![]() ![]() ![]() Incidentally, I’m reliably informed that the French word for “espresso” is “expresso”. We don’t have a similar issue with the pronunciation of “cappuccino” or “macchiato” because we simply don’t have anything similar to those words in English. 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. Certainly, 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. 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. 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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