I heard that word pronounced “nego-see-ation” for the millionth time today (this time by an NPR newsreader) and I finally cracked. Yes, my descriptivist faith tells me if so many people say it it’s not “wrong,” it’s just an alternate pronunciation (in fact, I just checked Merriam-Webster’s latest Collegiate and I see it’s listed as an alternate), but I’ve hated it all my life and I just have to post about it and get it off my chest. I used to think it revealed a prissy fear of sounding colloquial by using the /sh/ sound, but now I’m wondering if it’s good old dissimilation, the -sh…sh- sequence producing -s…sh-. If so, I guess I’m slightly reconciled.
This has been the Languagehat Venting Hour, or rather Minute. Our regular programming will resume tomorrow. Thank you for your attention.
NEGOTIATION.
November 7, 2007 by 79 Comments
My wife says “nursery” with two syllables and an /sh/ sound in the middle. For some reason, it makes me cringe just a little. There’s no good reason for my reaction; I pronounce “grocery” the same way. But I say “nursery” with three syllables and an /s/. Maybe it’s the /rshr/ sandwich in the middle that I don’t like.
FWIW I am inclined to agree with your first view, that the /s/ pronunciation is a marker of “formal register”. I notice newsreaders here (Victoria, Australia) also like to say “controver-see-al”, where I would say “controvershal” (excuse my pseudo-phonetic renderings). In this case I suppose you could argue that they are bringing the pronunciation into line with the noun “controversy” for the sake of morphological transparency. But I think it’s just hypercorrection.
Jonathon: What the hell? You say “grosh’ry”? Is that common?
nomis: “Groshry” is very common in American English. If you have a word with at least three syllables, and one of the unaccented middle syllables has the “er” sound, and the syllable after that starts with a vowel sound, the “er” sound will merge with the following syllable.
Examples: every is pronounced ev-ry, restaurant is pronounced rest-rahnt, different is pronounced diff-rent. So grocery would be pronounced grow-sree.
But English doesn’t have any words or syllables that start with “sr”, so people might unconsciously find that strange. There are a lot of words and syllables starting with “shr”, so they might use that instead, making grow-shree.
Does anyone have an explanation for why the normal pronunciation of “equation” has a “zh” sound rather than “sh” like other “-tion” words? I actually do use the “sh” version, but only when it means the act of equating rather than a mathematical expression.
And don’t the people who say “nego-see-ation” also say “nego-see-ate”? If so, it’s not dissimilation. What about “ini-see-ation” and “appre-see-ation” and “asso-see-ation” and “pronun-see-ation”? I do say the last, and I’m not sure about the third.
I bet it is a kind of dissimilation, partly driven by an attempt to clearly enunciate the “i” — “negoshiashun” becomes “negoshashon” (“negoshate”, etc.) quite easily if you’re speaking fast, and there’s the added danger of a say-it-don’t-spray-it disaster for some. I also know people who say “appresiate” etc. and I’ve always assumed (there’s another one) this was why.
Somewhere in the past 5 or 10 years I picked up the habit of saying “fid’ty” instead of “fifty” for similar reasons.
This horrendous mispronunciation of “negotiate” began as a mistake during one frantic report from the scene by a BBC reporter during the Falklands war. Suddenly every American twit in front of a camera reading news off a teleprompter thought he’d sound more edumacated if he said it that way. It’s been like a burr on a wool sweater ever since.
I (Australian) used to say “groshries”. For some reason I’ve unconsciously slipped into “grosseries”. Spelling pronunciation?
strangeguitars: Interesting, thanks. I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard “groshry” before (I’m from NZ), although of course we do elide unstressed vowels. I’ll be listening out for it now.
‘Association’ and ‘pronunciation’ both normally have the /s/ sound, KCinDC, at least in my American dialect. ‘Pronunciation’ would sound especially weird with a /sh/ there- I would assume the person had a lisp.
I’ll quell desire to comment upon the US use of “alternate”.
This person living and working in London negoshiates for gro-series in gros’ry stores; but his negosiashuns for plants are in nur-series rather than nur’sries.
Well my guess is that groshry is a way of getting away from associations with “gross” – not a problem for UK speakers like me – for us gross means big and bad, normally (or a quantity), not disgusting.
