Okay, so I only occasionally and sporadically encounter the following variations on pronunciation in the wild, and thus far they seem to have no rhyme or reason. They don’t always go together; they’re never associated with the same regional accent, and I cannot understand where it is that anyone learns to talk like this. It astonishes me. Can any of you shed some light on this for me?
- Pronouncing the word “humor” like “yoo-mor” (because, okay, no one, even the people who do that, pronounce “human” like “yoo-man,” so it’s not even consistent!)
- Pronouncing the word “mature” like “mah-toor” (rhymes with door)
- Ditto “ama-toor” for amateur
- Putting the word “an” in front of words that start with h, like “an house” or “an historic event.” You’re PRONOUNCING the h! It’s not a silent h! Whence the an, friend?
- Saying “schedule” like “shedule,” obviously, but I feel like no one does this except as kind of a self-conscious joke, so maybe it doesn’t count?
There is not a wrong way to have an accent, I did not come here to yell at the yumorists, I merely seek to understand. (IT’S TERRY GROSS, ISN’T IT. SHE GOT TO ALL OF YOU.)
Tags: dialect, language, linguistics, why
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I feel like I usually hear these on newscasts. Maybe there’s some sort of journalist community that propagates these pronunciations.
I feel like Martin Sheen does all of these, but I am willing to give him a pass.
I’m in the middle of my 19th re-watch of the West Wing and can confirm that he does say all of them. And he is the only person on Earth who gets a free pass because Jed Bartlet.
He pronounces the word “huge” as “yooge” at one point and I genuinely did not understand what he meant.
“they were YOOGE contributors!” I think was probably it. When that electronics company had a massive voluntary recall and Leo wanted to keep the contract, and Bartlet finally argued that it would appear politically and personally motivated.
I just finished my second viewing earlier this week… I have so much to catch up on. Both times, I have felt – and temporarily resisted – the urge to go immediately from the end credits of S7:E22 to the opening credits of S1:E1. What is it about that show???
It’s weird, because it’s so dated and problematic in some places but…it’s just so inherently re-watchable. It’s so damn good overall, but there’s something about it that makes it stand up to repeat viewings.
It’s that we all want to believe in a reality where being incredibly earnest and making stirring speeches is enough to accomplish significant political change.
I think he says “yoo-man,” too. I read all of these in Jed Bartlet’s voice.
he definitely spends all of Mass Effect 2 talking about how he’s gonna save the Yoo-mans.
yup, as someone who is on another play through of ME2, he definitely is in it for the Yoo-mans, not for aliens.
One of my professors pronounced human like “yoo-man”. Every time she said it, I was so shocked that I literally could not pay attention to the rest of the class because I was trying to convince myself that she was not, in fact, an alien. I think some of the things, like “an historic” have English origins. Why Americans say it, if that is the case, remains beyond me.
My undergrad psych professor did this, and it hurt me every time.
I, too, once had an instructor (anthro TA) say “yoo-man”. “Anthropology,” he said, on the first day of discussion section, “is the study of yoo-mins.”
I think he was from New York, if that helps.
I had horrible sinus problems all through college, so it sounded to me as if all of my professors were monstrously congested.
NJ (suburban NY, not suburban Phila) here. Yes, that is what we do. I trained myself to say the “h”s when I moved to the Midwest, but they still sound wrong to me.
I say yoo-min. I’m from East Texas. AND I SAY YOO-MER FOR HUMOR I CAN’T HELP IT. ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME.
Didn’t Sagan talk about the yoo-mans?
came here to say just that 🙂
“An house” sounded super-weird to me, so I looked this up to check: using “an” before a word starting with a non-silent h is only done when the word is polysyllabic and the first syllable is unstressed. So anyone saying “an house” is 100% wrong.
I do not do the “an hotel” thing, possibly because I am not posh/old-fashioned enough, but I find it faintly endearing when the BBC does it. (The Guardian apparently discourages the practice: http://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-styl…
From Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1994 edition):
“A is used before all consonants except silent h (a history, an hour); an was formerly used before an unaccented syllables beginning with h (an historical work), but now that the h in such words is pronounced the distinction has become pedantic, & a historical should be said and written; similarly an humble is now meaningless & undesirable.”
So it looks like it’s just a holdover from the unstressed h at the start of words being elided.
I just realized that while I don’t use “an” for any other h words I can think of (other than “an hour”), I do say “an historic event.”
I’ve maybe been saying it over and over under my breath at my desk to make sure that’s what I actually say. I really hope nobody can hear me . . .
But I think, for me anyway, it’s because the level to which the unstressed syllable at the beginning of the word gets lost otherwise. When I say “a historic event,” it sort of sounds a little like I’m just going “astoric event.”
But I would never say “an history.”
Hm. Weird.
Yeah, I’m the same way… I much prefer to say “an historic”, but it doesn’t pop up much with any other h words where I pronounce the h, even “history”. I think it’s just because we don’t usually preface the word “history” with “a” very often, and when we do, it’s in a more formal manner, like “A History Of X”, where you’re speaking in a more measured and deliberate fashion. By contrast, “historic” finds itself in the middle of everyday sentences where you’re speaking more casually, and are more likely to elide the syllables together without the “an”.
Syllable elision is one of my favorite quirks of language, and I’d venture to say that my delight for it is influenced by something of a mix between being exposed to My Fair Lady as a kid (in ‘artford, ‘eriford, and ‘ampshire…), and learning in high school that it’s a huge thing in Latin poetry, which they used to cram words into the meter that wouldn’t otherwise fit. Does one word end in a vowel and the next one start with another vowel? Eh, just slur like a drunken idiot and ignore the word gap. If you’re really good, you can slam four words together into a three-syllable smear of sound.
(In all seriousness, though, I loved reading Latin poems aloud… I could never tell you what they meant because I was always awful at remembering the vocabulary, but I was one of the few in my class who knew how to keep it on-meter.)
Ha. When I did my first year Latin oral exam, the professor frowned and said “at least you sound as though it means something”. Which I think means my pronunciation was terrible but at least the meter was right. I shudder to think how bad the other first years were!
Well, the first syllable is stressed in “history”, so “an” would be unnecessary.
It’s probably got to do with where the stress goes. With HIS-tory, the stressed first syllable brings out the h, whereas his-TOR-ic makes it easy to elide the h.
But – maybe you *are* following the rule. I pronounce the ‘h’ in history but not the ‘h’ in “historic”. Have no idea why, but that’s what I do, and so it becomes “an historic.” Sounds totally silly, though, if you say “an hhhhistoric.” English, irregularity.
I can give a pass to ‘an historical because ‘a historical’ might be heard as ‘ahistorical’–and that would reverse the meaning. Th rest make me think of Donald Trump. It’s YOOGE.
I love this and will totally bring it up the next time an annoying fellow student condescendingly corrects me when I say or write “a historic/a historian.” Because I HATE that.
I use ‘an’ for most of those words but I think that’s because I don’t pronounce the ‘h’ in any of them.
If I’m actually dropping my Hs I think I’d say “an”, but not otherwise. (“An ‘ouse” is fine, “an house” is bizarre.)
