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Category: English
What does British English sound like to Australian speaker?
Scottish English? My Scottish personal trainer reports people have difficulty understanding her. I can’t fathom why, and I don’t, but maybe my ear isn’t as tin as I think it is. (FWIW, it’s rare that any Scots creeps in to her speech: cannae only once in a while.) Northern English? I think highly of it, […]
bewray
The Magister tripped me up this morning with the very first sentence I saw from him. Michael Masiello’s answer to How do I avoid atheists? I have this fear that atheists will ridicule me for being a theist. Andrew Weill and others have bewrayed the remarkable difficulty of your undertaking. Bewrayed? Bewrayed? Obviously no typo […]
ineluctable
Habib Fanny has just included inexorable in A few of my favorite words here, and I wondered to myself: has the Magister used one of my favourite words, which is related to inexorable but is even more emotive? Was there ever any doubt? Michael Masiello’s answer to What is importance of divine intervention in literature? […]
irenic
Love this word, because it comes from my sister’s name, Irene. Love this word, because it describes the attitude I aspire to having on the Quoras, and I use it a fair bit myself as a disclaimer. Love this word, because while I had seen it ages back, the Magister reintroduced me to it. Michael […]
limn
I’m an arrogant overeducated effete sumbitch. I’m looking at the contributions so far, and going, ha! I know that word. That word too. But the Magister has tripped yours truly up as well. And not with big words (Greek and Latin are my gig, after all), but with really small ones. The Magister loves limn. […]
ontic
Another little word that gave me pause. I recognised it just fine, from ontology, I just didn’t know that philosophy had done away with the –ology. Do Greeks even say ontikós? *googles* Phew. Theologians do, at least: Η οντική εκδοχή του Είναι: Αιτιοκρατία και αξιολογία. “The ontic version of Being: Determinism and Axiology.” The Magister […]
Do you pronounce BMW as “bee em double-u” or as “bey em vey”?
English: Bee Em Double You. Australian English: Beamer. Greek: well, Greek only referenced English as its default foreign language in the last generation. So it’s the German pronunciation: Beh Em Veh. (Μπε εμ βε) Cypriot Greek: from memory, Pemve (Πεμβέ) —/b/ is rendered in Cypriot Greek as /p/, since Cypriot Greek has a three way […]
Is Australian accent a moderate between British and American ones?
Like the others said. There is a split between American accents and Commonwealth accents, with American often more archaic; the retention of r after vowels is the biggest shibboleth (and several British and Irish accents line up with America there). The Australian accent is pretty close to London English, though apparently there was a Midlands […]
Why is “species” sometimes pronounced as “spee-shees”?
The explanation behind this is tied up with the bizarre history of the Traditional English pronunciation of Latin. I didn’t find an explicit explanation of what happened with species, and in fact the rules in that Wikipedia page took me in a slightly different direction to where I hoped to go. But here goes. I […]
What is proper name of the sound when pushing air through nose?
As a lay term rather than a linguistic description (Vote #1 Clarissa Lohr: Clarissa Lohr’s answer to What is proper name of the sound when pushing air through nose?), I was racking my brains: I was sure English had a word, and couldn’t place it. Something to do with flared nostrils. And huffiness. Our fellow […]