My own manic cringe came listening to a recording of Eliot reading Prufrock: in “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”, “measured” is pronounced “mezzyured”. YUCK!
Shurely shome mishtake?
So will I, Sili. We don’t want to offend our host…
On altered sibilants, though, I call to the stand a very famous Australian philosopher, who (I think I read) is our most cited academic tout court. He always says easier with a /zh/ (as in pleasure). So much is this ingrained for him that he nearly always says easy with a /zh/, also. I find it endearing, and Sean-Conneric.
This business with syure (along with assyurance, etc.), syuit, and the rest is horribilis auditu, I agree. What about nature, though? Is the /tch/ replaced, here and there? We think also again of Pound, and kulchur.
I’d be interested to hear something about the incidence of strained-formal /bi’ond/ (‘=glottal stop), for beyond. Common enough in Australia, to the trained and attentive ear. Elsewhere?
I can appre-see-ate your discomfort!
The principle is sound, which is, despite your wilful descriptivism (shakes head sadly at such a bright young thing so sadly misguided), people who say iss-yoo and tiss-yoo are incredibly irritating and tend to wear bright clothes.
Noetica: I’ve heard /bi’ond/ before. One of my friends says it that way.
I had always assumed that the American tendency (and it seems more pronounced on the west coast than in the east) to pronounce ‘str’ as ‘shtr’ (so that ‘street’ is pronounced ‘shtreet’) was from German influences. Strangeguitars attributed the ‘sr’-to-‘shr’ transition as being due to the fact that no English words begin with ‘s-r’. There are plenty that begin with ‘s-t-r’, so his explanation doesn’t work here. I figured once you’re pronouncing ‘str’ as ‘shtr’, it’s only a hop and a skip (not even a jump) to changing ‘gros-ry’ into ‘grosh-ry’.
What about the cockney pronunciation of “stupid” as “shchupid”?
For that matter, is that really “shtreet”, or is it maybe “shchreet”, to go with pronouncing “truck” as “chruck” and “drum” and “jrum”?
And if the pronunciation came from German influence, why would it be more common on the West Coast?
I’m not sure where most of you come from, but I was raised in Boston where my grandmother taught us to speak in some sort of T.S.Eliot speak, most likely in the hopes that we would not be pahkin the cah.
I do know that my ex-mother in law, who worked in the Home Office, had a peculiar way of pronouncing “schedule”. Sounded like “shed’-ule”. She seemed fairly normal other than this. Not even my grandmother or Eliot went this far.
The problem with the German explanation is no one says “shmile” or “shtone”. I’d blame the ‘r’ itself for all this. Keep in mind the English ‘r’ is rather a weird sound, and there are several different ways of making it; I don’t know about other varieties of English, but in America the retroflex variant is popular, which involves curling the tip of the tongue back. For people with this ‘r’, other sounds before the ‘r’ tend to assimilate to it; hence “chree” for “tree”.
For me, at least, this is not an actual “ch” like in “cherry”, but a retroflex, aspirated ‘t’. Since this is also a weird sound, not otherwise in American English, that exists only in conjunction with the ‘r’, when people try to recreate it outside of that environment (“he says ‘tree’ with a ‘ch'”) I’d guess they’d use the independent sound most like it.
Same for ‘street’; the tongue’s being preemptively curled back for the ‘r’, and this wreaks (what else?) havoc on the sounds before it. It may be some people actually pronounce these sounds as normal “ch”s and “sh”s, but then I’d guess those sounds passed through that stage.
As for “negossiation”, the “fancy-pants” explanation might be right. Both “sh”s in that word were originally “s”s in middle English, and my distant, American impression of British English facts is that the old-style “sy” for “sh” sounds like high style, so I could see how that might be generalized to “‘s’ is better than ‘sh'”. Sort of like the pseudo-Greek “processeez”. I have no idea here though, just guessing.
An admitted drawback to the type of analysis above is it distracts you from the truly important part of language analysis, which, as Tom Wootton pointed out, is mocking people you don’t like.
Also, never heard “beyond” with a glottal stop. Is the “y” still pronounced?
