Friday, May 23, 2008

From I Ran to Eye Rack

In a thread on codeproject, someone humorously commented that "pedophile" must mean somebody with a foot-fetish: American pronunciation has even changed it from "peed-o-file" to "peddo-file", which is almost equivalent to "encyclo-peddy-ah" (since American spelling similarly converts that 'ae' glyph to an 'e').

Another funny dodgy American pronunciation is the popular "eye-raq / eye-ran" thing. It was entertaining to hear that our ex-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was introduced as "Bertie Ay-hern" by Nanci Pelosi on a recent trip to the US.
As culturally-prevalent-and-nobody-corrects-themselves pronunciation errors go, it seems as bad as the Japanese 'l'->'r' transliteration (take the eravator to the rower reveru, prease), since at least Japanese have the excuse that the 'l' sound doesn't appear in their language and they thus have trouble pronouncing it.

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