Monday, May 24, 2010

How to you say it?

I've spent a lot of time doing nothing with my mother this month as she heals from knee replacement surgery. We found ourselves wanting to make a list of common words that we've heard pronounced differently. We realize that we've spent most of our lives in our home state, and it has some language quirks we're aware of. Beyond those, listening to other people and watching television has made us notice discrepancies. I haven't looked these up in the dictionary yet, we are more interested in the daily speech of regular people. I'm going to try to make the pronunciation differences clear. Which comes closer to your own speech?

Orange ore-enj or are-enj?
Strength straygth or strehnth?
Aunt ant or auhnt?
Illegal ill-eagle or ee-legal?

I know there are more, but these are the ones that come to mind. I'm avoiding all the obvious area words (creek, barn, horse etc.). If more words come to mind (mine or Mom's), I'll expand my post.

4 comments:

Mare said...

Wa-ter or war-ter.
can or ken
My answers:
ore-enj
strehnth
ant
ill-eagle

Jean said...

Orange ore-enj or are-enj? # 1
Strength straygth or strehnth? # 1
Aunt ant or auhnt? # 1
Illegal ill-eagle or ee-legal?# 1

Teacher Mama said...

How about pillow or pellow, crayon or cran, or milk or melk? You also can't forget Utahan's habit of dropping the t from words like brighton and mountain. Good post.

Kay said...

If you were to come to Hawaii you'd have even more differences in speech patterns with our pigin.