Should I point out the /str/ -> /skr/ shift in AAVE? (I sometimes notice it in my own speech). For those of you who aren’t familiar with the shift, ‘street,’ ‘string,’ ‘stream,’ and ‘strong,’ for example, are pronounced ‘skreet,’ ‘skring,’ ‘skream,’ and ‘skrong’.
I would guess that this somehow mirrors the school-shul, sholde-skolde, shield-scild, sh-sk dynamic, bearing in mind the standard American ‘shtreet’ pronunciation Frank noticed.
madame I, it seems like your ex-mother-in-law had a normal British pronunciation of ‘schedule’. This is from etymonline.com:
“Modern spelling is 15c., in imitation of L[atin]; the modern British pronunciation (“shed-yul”) is from Fr[ench] influence, while the U.S. pronunciation (“sked-yul”) is from the practice of Webster, and is based on the Greek original.”
Apparently it was spelt/spelled ‘sedule’ or ‘cedule’ before that.
I don’t associate the elision of unstressed -er- with America; at least, I consider a three-syllable pronunciation of “interest” to be markedly American. As is three-syllable “medicine”. And one-syllable “it’d”.
Do Americans call that rapper Fiddy Cent or Fiffty Cent? In Ireland it’s always the latter.
Irish newsreaders seem to have been ordered lately to pronounce issue as “iss-yoo” intead of “ish-oo”. Oddly, there’s been no crackdown on the ones who rhyme says with days.
I had wondered about the /st/ > /sht/ thing before, and how it usually seemed to be Americans (?Californians) who said it that way. My completely unfounded guess was that it came about because of the collision of a laminal (flat of the tongue) /s/ and an apical (tip of the tongue) /t/. When I (BrE, RP) pronounce these words, the /t/ becomes laminal, but I wondered whether the assimilation could work the other way, giving an apical /s/ (like in Dutch), which sounds to others like a /sh/ sound.
Of course this is pure speculation, so please feel free to shout me down….
And don’t the people who say “nego-see-ation” also say “nego-see-ate”? If so, it’s not dissimilation.
Excellent point. And I’m glad to see I’m not the only one bothered by this.
The pronunciation of “street” as “shchreet” is an assimilation of the /s/ to the /t/, which has been palatalised because of the following /r/. The same thing happens, at least in NZE, with “stew”, which goes from “styoo” > “schoo” > “shchoo”.
Ah, Madame, the British and Australian pronunciation of schedule is indeed with /sh/, not /sk/. And schism is with /s/, not /sh/. But the young now have /sh/ in both.
Parvomagnus, in beyond when it is pronounced /be’ond/ there is nothing corresponding to the “y”. It is replaced by a glottal stop, when people unused to formal situations hypercorrect to avoid anything shamefully intervocalic that will give them away as perfectly competent natural speakers of their mother tongue. I am interested that Justin has heard it. I wonder if his friend does other things like that: over-use of thus (or even thusly); if-less conditionals (Had I the time, I would explain); whilst for while?
I meant: And schism is with /s/, not /sh/ or /sk/.
My mother used to pronounce shrimp as srimp, which I take to be a rather rare variant, but not unique. Not sure how she came by it, having come of age in the Shenandoah Valley. Sort of goes against the grain of str > shtr, which BTW is also characteristic of Hawaiian English.
Noetica, I’m surprised to hear that Australians pronounce schedule as /sh/ rather than /sk/. I’ll have to start listening for it. In NZ it is almost universally /sk/.
Nomis, I grew up in Australia, and “skedule” is how and all my friends pronounced it. The “shedule” pronunciation, for me, has the same mildly silly, unsuccessful-attempt-at-fancy-pantsery ring as “an history lesson” with the ‘h’ pronounced.
(Uh, no offence, Noetica…)
Noetica: That’s what I figured with ‘beyond’. Is it just that word, or is it some yod-dropping type stuff?
I sometimes use fronted subjunctive-relics in place of ‘if’ myself, for “be”, “have”, and modals. Never for “do” though; stuff like “did their Catullus walk that way” has always struck me as bizarre. Aside from that, I’d never thought of it as particularly British before.
The “shchreet” stuff’s still I think a slightly different case than “shchew”. I’m unware of any dialect of American English with a palatal ‘r’; Of the two main allophones, the alveolar approximant is articulated alveolarly, just like the /t/s and /s/s, and the retroflex approximant is, to quote wikipedia, “postalveolar without being palatalized”. So I’d guess the assimilation is to the retroflex part. I’m not sure what the distribution of the two variants is, but I think they’re both pretty wide spread.
