

The East Texas accent is a famously difficult accent to do.

I thought about Cassidy, and how she pronounced "vitamin" the British way and hated when people took too many napkins in restaurants.

there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers.

For some odd reason, Compact Discs and Digital Video Discs are spelled as discs, not disks.

I am Rose Howard and my first name has a homonym. To be accurate, it has a homophone, which is a word that's pronounced the same as another word, but spelled differently. My homophone name is Rows.

I am Rose Howard and my first name has a homonym. To be accurate, it has a homophone, which is a word that's pronounced the same as another word but spelled differently.

Ou is frequently used in the last syllable of words which in Latin end in or and are made English, as honour, labour, favour, from honor, labor, favor. Some late innovators have ejected the u, without considering that the last syllable gives the sound neither of or nor ur, but a sound between them, if not compounded of both; besides that they are probably derived to us from the French nouns in eur, as honeur, faveur.

C might be omitted in the language without loss, since one of its sounds might be supplied by, s, and the other by k, but that it preserves to the eye the etymology of words, as face from facies, captive from captivus.

C, according to English orthography, never ends a word; therefore we write stick, block, which were originally, sticke, blocke. In such words c is now mute.

of English, as of all living tongues, there is a double pronunciation, one cursory and colloquial, the other regular and solemn.

For pronunciation the best general rule is, to consider those as the most elegant speakers who deviate least from the written words.

What's a ree-tard?" I asked Bernadette when I to back upstairs. "In music it's pronounced rih-tard, short for the Italian ritardando, which means slowing down," she said. 'What does it mean when it's pronounced ree-tard and somebody says it about you in English?" I asked. "It usually means the person saying it is a dimwit." (27-28)