Yep, in old-fashioned RP you write ‘an hotel’ and say it ‘an otel’. Which sounds weird because dropping h’s is generally seen as a ‘common’ thing to do rather than an incredibly posh thing. But posh people always make up their own rules I suppose.
I actually had to look up why we say “an historic” because my mother, the English teacher, had always told me to. And it turns out it was because people would drop the H from those words (“an ‘oriffic event” would sound right) – but since language doesn’t really do that anymore, though it’s not INCORRECT so to speak, it sounds dumb. So there’s that.
You’re on your own with yooman, though.
omg wait has anyone else run into people who pronounce the word ANGST like AAAAAAHHHHNGGGGGG-st?
i’ve only met TWO PEOPLE who do this (both 40-50ish year old women of unspecified regional origin) and every time i hear this pronunciation i’m pretty sure my eyes bulge out of my head like they’ve just morphed into a centipede
I’ve known a couple of teenagers who did it. Ostensibly because that’s closer to how it would be in German, but really I think as part of Teen Snowflake Syndrome. One of them has now grown to the stage of one’s early twenties when one vociferously attacks other people on tumblr for being not the *exact right type* of social justice advocate. Bless them.
That would be the German pronunciation, for some reason (Angst means fear) – no idea why English-speakers would be using it…. pretension?
It’s like people who order a cwoissahnt at Starbucks. No, shut up, go away.
My mother is a French teacher, so I grew up pronouncing “croissant” and “crêpes” authentically and got RIDICULED for it by people like you. I’ve managed to switch to “cruh-SAHNT” like a normal person, but I refuse to start saying “crayps.” A man’s gotta have a code.
Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with using the original language’s pronunciation. It’s not pretentious, it’s the way the word is pronounced, and I wish Americans would be less Amerocentric about these things.
I mean, I don’t ridicule people to their faces or anything, I just mock their “authenticity” behind their backs. This is America, son, we borrow words. Except for the ones we don’t, like filet or sachet.
Saying “croissant” is always so awkward. I have always pronounced it something like “cwasson” (I think it’s more common in the UK than in the US), but it makes me feel pretentious. But “cruh-sahnt” makes me feel like people will think I’m too stupid to know how to pronounce it (and I’ve never heard non-Americans use that pronunciation).
I grew up in the US saying it the French(ish) way as well, so it was actually very exciting to hear other people ordering their “cwassohnhs” SHAMELESSLY once I moved to England. I will die on this hill, with a giant fucking sack of fresh cwassohnh to keep me company.
When you’re likely to be talking to actual French people, using the French pronunciation makes sense. I have beginner French, but once I moved to England it still took me a moment to reconcile ‘crepps’ with the foodstuff I’d grown up calling ‘craypes’.
Also, tbf, I’m coming at this as a former Starbucks employee, and the people who ordered cwoissahns at Starbucks are almost always terrible people. It’s probably a coincidence.
I say AHNGst, but half my family is German-speaking and I suspect that’s the source. However, I am also a 50-ish woman of unspecified regional origin, for what it’s worth.
It’s entered the English language as a loan word and come to mean something a bit different here. I’d describe it as closer to a listless unhappiness (surprisingly hard to describe without resorting to other loan words like malaise or ennui) than fear.
I actually wrote one of my short answers for my college linguistics class on words like ennui and weltschmerz, in response to a prompt asking us to elaborate on the accuracy or inaccuracy of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
I say “ahngst” because I learned the word as a Germanophile teenager and see no reason to change now. I also say “ahnimeh” for anime, for what it’s worth. I don’t like to use Americanized pronunciations unless they’ve been fully adopted into English and are no longer considered “foreign”.
It’s angst, regular old angst, when I’m actually talking about real life angst. It’s AAAAAAHHHHNGGGGGG-st when I’m describing most pre-Euphoria Enrique Iglesias songs.
My boyfriend is from New Jersey, and every time he says “huge” (pronounced yooge), I can only think of Donald Trump. I have asked him not to describe things as huge.
My whole family’s from Jersey and I have never noticed them saying “huge” like “yooge.” Maybe it’s a Philly/South Jersey thing? Or maybe I am not a noticing sort of gal.
His best friend (also from [Central] Jersey) has no trace of accent and makes fun of it with the rest of us. His mother has a bit of the same accent going on, though I think she’s from the same town.
I went to high school in South Jersey and a whole lot of my teachers said “yooge.” It drove me insane. I definitely think it may be a Philly/South Jersey accent. I didn’t hear it when I went to college in North Jersey.
I have several family members, some from NJ but most from Brooklyn/Queens, who never pronounce ‘h’ when it precedes ‘u.’ Made it very difficult for my cousin to introduce her boyfriend Hugh.
Me: Was he nice? What’s his name?
Aunt: You.
Me: Wait, what?
Aunt: His name is You.
etc etc
One of my favorite moments with him was when I first pointed out how weird he was pronouncing it.
“How do you say it?”
“hyooge.”
“What did I say?”
“yooge.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The H.”
“Hooge?”
“No…”
I’m from North Jersey; chiming in with the “hyooge” not “yooge” group.
My husband is from Virginia, and his parents are from Michigan. They say “huge,” but they never say it by itself, Everything that’s huge is “big huge.”
“It was a big huge mess.”
“They have a big huge house.”
and so on. Weirds me out every time, for some reason.
I hate Terry Gross’ voice almost as much as I hate Ira Glass’ (take that, current apostrophe conventions, I refuse to acknowledge you). I listen to less NPR than I should, and I feel somewhat guilty about that. Maybe if I were a better hippie, I’d be able to ignore their grating vocal stylings and focus purely on the substance of whatever it is they’re saying (I have no idea, because I can never listen to more than 30 seconds of anything they say).
I totally agree with you on both counts. Although with Ira Glass it seems like my problem is the combination of voice plus the weird cadence he uses on his show.
One of my most favorite Homestar Runner gags ever was the flier on Strong Sad’s table for the NPR Cage Match — Ira Glass vs Ira Flatow, with a picture of a pair of broken horn-rimmed glasses.
Everything he says sounds exactly.the.same, with the same weird, detached drone to it. People complain about his vocal fry, but I just hate the way he reads words.
“NPR Cage Match — Ira Glass vs Ira Flatow”
Oh God, I have to find this… (rubs hands in gleeful anticipation)
I think it’s in the Strong Bad Email called “radio” although it’s been years and years.
Still don’t understand how you can all be so wrong about the NPR voice. It’s so soothing! I love the vocal fry and the weird intonations and the mouth sounds.
I just don’t like the intonation where everything is the same, and where people sound like they’re reading instead of just talking. I guess the issue is naturalistic vs. clearly staged (I don’t like Laurence Olivier’s Shakespeare movies much either, if that helps/makes it worse). Vocal fry doesn’t actually bother me that much.
Ewwww mouth sounds
I also hate Ira Glass. (Partly because of his annoying voice, but also because he was such a dick to Lynda Barry when they were dating).
A lot of people’s voices on NPR are, indeed, annoying. I find a lot of the stories interesting on “This American Life” and similar shows, but sometimes the people’s voices are so irritating that I can’t listen.