Ha ha, Matt. No offence taken! I said: But the young now have /sh/ in both. But in fact, I should have said that they say /sk/ in both. Dammit, I made a mess of that post. You may have grown up in Australia: so did I, but I think I must have done so before you did. Schedule is still “corrected” to /sh/ in Australia, but the Americans have long ago won the tongues of the young.
As for an history lesson, that is more archaic than the much more common an historic occasion. The acceptability of this an depends on the stressing of the first syllable of the following h-word. Not just whether it bears the main stress or not: if it is stressed less than the second syllable, the an is more acceptable. So an historical account is more likely than an hysterectomy. That’s one consideration; another has to do with mere idiom, which works for an histor- in general, and against such nonce-formations as an hyster- and an humiliating defeat.
Matt, Noetica: the Oz situation is the same as NZ then. Only conservative speakers use /sh/ … although I should point out that I say it that way (my mother is a prescriptivist you see) and sure enough, anyone of my generation (30-35) mocks me mercilessly. But I enjoy my moments of half-hearted fancy-pantsery. I also use fronted subjunctives (e.g. “Had I known that, I never would have …”) but only in writing.
parvomagnus: I wasn’t suggesting that /r/ is palatal. In fact, the change of /t/ to /ch/ when preceding /r/ is not really palatisation at all (more like post-alveolo-affricativisation), and as you say is probably triggered by the retroflex feature of /r/.
I would agree that the changes to the /t/’s in ‘street’ and ‘stew’ are different things, triggered by following /r/ and /j/ (palatal glide) respectively, but the subsequent change of the preceding /s/ is the same in both cases, since both /t/’s end up as /ch/.
I hope that makes some kind of sense to someone.
There’s a sign marking a neighborhood in my town that declares it “An Historic Community.” Granted, the ‘h’ syllable is unstressed, but it still makes me want to egg their houses and/or curse the whole neighborhood.
Good example Joel! I find it very difficult to produce /shrimp/; it sounds like /skrimp(s)/ instead. I’d agree that /srimp/ is pretty rare, though.
Great discussion! I’m glad you all managed to amuse yourselves while I’ve been offline. (Router problems, don’t ask.) Anyway, I’m back and glad of all the enlightening (if sometimes confusing) comments!
Anyway, I’m back and glad of all the enlightening (if sometimes confusing) comments!
In the Rhode Island dialect (referred to locally as Vo Dilunese) confuse is pronounced cunFOOS, which I find charming.
Sounds like they’re trying to sound fancy. Or British, since it seems more “proper,” even if the word isn’t *supposed* to be pronounced that way.
Loan words usually become nativized in a language sooner or later. Even the French have turned Spanish mosquito into moustique and German Sauerkraut into choucrout.
British English “Nego-see-ay-sun” reflects more the original French pronunciation of the word just like the British pronunciations of the words picture and vase: “pik-tyoor” and “vahz.”
However, most Americans say “nego-shee-ayshun,” pik-cher,” and “vayz” which are actually a little more Anglo-Saxon than the British pronunciations.
But it’s not “British English ‘Nego-see-ay-sun'”—the traditional British pronunciation is with -sh-, just like the American. It’s a new development, due (apparently) to fear of sounding unposh.
Phew!
So I can stop trying to curl my tongue till it hurts. 🙂 Being a native speaker of southern (!) German, my alveolars are all laminal; I was only told a few years ago that the English ones are apical — I had noticed something sounded wrong about my /d t n/ when I spoke English, but I hadn’t figured out what. I seem to have mastered that by now, but I find an apical [s] much more difficult to get right. So I can stop trying. 🙂 🙂 🙂
Looks like your /r/ is always retroflex. With an alveolar one, /Sr/ is much easier than /sr/, IMHO.
Choucroute. Otherwise the t would be silent.
(BTW, what’s going on in the first syllable of this word? Analogy to chou-fleur?)
I was taught British English at school, and I wasn’t taught that pronunciation for picture. It was exclusively reserved for mature.
