Lawrence Yates writes: >>[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: >>So tell me then why it is okay to mispronounce Greenwich as gren-itch?
>because Gren-itch is the correct pronunciation, it's not a mis-pronunciation. >Green-itch is a mispronunciation. (I'm speaking of courser of Greenwich in England - if >there is a Greenwich in American that may be different). >It's like those who call a little town not far from here "Oswald-twistle" The town is called >Oswaldtwistle - the correct pronunciation is "Ozzletwistle" [snipped] The way I've always heard it is Ozz-el-twiss-el (without the T). I'm not a Northerner, but surely this was originally a lazy way of saying Os-wald-twis-tle (maybe even with a T in twistle), and only through unchallenged slackness has it evolved to become the accepted (I won't say correct) pronunciation. I daresay there are people who call it Ozzle for short, and who's to say that won't become the "correct" name of the place in years to come? I used to have a friend called Oswald. Only his mother called him by the full version - to everybody else he was Ossie. If we had called him "Ozzle", as in your version, then everybody would have thought THAT was wrong. I haven't checked the derivation of Oswald, but it looks Germanic to me, so maybe it should be pronounced OsVald. Who knows for sure? Nobody can truthfully say that THEIR pronunciation of a word is the "correct" way. As for Nu-cu-lar, mispronouncing words in this way seems to me to be quite similar to poor spelling. Either the person has learned to say it wrongly from hearing someone else's mistake, or they have a physical problem reproducing information they have seen or heard (as in dyslexia or deafness), or maybe they're just plain sloppy. I had a neighbour once who used to get hundreds of words wrong - my favourite was Westminister instead of Westminster. Her husband used to try for hours to get her to say words correctly, but she simply could not hear the difference! Regards Peter _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
