David W. Fenton wrote:
On 18 Oct 2006 at 19:59, Mark D Lew wrote:
For counter-example, the word
envelope is pronounced like "on-velope" by roughly the same percentage
of Americans who say "nucular", but you rarely hear complaints about
it.
But the "nucular" pronunciation gets the letters in the wrong order,
while the "on-velope" is simply a holdover pronunciation from its
French origins (I would presume).
There are no English pronunciation rules that I know of that treat
the reversal of the letter sounds as correct in any case.
Well, historically the word "girl" used to be "gril" in old-English, but
over years usage changed to the easier to say modern order of the letters.
Things like failing to pronounce K in knight or knife are the same
mispronunciation that we now accept as the educated rule, yet at one
time those letters were pronounced. The P in pneumonia is the same
thing. The French are stuck with having to pronounce that P at the
start of a similar word "pneu" and the Germans are stuck with
pronouncing Ks at the starts of words. But the English simply stopped
pronouncing them years ago. I'm sure that on some medieval
internet-list concerning the quality of foolscap or the newly evolving
musical notations they were bemoaning the mispronunciations of those
words, as well.
So all this griping about nucular instead of nuclear is just so much
whistling into the wind -- it's going to change or not on a permanent
basis whenever it will happen and we're helpless to stop it if it's
going to occur.
Thank goodness we don't have a damned Academy of English to force its
concepts of proper pronunciation on us, and our language can and does
continue to evolve around us, even as many complain about new uses of
words and new pronunciations of older words.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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