This is why online transcripts are so wonderful. I can imagine them read by somebody who can emote!
oh my god oh my god oh my god
This is the best thing in the history of the world.
Stuart McLean, from CBC Radio’s Vinyl Cafe, also has a very annoying radio voice.
Is Vinyl Cafe just lying in wait for Garrison Keillor to die? They seem like a parody of Prairie Home Companion, but they do too good a job because IT IS NOT FUNNY.
OMG, he is THE WORST!
so funny how different people react. I could listen to Terry Gross talk about anything. I listened to like 3 hours of her interviewing people and being interviewed yesterday alone.
I will admit the possibility that I just can’t listen to her in the car, either because her voice is too hypnotic, or because I get distracted, and this has colored my perceptions.
I definitely hate Ira Glass’ voice, though.
Terry Gross’ voice is fine, but her tendency to ask hour-long questions designed to show off how much she knows, instead of to promote conversation with her guest, drives me absolutely bonkers. Shut up and let the guests talk, Terry.
OMG that explains why I found her irresistible in my overly-confident, arrogant 20’s, and can’t stand her now! Thank you for explaining that!!!
I’ve pretty much migrated podcasts to deal with the voice thing- Snap Judgement instead of This American Life, Q instead of Fresh Air. They’re not exact equivalents, but close enough for my background entertainment purposes.
I love Ira Glass–I grew up listening to TAL and find him inimitably soothing–but my partner HATES him. He hates him so much he’s developed this amazing, pointed, vicious imitation of a This American Life episode he will perform whenever anyone brings up NPR. It’s wonderful. It’s one of the three major pop-culture things we divide on. (The other two are Neil Gaiman and contemporary art.)
I’m really excited that you used “whence” correctly, because while wacky pronunciation doesn’t particularly bother me one way or the other, incorrect usage of “wither” and “whence” really sticks in my craw. Also “wither” and “whence” are good, useful, efficient words, and I want them to come back into the language! You don’t need to say “wither to” or “from whence!” The “to” and “from” are part of the word! It’s awesome!
I’ll show myself out.
Yes! ‘Whence’ in particular would be really useful if it came back into common usage!
Sorry to nitpick, but isn’t it “whither”? Unless you’re talking about flowers or fierce looks.
I had an English prof in undergrad who said “yoo-manism.” One day, after he had talked a lot about yoomanism, a student raised her hand and ASKED WHAT YOOMANISM WAS. She specifically asked how/if it was different from humanism. The prof clearly had no idea that he pronounced the word oddly, and all the other students in the lecture were a) trying to figure out if the student was asking a serious question or poking fun and b) dying of second-hand embarrassment.
oh man I took a whole class on human rights from a prof who said “yooman.” Involuntary cringing 3x a week.
This poor girl, though, you can just picture her thinking “okay, everyone is acting like they know what he’s talking about, but I swear this word isn’t in the reading, I’m going to put myself out there and ask! Good for me!”
ohhh noooooooooooooooo
I always thought the yooman was a New York thing? I had a prof in college who did that, and it drove me nuts. My husband, not a native English speaker, does it too. He also says ‘idear’ (idea) and ‘i-ron’, which, I don’t know where he got this shit from because it wasn’t me.
Oh, that makes sense–I said “yoomin” growing up, and my parents are New Yorkers.
‘idear’ is a New England, specifically Boston thing. When I graduated we all got ‘diplomers’ we got counselling on choosing ‘careeahs’ and told to avoid ‘Korear’ when travelling. (Say those last two out loud – I’ll wait)
A dear friend declined to buy a pair of earrings because she doesn’t have PSDS (pierced ears utterly without the letter R).
All these are far beyond Harvard and the bloody car in the yard.
This is true, but “idear” sounds really bizarre in the context of a foreign accent. I knew a German woman once who did NOT have a Boston accent but said “idear” all the time, with a really hard ‘rrrrrrrr’ sound, and it was at once strange and supremely annoying. (Spoken as a Boston-dwelling fan of the Boston accent). Also, I am pretty sure she did not learn “idear” here — she had done most of her American-English learning in Utah Mysteries.
I always thought ‘shedule’ was British too, because that’s how I was exposed to it. Now that MacCrocodile pointed it out, the ‘hu’ spelling/’yoo’ pronunciation combination is very common around here in NJ. My guess is just it was something people learned in common speech and never unlearned.
I am an American living in England and have found both “shedule” and “an historic” to be much more common over here, especially among the older generation. My husband is Irish and he also says “shedule” and then always corrects himself to “schedule” and then says, “wait, I mean–which one is right again?” (for the record he does NOT say “an” anything starting with h)
A LOT of British/UK accents almost entirely drop their leading Hs, though, so it becomes “an ‘ouse [house]” or “an ‘orse [horse].” MrChouffe generally does “a house” or “a horse” unless he’s either at home or has had a long conversation with his mother, in which case there’s not a leading H to be found.
Ok, but none of these standards actually apply to Yorkshire, because it is the Texas of the UK (in a good way), and therefore its own thing entirely.
This is very true. We have a friend from Penzance with whom we often joke that England is the part of the island that is situated between Cornwall and Yorkshire.
“You can always tell a Yorkshireman, but you can’t tell ‘im mooch”.
“An’ th’ thing ’bout bees, right, is tha’ they doon’t lie. An’ they can allus tell royalty, like.”
They should have done the whole thing in northern.
“I’ve awlus reckoned dogs were proper gradely.”
This is an admirably succinct summary of my home life. 🙂
Every once in a while my dad does the yoomor thing and it bothers me every time!! Actually it’s most often ‘huge’ -> ‘yooge’, but any other hu- words could be suspect at any time. Including human, I’m pretty sure.
with “huge” especially I always figured it was the last remnant of his New Yorker childhood, and maybe because he’s lived in MA for almost 40 years and lost his accent everywhere else, he sometimes just gets confused and pulls it out in other weird places?? Idk. It does bother me, though.
I was going to ask if you were my long-lost sister (dad does this, early childhood in Yonkers, the works), but he’s been living in Indiana for 30+ years, so nope.
yeah, my dad grew up in Queens! Darn. It would have been nice to have a sister, though.
My peeves: “lit-tra-toor” (similar to the “mature” pronunciation above” and “IN-surance” (no, no, no, has any insurance commercial ever emphasized the IN, it’s in-SUR-ance aaaaaahhhhhh).
insurance commercials in the south pronounce it INsurance most of the time, it’s just a regional dialect and the dictionary says both are acceptable. i come from the land of inSURance, but after living in SC/VA for the past 8 years or so have slowly switched over, i find stressing the first syllable more enjoyable for some reason.
I love figuring out how long people have lived in VA by how they stress words like that.
I have a dear friend who grew up in Virginia. Having known her for 15 years now, I still don’t know what she is talking about when she asks about “crowns”. Until she says Crayola.
“IN-surance” as a pronunciation is actually a plot point in some Hitchcock movie – Marnie, I think? And though I hate that pronunciation, I will always be slightly fond of it just for that.
It’s Marnie– I remember it too. Horrible movie, though.
