![]() In English, the most important syllables for listener comprehension are stressed. A similar phenomenon happens in ‘especially’, pronounced ‘specially’ - the first syllable is weak and is deleted. The weak second syllable in ‘probably’ is often deleted in speech. The pronunciation of ‘probably’ as ‘probly’ likely arises from a process called weak syllable elision or deletion. Importantly, you are unlikely to misunderstand what the speaker has asked for. ![]() If you hear someone ask for an espresso, it’s easy to see how you might mishear this to be nearer to a word you already know, and therefore adopt that pronunciation. The two are actually cognate words with similar origins, both meaning ‘press out’ or ‘obtain by squeezing’. This pronunciation probably arose by analogy with the word ‘express’. ‘Espresso’ is pronounced ‘expresso’ by many people, even though there is no ‘x’ in the spelling. Let’s have a look at some of the pronunciations people objected to in that survey. These changes could be the result of social interaction (‘other people say it like this’), mishearings, spelling pronunciations, phonetic processes or the influence of other languages, among other things.Ĭertainly, language change is inevitable, which is handy because it keeps us linguists in business and generates a lot of copy for newspapers and the like. How did we get to those pronunciations? Through a process of gradual, historical language change. The most extreme cases are probably family and place names: the surname Featherstonehaugh can be pronounced to sound like ‘Fanshaw’, for example, while Torpenhow in Cumbria is pronounced ‘Trepenna’. In fact, English is known for having some very irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences, so that argument does not always hold up. One criticism of speakers who pronounce nuclear (‘NU-cle-ar’) as ‘nucular’ is that it does not match the spelling.
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