Preserving our native Minnesotan dialect

I heard a sponsorship ad on MPR this week in which the announcer used the words “strong” and “strength” but pronounced them “shtrong” and “shtrength.” WTF!

american english pronunciation Blogger Bev Cohn has noticed the same thing (Item #2)  with her Five Commonly Mispronounced English Words or Groups of Letters. I’ve heard this on the east coast for a while but it was interesting to hear that it had, um, infected the MPR sponsorship dept.

Note Item #4 on her list about words ending in ‘th’ pronounced as ‘f.’  One of my sons pointed out to me a couple years ago that it was common for ‘Northfield’ to be pronounced ‘Norfield.’

Want to know how to correctly pronounce words like ‘mischievous’?

7 Comments

  1. Love the HowJSay pronunciation service. It seems to have a British bent, however.

    I’m still ticked about the time my daughter was marked wrong on a spelling test because the pronouncer said “mere” when she meant “mirror.” It has two syllables, folks, especially when pronouncing it for a spelling test!

    April 10, 2009
  2. Griff Wigley said:

    Penny, what can be inferred by how they pronounce roof and hoof?

    Robbie will be happy to know they like both ways of pronouncing downtown.

    April 10, 2009
  3. Griff Wigley said:

    You’re right, Penny. Howjsay is Brit. Their notes say:

    Pronunciation is in Standard British
    English, with World English
    alternatives. Pronunciations are
    researched from a variety of
    dictionaries, online forums and other
    sources.

    April 10, 2009
  4. “Hoof” I think gives it away as British, rhyming here with “spoof” rather than “woof” – unlike “roof,” where I think Americans are more split on the pronunciation, in my experience the shorter “hoof” is almost universal here. Having come to the U.S. at age five but having continued to live with my British parents thereafter, I still sometimes find myself surprised when I finally notice that Americans, or Midwesterners, or some subset thereof, pronounce something differently from how I have always thought of it. “Mirror” was one such…

    April 10, 2009
  5. I spent my early years in Texas. We had fences we called “bobbed wire”. It never occurred to me that they were really “barbed wire” until I was in California and someone ask me what I was talking about.

    April 10, 2009
  6. So now will you quit with the constant correcting!

    April 10, 2009

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