This reminds me of how, in The Thin Man, Myrna Loy and William Powell have a long conversation about gathering the susPECTS in order to reveal the killer. That pronunciation turns up in some other early 1930s murder mysteries, too (one, I think, is The Kennel Murders, also starring Powell, this time as Philo Vance). I don’t know if that was the standard pronunciation at that time, or if it’s some aspect of hypercorrection in early talkie diction, but despite having seen The Thin Man more times than I can count, it always catches me up short. Suspects who? Oh, the SUSpects!
Oh man, my mother-in-law is from Tulsa, OK, and she pronounces a lot of words with a stress on the first syllable. It drives me crazy. It’s always THANKS-giving this and TEE-vee that. The text doesn’t do it justice; it’s a very dramatic stress, to the point that the rest of the word seems like an afterthought.
Here in sophisticated, (capital-n) Northern Kansas we celebrate ThanksGIVing by watching TV (equal stress, or a slight stress on the V).
I’m originally from northern Wisconsin, and first started hearing INsurance when I moved to southern Kansas. Now I hear it in southern Ohio, where I live currently. Northern parts of states FTW!
Yoo-mour (yu-man, yooge) just sounds like loss of aspiration before the /j/ (human etc. all have that “y” sound in them too, just after the “h”). Aspiration is one of those things that tends to just disappear with time in some contexts because it’s harder to produce. Especially in these cases since there’s no morphological distinction (yooge doesn’t mean something different than huge).
I’d like to point out that both Woody Allen and Alan Alda say yoomur and yooman and it is HIDEOUS.
I feel like these are the same people who call Nevada “Nevah-da,” which drives me nuts.
Why? It’s a Spanish word, and that’s how it’s pronounced in Spanish.
If you are calling something “snowy” in Spanish, it’s neVAHduh, yes, but if you are speaking of the American state, it’s NeVAduh. No one who lives in the state pronounces it like the Spanish word, and if you insist on it I’ll have to insist you pronounce all the other state names derived from non-English languages with their appropriate accent as well 😉 GOOD LUCK. http://www.native-languages.org/state-names.htm
The original name for Michigan sounds suspiciously like meshugena.
There are about 45 million hispanophones in the US; compared to about 3 million Nevadans. Up until this very moment I had no idea that people might say the state name differently, it’s just universal in my circle of friends/family/aquaintances to say “neVAHduh”. I could change from here on or you might be blowing in the wind to try to hold on to the anglophone pronunciation, but who knows, language change is funny and hard to predict.
If it changes, so be it. Meanwhile, it’s a sore spot for those who live there, imagine if everyone kept saying your last name differently from how you did. You’re in the minority, but it’s your name, so.
I don’t know if it will change, but the way that locals say it is by definition the correct pronunciation.
Which is why the city of Los Gatos, CA is pronounced Las Gatus, no matter how often you correct the residents.
And Buena Vista, VA is Bweh-nuh Vih-stuh.
Unless you are talking about the county and the university in Iowa, in which case it is Byoo-nuh Vih-stuh.
I’m not kidding. I have friends from Iowa.
There’s even more craziness in the American midwest. When I lived in Ohio, they pronounced Versailles as Ver-saylz, and Lima as Lye-mah!
Of course, if you’re in Missouri, Nevada is pronounced “Ne-VAY-da.” Oddly enough, I have relatives in both the state and the Missouri town.
Indiana: home to Vincennes (“vinSINS”) and Terre Haute (“terra hote”). Not to mention Edinburgh, with a hard “g” at the end.
Oh my god, Indiana with its Dubois county (DUboyz) and Versailles (Versaylz) and Milan (MILE-an, and no, I am not making that up).
I have many friends from Boy-see, Idaho and I agree with this statement.
Por ejemplo, the city of Los Angeles, which is decidedly NOT given its proper Spanish pronunciation.
And why Dauphin, Manitoba is pronounced DOFF-in. In an officially bilingual English/French country.
I’m talking about the name of the state, which isn’t pronounced the same way as the Spanish word.
I have been pronouncing this wrong my whole life and never knew… [/Australian]
Is it a holdover from the days of the posh mid-Atlantic accent?
Oh dear – I say ‘YOOmir’. I used to say ‘yooge’ and ‘YOOmin’, but people openly mocked me, so I learned to pronounce the heck ouf of that initial ‘H’.
I now say, “HeeYOOjuh” and “HeeYOOmin” and everyone nods and smiles, even if I’ve blown their eyebrows straight up like a Scotsman’s from the force of that first ‘H”.
My two sisters and I all have the same deficiency; I wonder if it’s a Canadian thing?
I said “yoomin” growing up, until a 12th-grade boyfriend re-trained me to say the “H” by correcting me every time. I still say “human,” but it bothers me, because I hated that boyfriend.
I used to say SOH-ry instead of SAH-ry, until a classmate made horrible fun of me in 6th grade and I stopped. I resisted the Ohio accent in all other ways, though, because my dad made fun of me when I said tomatah.
I hate your boyfriend, too!
Whole bunch of people in Houston pronounce it You-ston or maybe more like Ewe-ston, I have no idea if this has any correlation with yoo-man or yuge but I even got in the habit of dropping the H when I lived there.
CAN ATTEST! But I have no idea where it comes from either. One of the particular You-ston people that I know also does you-man and yuge.
As a native Houstonian, I can tell you that the correct, and most common, pronunciation states the “H.” There’s a radio personality here in town that says “Youston” and it driveseems me crazy. Why can’t people hear how the majority pronounce a word and follow suit. That coming from someone who says bay-owe for bayou because that’s the way Houstonians said it when I was a kid.
Jon Stewart says “an historic,” but he overemphasizes the H (“An Hhhistoric”), so it’s basically just screaming “listen to how Correct my Grammar is” despite not actually being correct.
This may be one reason why I stopped watching the Daily Show a few years ago.
That’s 100% definitely a joke that he’s making with the pronunciation. You can still hate it but it’s not like he doesn’t know it’s silly.
an historic is still correct, since we all understand it.
I am a native New Yorker and while I have successfully trained myself to say “milk” instead of “melk” and “cah-fee” instead of “caw-fee” I just can’t shake Yooman and Yumor! The worst was playing a board game with someone named Hugh – “You go, Yugo!” was a very confusing sentence.
Oh god, melk, I can’t break it. Everyone will have to deal with my melks.
Terry Gross definitely says both “yoo-mor” and “yoo-man” and it always confounds and infuriates me!
“You see, your honor, deez two yewts…”
“These two whuuuat?“
Oh I do pronounce youth badly when I’m being facetious:
In my YOOT
Aren’t these the same people who pronounce “amethyst” as if it were “am-e-tist”? (seriously though, that theta became a fricative in, like, the 2nd century BCE — it’s okay to use it!)
I associate both “ametist” and ” yooman” with my 8th grade science teacher (she probably said the others as well, but I don’t remember). She was awful qua teacher (every week, sometimes every day we did something completely different, and she would start units then stop them just because (I assume) she had gotten bored), and she also taught us such valuable things as the dangers of cloning — because “think about what will happen when the Chinese clone an army of super-soldiers and take over the world” and how if we girls ever got an abortion, we would become clinically depressed later in life when we realized that we had murdered our first-born child.
