TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Ask the Editor. I’m Emily Brewster, associate editor at Merriam-Webster. A mischievous nuclear scientist comes to the library. Does that bother you? Sorry, or maybe it sounds good to you. Alright. My silly sentence consists of three questionable pronunciations… mis-ˈchē-vē-əs instead of mis-chə-vəs,nyü-kyə-lər instead ofˈnü-klē-ər, and lī-ˌber-ē for ˈlī-ˌbrer-ē, … all in our dictionary. But we don’t simply enter variant pronunciations and leave it at that. Each variation is introduced by a symbol that tells the reader that the variation appears in educated speech but is considered by some to be questionable or unacceptable. In other words, use with caution. But where do these variant pronunciations come from? One source is the influence of other words. There’s nothing that rhymes with mis-chə-vəs but mis-ˈchē-vē-əs has the winding and preceding to make it sound right. In the case of nyü-kyə-lər, the less familiar -klē-ər sound is replaced by the -kyə-lər of words like circles and molecules. Li-ber-e loses R due to scatter. That’s when you change or omit one of two identical or closely related sounds in a word, usually R. These explanations are hardly comforting to those who really don’t like the pronunciation. variation sound. These people want us all to say, a naughty nuclear scientist came to the library because it reflected the spell. The problem with this is that English pronunciation quite often shows a disregard for spelling. How do you spell through? Uh-huh. And though? Mmm hmm. What about raw? Correct. You see, the spoken language is the primary language and not the written language, and in the case of English, the spoken language keeps changing while its spelling is pretty stable and largely based on the spoken language of several centuries ago, when two knights were two knikts. For more information from our Ask the Editor series, visit merriam-webster.com.
Categories: Usage Notes
Source: vothisaucamau.edu.vn
