Should creek be pronounced “crick” or “creak”? Does either sound like “EE-ther” or “EYE-ther”? And what about Caribbean, data, route, coupon, caramel or — God help us — Worcestershire and Wilkes-Barre?
Here in “Weird Words,” we haven’t spent a ton of time on pronunciation — though I do try to indicate this when defining oddball terms. After all, what’s the fun of learning a weird new word if you can’t say it out loud?
Of course, as with many of our kooky examples, there’s often more than one acceptable pronunciation; in fact, that’s the case for every term in my opening paragraph!
For the record, this current series of articles on pronunciation will not provide ironclad answers for all nine of those hotly contested words. Instead, I hope to give you enough info to work it out yourself — with the aid of a good dictionary.
And if this takes several issues, you can credit Editor Steph, who last week inspired me by finding a way to print our most common English sound — the schwa, styled in pronunciation guides as a backwards, upside down “e”: ə.
As I then indicated when looking at the word asafetida (ass-uh-FET-uh-duh), the schwa is our “unstressed vowel” — found in the second, fourth and final syllable of that word. Sounded as a quick “uh,” it can be made by all five standard English vowels: senAte, itEm, denIm, bottOm, focUs; and it’s sometimes found where there’s no vowel at all — like between the B and the L in able.
This in turn points to our major problem in pronunciation: Nearly two-thirds of our English letters can be pronounced more than one way. “G,” for example, can have the “hard” sound in get, or the “soft” one in germ; and C can come out as S or K.
In fact, we might ask why we even need that third letter in our alphabet — since we already have another letter for both of its sounds! (For the same reason, we don’t really need Q either.) This is especially galling when you consider the contrasting problem: namely, that there are many sounds for which we do not even have a letter!
For instance, I’ll go ahead and reveal the preferred pronunciation of Worcestershire: It’s WOOS-ter-sheer. But I then have to add that this contains the “oo” of “good” rather than “fool” — because we don’t have a letter for the vowel sound in book, put and should.
(So, you see that this creates problems for spelling as well — since, as in those last three examples, the same sound can be spelled several different ways!)
The fact is that while English has only five major vowels and 21 consonants, it actually offers a total of 45 sounds: 25 consonants and 20 vowels.
The letter A, for example, can be spoken at least five ways: ate, cat, hall, father and about.
And while we have only one letter for all those sounds, we have no letter whatsoever for the “TH” in thin. After all, it certainly can’t be sounded out with “tuh-huh” from the two letters we generally use. (The somewhat more sensible Greek alphabet has this as theta — a large “O” with a line through the middle.)
And just imagine trying write out the “zh” in leisure for someone who had never heard it!
Linguists have addressed this problem by creating the “International Phonetic Alphabet,” which assigns an actual symbol to all 45 of our sounds. Some of these — like b, m and d — are perfectly intuitive; others look more like a foreign language. For example, the IPA employs both theta and schwa, along with a sort of horseshoe for the vowel in “book”; there’s also an n with a long right leg for the final sound in ring. And for those wondering: The zh in leisure is a weird-looking “3” with an extra right curl on the bottom.
Some reference tools — including Wikipedia — prefer the IPA for perfect accuracy. But it’s so clumsy that many standard dictionaries simply offer their own makeshift pronunciation guide. (In good hard-copy dictionaries, a shortened version appears at the bottom of every page.)
Meanwhile, popular sites like dictionary.com prefer to sound out things phonetically — which is what I do in “Weird Words” as well. Of course, we must then also show which syllable is stressed (or “louder”) — usually styled with capitals or bold. For instance: Caribbean can be pronounced two ways: care-uh-BEE-in, or kuh-RIB-ee-in.
So you can now look up the other words in my opening paragraph — but keep in mind that if there’s more than one pronunciation listed, the first is generally preferred; so it should be care-uh-bee-in. (Though the other way is not wrong.)
Speaking of which: There are three ways to say Wilkes-Barre!
Don’t blame me; I didn’t make the rules. But I’ll try to explain a few more next week.
“Weird Words” Looks at Pronunciation
By Joseph W. Smith III
