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
Given the recent political developments in Europe, the word refugee is now used much more often by non-native speakers. Because most of them are not aware of the correct pronunciation, let me mention it here. The most obvious mistake is to stress the word on the first syllable. Instead, refugee is stressed on the last
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
Let me share some of the most interesting English blunders I encountered during a recent physics conference in Germany. Mistake 1: Several German native speakers made the mistake of pronouncing the th in thermal and thermodynamic as a t rather than a θ. Since most of them pronounced other occurrences of th correctly, I suspect
Certain English words and expressions are commonly used also by speakers of other languages. Know-how is a term that can be heard in many business meetings, while comeback and come on are often used in sports. Similar to the case of no comment, see this post, there is often confusion about the correct English pronunciation.
Have you noticed that the phrase “no comment” is now also used in other languages, but often pronounced in a strange way? The correct pronunciation of comment is [ˈkɒment] (British English) or [ˈkɑːment] (American English). A rather common mistake (especially among German speakers) is to stress comment on the second syllable, similar to the words
Abbreviations such as LCD, HTML, or USA are commonly used in many languages. The correct pronunciation of such abbreviations is a two-step process. First, you have to be able to correctly pronounce each of the letters. As discussed in a previous post, this task can be more daunting than you would expect even for advanced
Here is an interesting false friend for those trying to learn German. The English word stress has a number of different meanings. According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, the word is used for, for example, mental pressure (as in stress management), physical pressure (for example, a stress fracture), emphasis (the boss lays great stress on