Pronunciation of words

[guitarpete247]

Paddy and Murphy were looking in the job centre for work. Paddy spots an ad and tells Murphy. "It say here they're looking for tree fellers".
Murphy thinks for a minute then replies "Tis a pity dere's only two of us".

 

[Andy in Sig]

It's common for school children or adults here to spell where and were the wrong way round because the correct pronunciation round here is where sounds like weir or we're and were sounds like w her. A similar but lesser effect is seen with there, their, thee but of course that's famously pronounced with a d rather than th.

There are several PhDs lurking in all this. If you have nothing better to do (and time on your hands), read Speaking - From Intention To Articulation by Levelt.

 

[SavageHoutkop]

No need to apologise: I just read that with a weary sigh because the only place I make spelling mistakes is when on the internet. It's always homophonic pairs e.g. hear/here, to/two, and even through/threw.

I've found the explanation for this in the area of psycholinguistics (I'm working on a thesis at the moment) and it seems to be do with the processing mechanism for speech generation (although in this case the key difference is that one is generating typed words). What seems to happen is that you trigger the search for a word but the wrong homophone has a chance of winning out and it is usually the commoner one of the two as far as I can see i.e. of the two words, the one which occurs more often in everyday use. The really interesting thing is that I never make such mistakes when hand writing, so I think it is down to the mind having to pay attention to typing (however subconsciously: I'm a ten finger typist and don't have to think while doing it) while simultaneously seeking out lemmas (the posh term for pre-words as stored in the brain). What I suspect happens is that the mind, being distracted for milliseconds at a time, sometimes fails to filter the wrong homophone out.

I hope that makes sense. And if any of you have kids at school who need an explanation for failing spelling tests, feel free to print this out so that they can learn it and spout it to the teacher.

Is it worse typing in another language? I find it impossible to type quickly in my second language, because my mind keeps wanting to 'sound out' the words in my first language when talking to my fingers!!
I'm also normally a 10 finger typist...

 

[SavageHoutkop]

There are a bit on Radio 4 Today programme about evolving pronunciation of words. Examples of word pronunciation that seem to be changing include 'says', 'ate', 'harass', 'garage', 'mischievous' and the letter H. There was some chap from the British Library or somewhere who wanted to tape people reading from a Mr Men book, so as to study the change. So, how do you say them?

says or sez
eight ot et
harass or harass depends on the context :S generally harass wins
garage or garage the second if you mean ga-raage not ga-ridge
mischevous or mischievious depends on the context :S
aitch or haitch

 

[Andy in Sig]

Is it worse typing in another language? I find it impossible to type quickly in my second language, because my mind keeps wanting to 'sound out' the words in my first language when talking to my fingers!!
I'm also normally a 10 finger typist...

For me, no and that is I think because German words are not so deeply embedded in my head or at least far fewer are as deeply embedded as my English vocabulary. They also have far fewer homophonic words which is what leads to my typing problem in English. It would be very interesting to put the question to a true bilingual.

 

[swee'pea99]

Mrs G says 'skedule' instead of the Anglicised flavour 'shedule' for Schedule. She is half Canadian so I can forgive her!

Mrs S says 'anythink', which is unforgivable wherever you come from.

 

[Davidc]

[quote name='swee'pea99' timestamp='1288374171' post='1450707']
Mrs S says 'anythink', which is unforgivable wherever you come from.
[/quote]

Could be worse, could be anyfink.