So, in my mind, that’s the kind of person who says yooman.
My grandmother and a loooooot of older people in south Louisiana did the non-fricative “th” thing. “Turn up the termostat,” particularly always made me laugh cause I KNOW YOU CAN MAKE THE SOUND, YOU JUST DID IT!!
“seriously though, that theta became a fricative in, like, the 2nd century BCE — it’s okay to use it!”
*all the high-fives*
I always thought “yooman” was A Cat Thing.
also, pronouncing “coupon” as “kyoopon”. My brother does it, but I don’t. We’ve grown up in the same area all our lives and i can’t for the life of me understand.
it’s definitely weird if you’re not familiar with it, but I think that’s the dialect down here in NEFL/SE GA because I got very confused when I first heard it without the Y in there.
That makes sense! Never having been further east than Lake Tahoe really means I miss out on a lot of interesting US Dialect differences.
OH NO NOW I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW I SAY THESE WORDS! I think…. I say yoo? It doesn’t sound weird to me? Could it be a Northeast US thing? I’m originally from Maine, and spent most of my childhood learning how to put an “r” at the end of words, so maybe I missed the “h” beginnings?
I don’t know anything anymore.
I associate the yoo-man/yuge phenomenon with Pennsylvania for some reason? Maybe because the two people I’ve noticed doing it are my father-in-law and Terry Gross, both of whom are associated with PA. Sample set of two – theory proven, right?
Don’t think PA can claim it, not directly anyway. Grew up in central NJ and outer Philly suburbs, and it’s not all that common there. Terry Gross is actually from Brooklyn, and my boyfriend’s family is all from Long Island and I feel like I’ve heard a few of them say some of these. They’re also Jewish, just to throw that out there for the Irish theory.
As with all amazing/annoying things, looks like we might have to thank/blame New York?
I have a feeling it’s a matter of both geography and class, but I’m not going any further than that.
My Irish Catholic priest pronounced human “yoo-man.” Maybe it’s an Irish thing?
So… wait. The question is “yoo-man” vs. “hew-man,” right? The difference is in the initial vowel sound? I have a natural rednecky Appalachian sort of accent, and I’ve smoothed it out as I’ve gotten older, but I didn’t realize this was a word people said differently. I say “YOO-man,” “yuge,” etc.
yes! HEW-man is how I have always said it
THIS MAKES EVEN LESS SENSE, I was convinced “yuman” was coming from Philly and here you are telling me it’s an Appalachian thing??
I lived in southern Indiana my entire life, with deep family roots in Kentucky. My accent, to my ears, has always been less deep than that of my Kentucky relatives, although now that I’ve lived outside IN for a couple years, the Indiana relatives sound more pronounced to me.
Ok, so the words you mentioned and how I think I pronounce them:
Humor – YOO-murr
Human – YOO-man
Mature – muh-CHUR
Amature – AM-a-chur
A/An – a historic event, a house, etc.
Schedule – SKED-juwall
I am available as a study subject, if anyone wants me.
I just called my mom – she says all these words the same way. She was also deeply amused the question.
I don’t know if it’s a Midwesterner thing, but my mom pronounces “toilet” as a mix of “toe-lit” and “tor-let”… “toer-let”? Like, the R isn’t really pronounced as such so it isn’t a straight-up hillbilly “ter-lit”, it’s like a phantom R, lurking at the back of the throat, unspoken but not absent.
Anyway, it occasionally makes my eye twitch.
Like if a British person were pronouncing “torlit”?
Yeah, that’s probably the best way to think of it.
Oh my god, is there anything funnier than “ter-lit”? Laughing like a 12 year old here.
My husband and I use “terlit” constantly but only facetiously. And yes, we laugh like middle school kids every time.
witness: yes in southern ohio/west virginia. Not in northern ohio.
I moved from New York to Indiana. No one says anything correctly here.
I’m from Indiana! Is this why I sound bizarre?! I sometimes overcorrect and it comes out vaguely British! Good lord.
In Indiana I am told I talk too fast. In New York, people start completing my sentences. Also, I have never been know to say that something “Needs warshed.”
As a born and raised Hoosier with a background in linguistics, I will defend regionalisms of that sort with my dying breath. Pretty soon there will be nobody on earth who speaks the way my grandmother did and it breaks my heart a little.
I’m in Oregon, and some of my coworkers, mostly older, say “needs warshed”. Drove me buggy for years, then I found myself using the “needs” construction when talking to my husband. I stopped myself in horror.
I still refuse to add an intrusive “r” to “washed”.
I lost a spelling bee in 6th grade because Mrs. Colby gave me to spell <<um-bull>>, and I spelled it the way it sounded not realizing she meant “humble.” I’m still pissed off.
Noooo that is terrible! I would be pissed off too.
Oh my god I’m not alone. I moved to TX from upstate NY before 2nd grade. That year, Mrs. Sapio gave a spelling test in which the prompt was “Pin. I have a new pin. Pin.” So I dutifully wrote down “P-I-N.” And she marked it WRONG, that monster, because she thought she was saying “pen.”
And I was livid, because A) I sure as shit knew how to spell “pen” in 2nd grade, and was mortified that anyone might think otherwise, and B) her “use it in a sentence” sentence did not actually provide clarification as to whether she was saying “pin” or “pen.”
Not that I’m still bitter nearly 30 years later or anything.
That is an entirely unhelpful way to use it in a sentence!!! That’s like what students do when they don’t really know a vocabulary word and have to use it in a sentence on a test. You are totally justified in any residual bitterness.
“no one, even the people who do that, pronounce ‘human’ like ‘yoo-man'”
Anyone from Pennsylvania want to weigh in on this…?
I think I CAN tell you! Many my baby boomer aged relatives who grew up in Western Massachusetts say it this way. Western MA dialects are so weird because they mostly sound “normal American” (as in it’s hard to pinpoint them to a specific region, not as in the average American speaks that way) and then BAM, someone throws in a “yoomur” or “ideer” or “myoo-zam” (very guilty of that one, myself).
Ok, but New England is a crazy place, with the fish people and the creeping horrors and the Marky Marks.
And don’t forget Old Henry.
(He hasn’t forgotten you).
Nooooooooooo, not Old Henry.
(I actually don’t know what this is a reference to, but it sounds sufficiently ominous.)
Be afraid….
http://the-toast.net/2015/01/29/letter-chris-kimb…
Oh, riiiiiiiiiight. I think perhaps my brain had refused to store that information. I’m not sure why, but I really do find backwoods New England folk magic horror to be uniquely unsettling. I genuinely don’t know why this is. Somehow the witches are extra witchy. This is probably Stephen King’s fault somehow, or maybe Cornwall’s.
Maine is basically America’s Cornwall (with lobsters instead of pasties).
