This is a very eye-opening (or ear-opening) discussion. And even though it has been raised in the past, it is the first time I have heard the argument (and I mean the
rhetorical argument, not implying that this is a fight) play out in such an interesting fashion.
For years I had been saying that the British way of saying the metal
aluminum (as we in the US spell and pronounce it) as
aluminium was just plain wrong. Inspired by this discussion here, I decided to do a little research and found (only one listing PAST Wikipedia)
this page in World Wide Words. I found this article fascinating, and when Noah Webster's name was raised, I realized that the US pronunciation and spelling - aluminum - probably had much to do with Webster's agenda to deliberately differentiate US pronunciations from British, furthering the cause of Independence, I suppose. (Tangent: spelling is to writing what pronunciation is to speaking.
I have a problem (In life, not at LV) with listening to people say, for bestial, BEE-stial rather than BES-tial. Dictionary.com gives both pronunciations as correct but my American Heritage dictionary only mentions variation on the final two syllables. I once corrected a student - an honor student, I might add - but she defiantly continued to pronounce the word as BEE-stial. She had obviously heard it that way all her life and my way sounded glaringly, blaringly incorrect. I still think BEST-ial is correct and BEE-stial is not. Call me stubborn.
I have Laurence Olivier on a recording of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde pronouncing one of the title characters as Doctor JEE-kil, a notably singular pronunciation. I had NEVER heard it pronounced that way before or since. All our LivriVox recordings - by David Barnes, Kristin Hughes, and Bob Neufeld - pronounce the name like I've always otherwise heard it - JEK-il. So there you have it: a professional that pronounces the name in at least an idiosyncratic, if not just plain wrong, manner.
One thing about pronunciation worth noting is that natives of particular regions use pronunciation to immediately determine if someone is a stranger or not. Case in point: the little town where my parents spend most of the year - Cashiers, North Carolina, USA. Natives pronounce the name of their town as CASH-ers, while non-natives will pronounce it the same as the retail employee to whom you give your money - cash-EE-ers. If you pronounce it as the latter, they know at once that you're not "from around here."
Although some of this is ear-opening, I still don't agree that people can choose to pronounce words any way they want and still be correct. I think there are words whose pronunciations differ because of accent - such as schedule: [sheh-dyool] and [skeh-dule] - or allowable variation -- such as often: [off-ten and offen], but that there are certain pronunciations that are just plain wrong, like GREE-vee-us and mis CHEE-vee-us. I have now crossed aluminium off my "just plain wrong" list, but I will never stop correcting people, especially students, who do NOT pronounce these words GREE-vus and MIS-cheh-vus.
Has anyone ever seen the television special, Stephen Fry in America? There is a scene in North Carolina, I believe, where the natives are teaching him the song, She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain. Fry pronounces the "t" in "mountain" and the NC natives correct him. "It's not 'mounTin,' they chide, it's 'moun?in!' You people from England talk funny." [The question mark is the closest approximation on this keyboard for the IPA symbol for a glottal stop - kind of an "uh" sound.] There were smiles all around at the cultural teasing. (By the way, I'm aware that the British use quotation marks in the opposite way we do in the States, with single quotation marks used where we use double quotation marks and vice versa.)
I think the issue of generally correct pronunciation is a worthy topic to continue discussing and I think it commendable that people care about how they pronounce words, doing their best by looking them up or asking for help when they are not sure. It's nice to see the helpful pronunciation entries in the LibriVox wiki. My students usually don't take the trouble to look up even words they have never seen before (one student barreled through Shakespeare's sonnet 18 totally clueless about what any of it meant). That's just lazy and careless (as in not caring). I think one of the reasons LibriVox has succeeded, along with the friendly and supportive community with no unsolicited criticism allowed, is the the recordings have improved over the years. I think the members who have higher standards of quality control for themselves than LibriVox actually requires serve to "raise the bar" and serve as examples worthy of emulation for the dedicated novices that genuinely wish to improve. It is also good for listeners to give readers at least the benefit of the doubt when it comes to words that seem frightfully mispronounced, as the examples of Don Juan and aluminium (now see, the spell checker in this software has identified aluminium as misspelled) illustrate.
Bob
I think I already apologized to the French-speaking world for that one. I like to imagine that I sound a little like she would have, other than the French of course.
I can't think of a good example right now, but there are some French-originating words in English that I had no clue how to pronounce... I do now.
