By using incorrect pronunciation, we internalise what we hear.
When I wrote my earlier comment, Nadir, I meant to remark upon the very apt sentence above, but I simply forgot to. The phenomenon that the sentence points to is as characteristic of the way (i.e., the unfortunate way) young people learn nowadays as a related but also contrary phenomenon was characteristic of learning in most of the prior thousand years and more. Since ever fewer people now seem to read for pleasure, instruction, or information—most seem to reflexively look to videos for everything—the tendency when writing is simply to try to spell out, more or less faithfully, the usually badly pronounced words and crude usages of the speakers one hears. That the result often tends more to the catastrophic than the successful should hardly come as a surprise.
The problem, of course, is that a large, flexible, responsive vocabulary and a comprehensive grasp of the tools available to one who has mastered the complexities of English grammar and semantics are not things that anyone ever acquired through listening to people talk, especially in the informal and familiar manner that everyone has come to expect in almost every contemporary situation, even funerals! For centuries it was common to hear students and young people mispronounce words that they had encountered only in reading but wanted to make part of their active vocabulary. (I was well into my thirties before I learned that I had been mispronouncing "Chimaera" since I first saw the word in the
Iliad in high school!) Such errors, of course, were praiseworthy in that they were the side effects of a laudable desire for self-betterment. Would that we encountered more of them today!
Topic: Spelling Challenge (Read 38739 times)