I have a book of Cornish fairy tales (the good ones, with giants and witches who turn into cats and dance with Satan). I read them to some first graders when I was in high school, as a volunteer thing, and a young boy told me that they might scare littler kids, so I should probably not read them to any younger children. Not that he was scared, but some other kids, that totally weren’t him, might be. It’s probably because I did the voices. Turns out Cornwall is terrifying.
because it is set close to home, in my case at any rate
because i never, ever managed to get through any Stephen King ever. I should try blaming more on Cornwall.
The great thing about early American settlement patterns is that you can get really specific about which parts of Great Britain to blame for linguistic craziness.
How do people normally say museum? I’m not from that specific area, but I can’t think of any other way to say it.
myoo-ZEE-um
French-Canadians who have otherwise lost their accent usually remain incapable of putting their h-sounds in the right places – I have observed this phenomenon much more frequently since moving to Quebec. We play ‘ockey on da hice, it is an ‘istorical hobby!
Replying to myself 2 days later to add this: I wonder what you would see if you took an accent map showing people who say yoo-mor and yoo-man and superimposed it over areas where the Acadians settled after being kicked out of New France? It almost sounds like an assimilated francophone accent to me
I drive my husband crazy because I say electronic with the first e as a long e instead of short e. He looked up the pronunciation to prove that I am wrong. But he says email with a long e, as do I, so I say I’m right. After all, email is short for electronic mail.
I mean.. I honestly can’t tell if you’re joking but… e-mail is short for “the letter E” – mail… like ipod…is not pronounced ihpod…. >_>
Edit: if anyone is gonna be right it’s the one pronouncing it more like the source Greek word… *whistles*
Actually, email started as an abbreviation for electronic mail. Used to be written as e-mail, to signify the e was short for electronic. Hence why email has a long e sound.
“Hence why” is an epic meta-troll, right?
yes…. the “e” that abbreviates electronic is pronounced like the letter “e”. like in every other instance of that kind of abbreviation. since i-pod didn’t convince you, what about “the f-word” not being pronounced “the fffword”?
The largest demographic of “mah-toor”s I’ve encountered has been those teaching sex ed to me. I really loved my fifth grade teacher until I had to sit through an hour and a half of her talking about how our bodies will “mah-toor”.
The woman who is my own personal Auntie Mame is a person who says yooman, yooge, and yoo-mor.
But she’s also amazing and a total BAMF. So she can pronounce them however she likes.
What about “intresting” vs. “in-ter-esting”? I find the second one pretentious as hell and was dismayed when I realized early-on that the guy I was dating used it. But hey, we’re married ten years now because in my benevolence I am willing to ignore this tragic flaw.
I use “in-ter-esting” only when I am drawing out the word to convey that although there are many comments I wish to make on the situation my conversational partner has just told me about, “interesting” is the most polite one.
Yeah if I say “in-ter-esting” it’s definitely in a funny voice. Which must be from somewhere, but I’m not sure where? EEN-ter-esting!
What drove me nuts in school was when English teachers – and it was always English teachers – pronounced sure like “shoooooor” or “shoo-ur” (I say it like “shur”). I mean maybe it was more correct, but did they really have to wrangle one vowel into such a torturous string of sounds like that?
Now I’m wondering about the “an house” and “an history” thing in regards to my grandmother, who’s from Cape Breton and drops h’s at the beginning of words…
First year of college, my cousin had a teacher who pronounced puberty as poo-berty. Fifteen years later, I still think about that all the time and laugh and laugh.
What about pronouncing “three” like “tree?” Do other places do that too?
South Louisiana does the weird th thing.
The entire French Canadian side of my family pronounces “th” as “t”. My favorite is bat-tub.
I just realized I say that too! And before we go on a long car ride, I make sure my daughter goes to the batch-room.
I have Irish friends that do. It’s funny to make them say “third”, which comes out as “turd.” Yes, we are all 12 year old boys
Cory Matthews pronounced it poo-berty too <3
When I moved to Oregon from North Carolina for college, half my professors said the word ‘measure’ like “may-sure” and it seriously through me for a loop, because they didn’t say “play-sure” instead of ‘pleasure’. It bothered me so much I couldn’t concentrate half the time.
Haha that reminds me how some of my southern college-mates would say the words “pin” and “pen” exactly the same and I wouldn’t know which object they were asking for. I love these little dialectical differences you wouldn’t even think of until you experience them!
I saved the day when I worked at a JoAnn’s in Oregon by being the one person on staff who was from the South and thus could recognize that the poor lady being passed from employee to employee didn’t want stretch nets (nonexistent, at least in our inventory), she wanted stretch knits (aisle 4).
I am from the midwest and always said maysure, but plehsure and trehsure (the older, lower-class people in my family say maysure, playsure and traysure). My husband, a lifelong PNW person is teaching me to say mehsure, but I still slip sometimes.
Regional accents are awesome, and it is always disappointing that I meet people who can tell a Texan from an Oklahoman by accent but think all all British people sound the same (or worse yet can’t distinguish BR from AU, NZ and SA.)
I thought it was an Oregon thing, not a midwest thing! The more you know.
I have a super-bastardized accent; I have a pretty passing non-regional dialect for work and most social situations (thanks PBS & NPR!) but when I’m heated or drunk or around my parents or anyone with a tinge of a southern drawl, I lapse into a weird mishmash of East Texas/Western North Carolina which just confuses everybody because I use the super local idioms from my family in Texas but no one’s ever heard of them here in WNC so mostly I just get strange looks.
I used to pronounce “bagel” as “baa-gel” (like “bag,” or the sound a sheep makes) and never thought anything of it until one day in middle school a classmate pointed it out. I have no idea where it came from – my parents certainly don’t say it like that – and I still take conscious note of every time I say the word. (I live in NYC, so, frequently.)
https://youtu.be/EDQyUqsCLXA?t=22s
we are all britta
Ugh. She’s the AT&T of people.
I am so happy to learn that there are people who say “baggle” and have lived in New York. Britta is vindicated.
I have known one person who said bagel like that, and we grew up together, so similarly it came out of nowhere for her. she also said “hilahhrious” as though she was a posh brit, and she said ‘shirrup’ for syrup. it was interesting.
When I was a kid I never heard “basil” (as in the herb) out loud, so I assumed it was pronounced basil as in Fawlty. When I first said it to my husband he mocked me terribly, and even today we say “basil” with a strong fake Brit accent when cooking spaghetti sauce.
Well, Toasties, I thought I would wait for an open thread to stop lurking and say hi, but now I’m going to do it here instead just to say that “an historian” / “an historic” is like nails on a chalkboard to me. A chalkboard of incorrect historical facts and I hate it SO MUCH. It’s not even easier to say!
for some reason I associate this with Yorkshire. is that wrong?
I believe the last person I knew who said “yoomur” (and “yooman”) was my eighth-grade science teacher, who also said “TUES-dee,” “WEDS-dee,” et al for the days of the week…at the time I just figured it was old man speech?
I know someone who says “dee” for “day”: she’s from very rural Texas.
My grandfather (from northern Minnesota, also rural) said this too. He didn’t have a strong accent because he moved to California when he was 20-ish and tried to lose it. Bits of it always came through, though
How about “both?” Anyone else stick an L/W-sound in there?
MY BROTHER.
Wait… where would one stick it? I seriously can’t figure it out.
