This week’s seminar speaker (German, but currently working in the US) made several interesting pronunciation mistakes. Most notably, he kept pronouncing the verb interpret so incorrectly that I did not even recognize it immediately. To understand what went wrong, we best look at the phonetic spelling. The are actually several pronunciations of interpret that are
At a physics conference I attended last week in Berlin, I came across yet another example of tricky distinctions to master. Several speakers confused the words monotonic or monotone with monotonous. While these words can be used interchangeably in some situations, only monotonic and monotone are correct in a mathematical context. The Oxford online dictionary
A python is not just a rather dangerous looking animal. It also gave the name to a very powerful and popular programming language — Python. Having heard different people pronounce Python in different ways, I decided to look up its pronunciation. This is what I found. In British English, Python is pronounced as [ˈpaɪθən], whereas
I find the incorrect pronunciation of the word parameter in English (and of Parameter in German) both annoying and fascinating. Remarkably, the mistake is made both by professionals who use it almost every day, and people who haven’t used the word parameter since they distanced themselves from mathematics after high school. The OED gives the
Are you an engineer? Even if not, you may want to find out about the correct pronunciation of the word engineer, because many people are not aware of it. The pronunciation is tricky because it differs from that of the word engine in terms of stress. While engine is usually pronounced correctly, namely as [ˈendʒɪn]
I recently came across a scientific paper in which the authors (who struggled with the English language quite a bit throughout the text) used “to testify” instead of “to test”. However, the meaning of these two verbs is very different. According to the OED, to testify means either 1. to make a statement that something
In my experience, many German native speakers (including myself) tend to mispronounce the noun worm, referring to a long thin creature with no bones or legs, that lives in soil. The mistake usually made is to pronounce worm as [wɔː(r)m], just like the word warm, listen here. However, the correct pronunciation of worm is [wɜː(r)m],
Below you can find a list of the most important chemical elements and their correct pronunciation. Elements which are often pronounced incorrectly are highlighted in red. I have previously written about iron and copper. Let me also remind you that in English, the letter y (which appears in elements such as Beryllium or Yttrium) is
My fellow German native speakers tend to make the mistake of translating the expression studieren gehen as to go studying. However, the correct English expression is to go to university. Moreover, in a previous post, I had pointed out that the noun study is not the English translation of Studium but instead means Studie. Therefore, a
Non-native speakers often struggle when they have to speak about powers. For example, the correct expression used for is ten to the power of three, although it is common to instead use the shorter form ten to the three. Similarly, is x to the (power of) seven. The exponents 2 and 3 (can you think