That “chou” is simply French for “cabbage,” no? Larousse Etymologique derives “choucroûte” and “sauerkraut” both from Alsacien sûrkrût, meaning herbe sure, which in fact doesn’t mean what we call sauerkraut at all, but what our kids call “sourgrass,” a kind of sorrel. Chou=cabbage; croûte=crust; I recall sauerkraut in the making as shredded cabbage with a crust of salt.
Well, if choucroûte is from Alsacien sûrkrût, then the chou isn’t from the French for “cabbage,” it’s just been remodeled to look like it.
the British pronunciations of the words picture and vase: “pik-tyoor”
No, picture is traditionally PIK-che(r)—Daniel Jones gives no other pronunciation. “PIK-tyoor” is a prissification.
Most of us in the UK say pik-cher. A few prissy arty types say pic-tyoor, but not many. Languagehat, everyone deserves a good rant every now and again. Enjoy the moment!
I don’t think my /r/ is always retroflex, David, but that I learned the word with the /k/ and so have to concentrate to avoid using it. I have alveolar /r/ in other places, but it was a valid guess.
Sauerkraut is acidic because the fermentation produces lactic acid, and named after that fact(sauer “acidic”). No?
(Same word as English sour. The point of intersection is sour milk — saure Milch, which is both rotten and acidic.)
i’m gonna go watch a filum.
Charles Shere: Chou=cabbage; croûte=crust; I recall sauerkraut in the making as shredded cabbage with a crust of salt.
Have you actually seen this? or just heard about it?
LH: Well, if choucroûte is from Alsacien sûrkrût, then the chou isn’t from the French for “cabbage,” it’s just been remodeled to look like it.
LH is right. CS’s derivation is a case of folk etymology.
The French name of this food is choucroute, without the circumflex which exists in croûte meaning ‘crust’. It is a traditional Alsatian preparation which is of course eaten throughout France nowadays but is not indigenous to other French regions. Also, in the days before refrigeration salt was used to preserve a variety of foods, none of which have the word croûte in their names, and choucroute as bought and consumed by the average French speaker does not come encrusted with salt. Furthermore, the word croûte without a qualifier or context calls to mind a hard crust of bread or pastry, not of salt.
For a purely French name of the preparation emphasizing the role of salt one might conceivably expect something like chou salé ‘salt cabbage’ or chou au sel ‘cabbage with salt’, but a compound chou + croûte does not seem well-formed (unless it was for some reason the name of a specific variety of cabbage), and this is typical of adaptations of foreign words such as Alsatian sûrkrût.
An example of such an adaptation in English is mushroom which is not from mush + room but from the Old French ancestor of the word mousseron, a type of mushroom.
Specifically St. George’s mushroom, Calocybe gambosa, which first appears in the UK on St. George’s Day, April 23. This mushroom grows in moss, the Old French for which was mo(u)sse, hence the name mousseron. Nowadays,mousse in French has shifted semantically to ‘foam, froth’, and the culinary mousse is an extension of this meaning. The PIE root is pretty widespread, and it’s not clear if the OF form is a Germanic borrowing or native or a semantic mixture (as the OED thinks). In Germanic the meaning was extended to ‘bog’, but this meaning has been lost from Standard English.
Are you saying moor is a Verner doublet?
No, moor is the o-grade of mere ‘pond’, where the /r/ is in the root (cf. Latin mare, Russian more). The Verner doublet, if that’s what it is, is mire, which however is a borrowing from Old Norse mýrr. However, Wikt says the two were already distinct at the PGmc level: *musą > moss vs. *miuzijō > mire.
I too have heard the word “negotiation” pronounced many times with the s sound. It’s usually used by high diplomats and the like and “highly educated” people. It does sound more educated and I think if I tried to use it it wouldn’t come out right, even though I believe I’m educated as to formal schooling and life experience.
John Wells had a blog post on negotiate; at the time the Australian PM was being mocked for her “nego-see-ate”. (His link to the video is broken, but other copies can be found by searching for “Julia Gillard negotiate song”). John said: “I think we would probably all agree that the s form has overtones of exaggerated formality, perhaps prissiness. In some cases I suspect it may also be a spelling pronunciation.” But a couple of commenters disagreed!
I don’t understand how pronouncing t as /s/ can be a spelling pronunciation. Maybe for people who think the word is spelled negociate?