Late response, but this Jersey girl (me) pronounces it like “bolth.”
My dad is Dutch and has an accent*, and I picked up certain words that he pronounced incorrectly. For example, it took me a long time to stop pronouncing “vehicle” as “vee-hickle.” I don’t think he does any of the things on this list though except he might say “yooge.”
*But I had NO IDEA he had an accent though until I was in 6th grade and a friend asked about it and I was like, “HUH? He doesn’t have an accent!” I just didn’t hear it and I still don’t.
“Yoo-man” is totally real and part of the philly dialect. My grandmother is fond of saying, “You’re only YOO-MAN!”
I have. Oh, English, your development means you look so ridiculous, even if there were valid reasons for spelling/pronunciation changes at the time.
This is exactly how I felt listening to Super Hans when I first watched Peep Show. Impenetrable accent, until it wasn’t and then I got almost every word. Funny how that works.
“Tell you what, that crack is really more-ish”.
What’s your accent? This is very interesting to me, because I have never thought of Super Hans as having a difficult-to-understand accent (he slurs/mumbles, but the accent itself is fine), but that is possibly because I am from the south of England and it’s not too weird to me.
I’m from Washington state in the States. Some people tell me I have an accent, but I have lived her all my life and have no clue if it’s true. To my knowledge a Washington accent isn’t a thing.
Is this the right forum to speculate about why my grandma pronounces “batteries” as “bat trees”?
I’ve always found it particularly charming, but have no idea where it came from. She grew up in rural Kansas, but so did two of my other grandparents, and they don’t do it.
I like to picture little furry bats in trees.
Big talk from you “an erb” American types
“erb” is actually the original pronunciation. The “h” got added on due to linguistic confusion in England around the 17th or 18th century. All the lower-class Cockney types were dropping the “h” in words like ” ‘ello “, and to counter this the more upper class Victorian types started emphasing the “h” in words starting with the letter, and accidentally added it onto herb.
I mean… “original”? The original is Latin which definitely had a pronounced H, which got dropped in French due to their phonetics, then resurfaced in some English uses. So basically you’re just imitating French snobbery if you drop it >:)
Anyway my point was that you spell it Herb and still use “an”.
Luxury pronounced as “lugg-ry”, usually in ads for expensive cars…
My understanding is that way back when – like the 17th century? – dropping the initial h of a word was a very common pronunciation, maybe even London standard. But that didn’t persist (except in a few words like honor, honest, or hour) and then more recently, like in the 19C maybe, the same pronunciation became class-marked.
My surmise as to why “historic” has this weird in-between status is that book titles through the centuries have kept “an historic[al]” alive, and people are working off of that.
Of course people wouldn’t pronounce it “an ‘istorical” because that would sound Cockney! We labor under so many layers of implication.
Well, being American Southern, Louisiana style, I pronounce it ‘yoomah’. We are often non-rhotic here and don’t talk like the rest of you. We also know how to do it when we are with you. There is a difference between people who use words in a way to try to signify class difference and simple regional variants of our language.
OOh, is this why Houston is You-ston? Is this a bayou thing?? (I say this with sincere love in my heart; I’m from Appalachia, so I know from marginalized accents.)
Why, yes. I’ve heard tell that crazy New Yorkers say it as though it were ‘House Town” Street but that’s just their funny way of talking. No one living anywhere near the Alamo would ever say his last name but You-ston. I know this and I’m not a Texan, but have friends who actually live in Houston, San Antonio and Austin.
I would recommend Kevin Stroud’s excellent “History of English” podcast, and also his “History of the Alphabet” audiobook, for the answers to some of these questions. In particular, in the “History of the Alphabet” he explains the close connections between the letters “u”,”y”, “i”, “v”, and “w” — they all originally come from the same letter and their sounds have shifted between each other quite a bit over time. This may explain the “humor -> yoomor” connection.
Given its prevalence in some generations of my family, I always assumed that yumor and yuman were elderly Jewish New Yorker things. Are they not?
Except for the ‘H/Y’ they’d right at home here. I worked for over 20 years for a Jewish man from Tennessee who had more of a Southern drawl than I could ever have had. And he wasn’t stupid, no matter how soft his speech sounded. He was the assistant dean at Tulane University after having taught as a professor there for decades. People make snap judgements all the time about how other people sound.. When it’s funny in a ‘everybody is different’ way. OK.
My wife is from Montana, I am from NYC, and she was genuinely appalled to learn I pronounce “marry,” “Mary,” and “merry” in three different ways.
I’m from New Jersey, and after being laughed at a lot in my elitist Seven Sisters college (people would also beg me to slow down when I talked), and being relentlessly mocked by an obnoxious ex (who nevertheless thought it was just dandy to say “diabeetus”), I managed to purge “yoomor” and “yuman” from my speech most of the time, but saying “HYumor” and “Hyuman” the way I mostly do now still sounds fairly pretentious to me now if I think about it.
This is turning into a fun linguistic survey. My dad says yoo-min and yoo-mor. I think it’s a French Canadian/ Southeastern Massachusetts/ Northeastern Connecticut thing in his case.
One hill that I will die upon is the pronunciation of elementary and documentary, because I am from central New York and have always pronounced both of those with the “a,” but it wasn’t until I went to college that I was told this is apparently a very weird thing. EVEN THOUGH I HAVE NEVER MET ANYONE BORN AND RAISED IN THE US WHO DOESN’T PRONOUNCE, SAY, SECRETARY OR MILITARY WITH THE “A” SOUND AT THE END. Like, why just these two words? Why “elemen-try,” but not “mili-try”? It makes no sense and makes me just LIVID. (Apologies to any people from the US who actually pronounce these words this way. Who are you? Where are you from?)
I believe “amatoor” is the correct pronunciation of the original French, but, you know, that was a long time ago. A good older edition of Emily Post will have a section on language, and I think this is an example in my 40s edition (currently packed away, alas). Mallory, I think you’d have a lot of fun with early Post! Especially since for every batshit thing she says (“never wear your hair down!”) she says at least one that’s common sense or even progressive. Her chapter on weddings — and why overkill is unnecessary and gauche – is a must-read. Next time you’re asked to be the ninth bridesmaid, you have your wedding present sorted.
Wait, I had a point. I’ll confess to the occasional “an istoric”; it slips out, no reason. But the real question is: do you say “wash cloth” or “warsh cloth”? PA strikes again!
Aha, been scrolling to find someone addressing “Amatoor”.
French pronunciation is Am – a – TERR (well I can’t seem to render it well but there’s no “ch” in it)
In the UK we tend to say AM-uh-ter (ie with a brief neutral vowel in the middle
I was always puzzled by the US pronunciation AMacher, where did the ch come from? But it is also creeping into the UK, although I’d say AM-uh-ter prevails.
I had a genetics professor who pronounced “skeletal” as “ske-LEE-tal.” I could never figure out why.
Also, friend in college who said “ca-SHEW” instead of “CA-shew”
My mom refers often to a science teacher of hers who pronounced hybrid as hi-bird. Has never gotten over the marvel of it.
