Watch this interesting video about the proper pronunciation of a piece of cycling equipment: the pannier which, in its modern form, looks like saddle bags on a bicycle.
The video affirms a point I've made before: there's no avoiding prescriptivism. By the end of the video, the Merriam-Webster lexicographer does pick a side and say there is a proper, received American pronunciation for the word. I agree with his reasoning: pannier came into the English language centuries ago and had plenty of time to anglicize, i.e., to become fully a part of our lexicon and not remain a mere loan-word. Note, though, that the expert, while trying to sound as if he's a descriptivist ("Oh, that's interesting!"), ends up being a prescriptivist like everyone else. His form of prescriptivism comes down to "historical forces and the weight of wide usage make it so." A true descriptivist (and I don't think there are any) wouldn't take sides at all because he'd be committed to observation only.
What's the proper American-English pronunciation of Paris? Must we say it the French way? If not, then why insist that pannier be pronounced "pah-nyey"?
HaHa! I don't know why but this reminded me of an embarrassing moment in my working life. It was many years ago, back in the days when mid-level managers like me didn't have a PC on our desk. Instead I had a "dictaphone" that I would speak my correspondence into and a secretary would then transform the recording into a written document. Anyway, one day the secretary came to me and shyly said "I don't think you are pronouncing this word right..." That word was ascertain. Although I knew it's meaning and usage, I'd never actually HEARD the word in conversation. Hence, I read it as AS-certain. Yep, I was as certain as I could be about that. Hoo-boy.
ReplyDeleteI used to pronounce "miscegenation" incorrectly, and for the same reason: I'd never heard it in conversation before I got roundly corrected.
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