muckefuck | SSC: automaton

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SSC: automaton

I don't care how often in my life I hear "aw-TOM-a-tohn". Every time I think of this word, I will always have to overcome my urge to pronounce it "auto-MATE-on".

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For me, it's "AUTO-muh-ton".

I like this "auto-mutton" version!

because of automation? I'm strictly aw-TOM-a-tun (I'm never sure if that oh is really a short o of the kind I find so rare in US English).

OT, what about this whole first syllable stress vs second syllable stress business in UK/US English, with French loan words? It drives me nuts, and I'm selfishly teaching my kids to stress first syllables and use terminal consonants in, for instance, fillet and valet, but I know I'm setting them up for trouble later.

I'm fairly sure that deliberately teaching your children to sound like ponces is a punishable offence in this country. Though, on second though, perhaps not in New York.

interesting: of course you know what fiLAY and valAY sound like to British ears, but I didn't think it was symmetrical: would the British pronunciation of these words really have a social position in the US?

Maybe I'm doing them a disservice by teaching them short o and a distinct /t/ - but I think they'll need them when they travel.

Wha', you're no' teaching them to glo''alise their /t/ like their coun'erpar's in the Home Coun'ies? They'll end up bipondian ponces!

I have already condemned them to a life of travel: they need at least to be able to communicate properly in each place they'll go to regularly.

Social position, perhaps not, but it will sound very strange, and probably uneducated, to a lot of people. I was taught that we do NOT pronounce the final "t" in those words, any more than we say "BAL-leT".

I also flinch when I hear "GA-teau".

When I was sixteen, I was part of a US-based youth orchestra. We went to a music festival in Aberdeen. Sixty of us. We managed to bully our long-suffering minder/guide/saint into pronouncing "buffet" "buf-FAY", US style. After hearing sixty US teenagers scream "buf-FAY" at her for a solid week, she accent switched. We all cheered.

It never fails: every time I see a posting on usajobs for an OFFICE AUTOMATION ASSISTANT, I always read it as office automaton assistant. Which, after reading the position description, is basically accurate.

Unfortunately so far THIS was the only occasion in which I ever heard someone pronounce it:

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For people whose mother languages usually have a one-to-one letter to sound correspondence, knowing in advance how to pronounce these words is challenging
That's my biggest mistake in oral English.
This week, I had to look up how to pronounce "Midas" in English (Midas is related to the Insurance industry in the UK). I thought it was "MY-das" and it turned out to be "MI-das", for once!
Bearing in mind the important efforts from our governments to actually make people ignorant by making public education a real shit, it's no surprise not even native speakers have the tools to know how to pronounce words in their own language

I don't know what fool things those limeys say (that's

richardthinks' department), but on this side of the pond it's definitely "MY-duss".

Hey, I checked here:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/midas

Then I hope you're not reading their pronunciation symbols as IPA, because they're not. If you open the popup window on that page you'll find "\ī\ as i in ice". If it were meant to be "MI-das", it would be "\'mi-dəs\.

(I think Webster might've pioneered these symbols. In any case, I've been seeing them in American dictionaries my whole life. The OED, on the other hand, uses proper IPA.)

Go figure... I did so. I'm totally biased by my almost "one letter = one sound" rule from Spanish.
Thanks for the correction (one more!). I'm saying the name of the Greek king in a perfect pronunciation during my next meeting.

As for the fool limeys, the OED has: "Brit. /'mʌɪdəs/, U.S. /'maɪdəs/". (To me, with my weak form of Canadian raising, this makes the prescribed British pronunciation sound more like "might us".)

usually also MY-duss in Limeyland, although if you say ME-das nobody will goggle at you. Last time I looked, BTW, the long-standing consensus on Quixote had just broken down: after years of everyone calling him Kee-HO-tay suddenly some people started saying Kee-SHOTT, Kee-OT-a and all sorts of other things. Peculiar.

Hum, it's difficult for some people to realize that languages have evolutions and Spanish didn't set up the whole G/J/X thing until the late XVIII century :)

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