It’s quite often casHEW in the UK. But only a slight emphasis on the latter syllable, and lots of people say CAShew too.
I’ve heard skeLEEtal in the UK too.
u-RYE-nal, VITT-amin, how dare they tbh
I say “ca-SHEW”. I never noticed until now.
at work i asked a customer if she would like a bag “bae-g” and she looked at me like I had asked her if she were wearing a thong. she said ” i don’t know what you mean” and i repeated myself and she was like, “a bah-g you mean a bah-g” and it was like, lady, you are in small town prairie Canada buying insoles for your sneakers WE ARE NOT AMUSED
Ok but why do Americans leave the H off ‘herb’? Just for that one word you try and sound a bit French?
Nah, y’all Brits added the H back in because you didn’t want to sound like the poors.
My dad says both “yoo-mans” and “yoo-mor.” I can’t explain it, but we mock him incessantly for it.
Has anyone ever heard someone call those edible fungi you put on pizza “mushroons”? My MIL says this and I’ve never heard it from anyone else ever, but maybe there are more out there. I’ve asked my husband why he’s never corrected her, and he just shrugs and says, “Not worth it.”
My health teacher in HS would say Yoomans, but also, SUPER STRANGELY would say “shumac” as in “poison shumac.” I remember having a conversation via passed notes in that class trying to figure out why the hell he said shumac, but we finally decided it was a conservation of consonants thing, and that was the H that he’d lost from Yoomans.
The conservation of consonants also explains people who say “Idear”–“I had an idear about how I could improve this.”–they exist to balance out the ‘I pahked my cah in havahd yahd.” people.
For over ten years, I was a Massachusetts Yankee in Queen Elizabeth’s court (not literally). Got my UK citizenship. Spent much effort learning new spelling and pronunciation, minus the accent, which I never had the guts to try to imitate (though my youngest son does a fine job). Back in the Colonies now, and I just refuse to change back. It’s ‘zed’ and ‘aluminium’, single quotes, ‘car park’, and all the extra ‘u’s I can throw at things. Maybe people think I’m Canadian, maybe they just think I’m a prat, but there you go.
I still stumble frequently over shedule/skedule (all the natives over there that I ever heard used ‘sh’); it never felt quite right to me, so maybe I’ll just leave it at ‘sk’.
There is still an ‘h’ at the beginning of ‘humour’ and ‘history’, though. And I can’t really imagine saying ‘a historical …’, if for no other reason than that it sounds like ‘ahistorical’.
‘uh historical’ vs ‘aie-historical’
Right, so as The Toast’s Resident Linguist, I feel like I have been well-chosen for the job because I actually do know the answers to all of these questions.
The short answers are as follows:
1, “humor”/“yoo-mor”, “human”/“yoo-man” – /h/ dropping, now somewhat lexicalized/fossilized
2. “mature” as “mah-toor” (rhymes with door) and “ama-toor” for amateur – yod-dropping
3. Putting the word “an” in front of words that start with h, like “an house” or “an historic event.” – /h/ dropping and subsequent reanalysis/spelling pronunciation
4. Saying “schedule” like “shedule,” – it’s a British thing that they got from the French (whereas skedule is ultimately the fault of the Greeks).
But I don’t want to write a whole essay on this at the bottom of like 300 comments, so like, is this something we want a longer thing on? Do we need an Ask The Linguist feature?
I have never heard anyone say “cashay” for “cache.” (Washington state here.)
Yes please to an Ask A Linguist on this.
As an Irish person who spends some time every day speaking to Americans / Australians / Brits on the phone, I have to do a weird kind of code-switching to be understood.
For example, if I am speaking to an American, I will say “rauter” and “cashay”. I do this because using my standard pronunciations of “rooter” and “cash” are met with baffled silence or am ostentatious correction. (In context: Please restart your router and clear your cache)
I know where “router” comes from but cashay? Is it the verbal cacher or a past tense caché? I always think “cachet” when I hear someone say it that way. It’s hotel and hostel all over again, except for internet things.
I say hyuman, skedule and amatyur but there is nothing more guaranteed to make me livid than “an ‘erb” – I have heard Irish people do this because they think it’s “correct” or “fancy” recently and I. cannot. deal. The H is voiced, dangit. Erb Alpert would like a word with you.
It is also weird because for an old like me h-dropping was something that was often over-corrected (associations with cockney, maybe?) and now it seems to have resurged with the use of “an” before many h words. It’s like us Irish with either a dental t in our mid-atlantic drawl or a hyper-pronounced, almost punctuative t in other accents (typically combined with dropped hs in th combos. Tree t-imes is something I hear a lot for “three times”. All of this is endlessly fascinating to me.
“Cashay” for “cache” is not a standard American thing, I promise you. I’m an American and I say “cache” like “cash,” as does everyone else I know.
Having done software engineering for nigh on 30 years, I can promise you that it’s ‘cash’ wherever you go.
I can confirm that the Welsh do, in fact, pronounce human as yoo-man.
I think it developed (in the US) as faux-Britishism amongst the self-determined “upwardly mobile” of the mid-twentieth century. My dad learned this “style” of pronunciation, for one, and occasionally lapses back into it. He grew up in the Midwest and is the only one besides a few schoolteachers and librarians that I ever remember doing it in real life.
I had a German instructor in college who was trying to get us to pronounce the German /ch/ properly. He said, “It’s like the sound at the beginning of ‘humid’ or ‘huge.’ Unless you’re one of those people who says ‘yoo-min,’ and then you’re out of luck.” I had never even noticed the difference, but the class rapidly split into “hyoo-man” and “yoo-man” factions.
Roger Ebert was pretty far on the humor/yoomor spectrum. I’m pretty sure he said yooman being and I know he said an historic event.
“Shedule” is the English way.
I feel like we’ve missed the absolute most egregious and grating alternate pronunciation, which is ‘HAIR-essment” for harassment. I cringe.
Oh, I hate that ‘un. My husband says that, as well as “a-loo-MIN-ee-um” for aluminum.
I have a dear friend who grew up in Virginia. Having known her for 15 years now, I still don't know what she is talking about when she asks about "crowns". Until she says Crayola.
witness: yes in southern ohio/west virginia. Not in northern ohio.
I say "ca-SHEW". I never noticed until now.
Replying to myself 2 days later to add this: I wonder what you would see if you took an accent map showing people who say yoo-mor and yoo-man and superimposed it over areas where the Acadians settled after being kicked out of New France? It almost sounds like an assimilated francophone accent to me
Late response, but this Jersey girl (me) pronounces it like "bolth."
I used to work with a woman from Glasgow (could understand her perfectly, but always took me a minute or two to understand her mother at first) and she always said both. I would say we know what shedule means, but she'd always say shedule schedule 🙂 I don't know that my generation of bookstore employees would have a problem with shedule.
WEBSTER DESERVES SHADE. *opens parasol angrily*
When you're likely to be talking to actual French people, using the French pronunciation makes sense. I have beginner French, but once I moved to England it still took me a moment to reconcile 'crepps' with the foodstuff I'd grown up calling 'craypes'.
I have been pronouncing this wrong my whole life and never knew… [/Australian]