It very well could have been. Enunciate is < L enuntiatus, for example, and is pronounced with /s/. This is an example of the first palatalization of Latinate English words, whereas negotiate shows the third palatalization in action.
Rereading the John Wells post, I’m not quite sure whether he means “some cases of nego[s]iate”, or whether he’s thinking ahead to the next sentence and means “some cases of analogous words”, such as appreciate or oceanic, that have c in the spelling.
languagehat’s original post: “I just checked Merriam-Webster’s latest Collegiate and I see it’s listed as an alternate”
Look closely: in MW’s 11th Collegiate (2003), the “-sē-” option is preceded by the cryptic warning symbol ÷ , which marks “a pronunciation variant that occurs in educated speech but that is considered by some to be unacceptable” — the same symbol they put on “nucular”. So they’re aware that you’re far from alone. The ÷ was added to the word in the 10th Collegiate; the previous edition showed the syllable as “-s(h)ē-”. Maybe they started to notice people complaining? The current online version, freed from space constraints, replaces the symbol with nonstandard.
Ben Yagoda at Not One-Off Britishisms also said “I can’t stand that pronunciation”, when polling his readers to find out if it was more common in the UK. Theresa May was criticized for this in youtube videos as well. I consider it incorrect myself, but comments like “posh dinguses, political lemmings, frighteningly symptomatic” make me roll my eyes. It’s not *that* significant.
It’s not *that* significant.
Quite right, of course, but people love using insignificant linguistic preferences to bash political opponents with (cf. “nucular”). And thanks very much for the M-W clarifications!
It very well could have been: and appreciation could have been appretiation. Both have -ti- in the Latin source (nec + ōtium, ad- + pretium), and both have a history of competition between French spellings with -ci- and Latin spellings with -ti-. It seems to be random which one won out in each case.
There are some misinformed guesses around the internet on just how old-fashioned nego[s]iation is, with some claiming that it’s period-appropriate for a Regency drama, or even Downton Abbey. Nope, this change started before Shakespeare, and finished sometime in the 1600s; negotiation is transcribed “ne-go-she-a-shun” in Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of 1791.
In 19th century you’d expect some code-switching from educated people (but hardly French pronunciation of already adapted words).
Cf. Russian “to speak with prononce-om” where -om is Russian Instrumental (expected after with) and prononce- is said with “prononce”, that is, with a nasal o.
Apparently describes the mode of code-switching (or borrowing, or just speaking French) which preserves French phonology.
I cited Walker as an authority for “ne-go-she-a-shun” as of 1791, but he’s a huge cheerleader for palatalization, so maybe he could have been exaggerating how complete it was, or maybe that particular palatalization was never quite stable? Here’s an English teacher foaming at the mouth in 1869 about politicians:
(I’m not sure that “nego-shay-shun” would be very noticeable in connected, rapid speech; it seems like a normal compression of “nego-she-ashun”.) The raging tone continues throughout the book, earning a snarktastic review in the Saturday Review:
Bravo, anonymous reviewer! There were journalists who could think like linguists and recognize poppycock, even then.
Question for languagehat and anyone else who objects to “nego-see-ation”: Are you also bothered by emaciated with /s/? That’s how I say it, do I need to change it now? Dictionaries say… huh… some say /si/ only, some say /ʃi/ only, some have both, in either order. There’s some tilt toward “ema-shee-ated” in American dictionaries and “ema-see-ated” in British ones; Youglish has both in use from American speakers, and a clear dominance of “ema-see-ated” from British ones.
There’s a similar pattern for glaciated (which I can’t pronounce without getting stuck in second-guessing), with even more acceptance of the /si/ pronunciation. That must be influenced by glacier, where BrE retains the French /si/ as the dominant pronunciation, maybe because it’s a more recent borrowing (1700s)?
Are you also bothered by emaciated with /s/?
No. That’s how I say it too (mostly, I think…). And glaciated I say with /ʃi/, doubtless because of glacier. I am not a believer in consistency in these things.
Re glacier and presumably glaciation I think the decisive feature is shortness of the first vowel in Br/Ir. E. I am fairly certain that, as in Am.E., the word glacier has two syllables, unlike the word glassier, therefore the consonant c could end up being pronounced the same as in Am. E.
