Quotes About Pronunciation

If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently.

Mispronouncing "buoy." The thing that floats in a navigation channel is not a "boo-ee." It's a "boy." Think about it. Would you call something that floats "boo-ee-ant"? Also, in a similar vein, pronouncing Brett Favre's last name as if the "r" comes before the "v." It doesn't, so stop it. Hotel

Even his command of languages was only partial: although he could read them flawlessly, he used his own made-up pronunciations, which no one who spoke the languages could actually understand. In Norway, hoping to impress colleagues, he once tried to order a dish of raspberries and was brought twelve beers.

Nor can we be entirely confident how he pronounced his name. Helge Kökeritz, author of the definitive Shakespeare's Pronunciation, thought it possible that Shakespeare said it with a short a, as in "shack." It may have been spoken one way in Stratford and another in London, or he may have been as variable with the pronunciation as he was with the spelling.

But perhaps nothing speaks more clearly for the absurdities of English pronunciation than that the word for the study of pronunciation in English, orthoepy, can itself be pronounced two ways.

I'm really bad at pronunciation in Italian.

My name is James Guckert. Well, when you read it, it's always pronounced some other way.

Japanese is a very difficult language.

In the Fukien province of China, the Dutch learned the word tay, which means "tea" in the local dialect, and with this sound it was introduced to Europe. In fact, in Ireland and England it was pronounced tay until the start of the eighteenth century, after which the word was derived to tee and then tea—as we know it today.

I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it.

The Australian accent is sort of like going down a step in smartness, you could say, because you guys pronounce things as they're spelled. We add and abbreviate stuff.

There's a viral video of a young girl learning to say 'who' but pronouncing it as 'wah' which I think could be one of the funniest things that has ever happened.

One thing you might want to learn before you attend the world's largest ukulele lesson is how to say ukulele.

This is probably the most annoying thing of all to the French. Not only do we pronounce the battles incorrectly (Crécy should be 'Cray-see' and Waterloo 'Watt-air-loh'), with Agincourt ('Ah-zan-coor') we even get the spelling wrong.

I don't like the news on the radio. It's always read by girls of some sort who pronounce the place names incomprehensibly. What's more, one in three of them has a slight speech defect, as though such ones are selected deliberately.

Akthent on thee latht thyllable.

I before E except after C and when sounding like A as in neighbor and weigh, and on weekends and holidays and all throughout May, and YOU'LL ALWAYS BE WRONG NO MATTER WHAT YOU SAY!!!!

I' before 'e' except after 'c' and when sounding like 'a' as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh' and on weekends and holidays and all throughout May and YOU'LL ALWAYS BE WRONG NO MATTER WHAT YOU SAY!!!!

The history of Vietnam lies in this bowl, for it is in Hanoi, the Vietnamese heart, that ph? was born, a combination of the rice noodles that predominated after a thousand years of Chinese occupation and the taste for beef the Vietnamese acquired under the French, who turned their cows away from ploughs and into bifteck and pot-au-feu. The name of their national soup is pronounced like this French word for fire...

Letitia! What a name. Halfway between a salad and a sneeze.

I' before 'E' except after 'C', and when sounded like 'ay' as in neighbor and weigh, and on weekends and holidays, and all throughout May, and you'll always be wrong no matter what you say!

Only Celts would use nine letters to make one sound.

If you can't pronounce it, you probably shouldn't be putting it in your body or in your environment.

At, like, 11, I think, that was just me watching a lot of YouTube videos, and I whenever I had the chance, I would talk to myself, practise pronunciation. Then I found out about hip hop and became friends with American people through Twitter. I was like, 'Yo, I need to be in a country where everybody speaks the same language.'