I am fairly certain that, as in Am.E., the word glacier has two syllables, unlike the word glassier,
For me ‘glacier’ has three syllables. I seem to vary unpredictably whether a short or long first vowel. (That’ll be BrE upbringing fighting fighting French-Alps first seeing them fighting hearing the word recently mostly on American documentaries.)
How do you pronounce ‘glazier’?
I don’t know that I’ve ever said it, but my instinct would dictate /ˈɡleɪʒəɹ/, and I see that’s what M-W lists first.
@AntC
I am rethinking this, but are your 3 syllables glass + [GLOTTAL] + yer or glass + ee + yer (so identical to the word glassier)? For glazier it is definitely a long vowel for me, so something like glaze+ yer (with the same two possibilities for extending to 3 syllables).
For me “glacier” can’t be anything other than two syllables, while (maybe I should say “whilst,” for exoticism points?) “glazier” could be either two or kinda/sorta three (maybe two and a half?). But that’s only because I have had life-to-date minimal occasion to saying it out loud and thus settling into a default pronunciation.
glacier … shortness of the first vowel
i.e., the dominant BrE pronunciation of the first vowel is TRAP, not BATH (vs. AmE FACE); since glass is BATH, “glass…” might be a confusing way of representing the start of glacier.
The Longman Dictionary represents the ending of (BrE) glacier with the tie i‿ə indicating “possible compression of adjacent syllables” in fast or casual speech (whereas glassier would never be compressed). Most other British dictionaries just put /iə/, assuming native speakers can infer when syllables can be compressed. Search the web, you can find plenty of videos with British speakers saying glacier slowly enough to have three syllables. Google also shows that glassier is a common misspelling of glacier, suggesting they can be homophones for those who don’t have the TRAP-BATH split.
John Wells transcribes his own glacier as either /ɡlæsiə/ or /ɡlæsjər/ (followed by a vowel), and when questioned on it, replied “variable compression”. Another commenter remarked that his own glacier was the same as glassier.
I say “glaysher”, having heard it many times. I have never heard “glayzher”. I have no idea how glazier is pronounced. If pressed, I’d think /glǝˈzir/, give up, and say “glass guy”.
An Australian professor I had would say /ˈglei̯siǝ/. (Not sure if he had a final [ɹ] in this context.)
@PP, I’m greatly disappointed wiktionary doesn’t even give a BrE pronunciation. And it’s pronunciation /ɡla.sje/ for French looks improbable to me. (They could listen to their own sound file. Or does /j/ for their French entries have a different value vs for their English entries?) from Savoy dialect glacière “moving mass of ice,” says etymonline — which must surely have three syllables! (Not the same as glacé cherries.)
(so identical to the word glassier)?
Definitely not that — which has the BATH vowel first, and a definite -yer because it’s a comparative. For me ‘glacier’ has final schwa.
@ktschwartz the dominant BrE pronunciation of the first vowel is TRAP, not BATH … [for the second/third] Most other British dictionaries just put /iə/, assuming native speakers can infer when syllables can be compressed.
Thank you. Yes highly likely that I compress to two-and-a-half syllables in rapid speech.
Y: glacier=“glaysher” is the only option for Americans; the puzzle is that even though I have no doubt about “glaysher”, I tend to say “glay-see-ation” anyway, but I vacillate on it.
/ˈɡleɪsɪə/ is one of the minority options shown by the OED in BrE, and can be heard on the web as well, so I think it’s unsurprising from an Australian. A 1981 Macquarie dictionary actually lists /ˈɡleɪsɪə/ first, /ˈɡlæsɪə/ second.
AntC: which word are you talking about where Wiktionary doesn’t give a BrE pronunciation? For glacier they have RP, US, and Canada. Anyway, I wouldn’t expect a careful description of /jə/-/i.ə/ variation in Wiktionary.
(I said “glassier would never be compressed”, but that was just my own intuition. I don’t think *I* would compress it, because the -i- and the -er are different morphemes, but the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary shows that with a tie as well. You never know!)
It is a very questionable practice to indicate syllable boundaries in a phonemic transcription of French, but [glasje] is absolutely how it’s pronounced, fitting the spelling exactly.