Everyone I know says “key-HOE-tik”.
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I recently visited Bogota and at passport control I was asked at what hotel I was staying. Being an insensitive gringo, I naturally said “Pestana” like an American. The agent was very annoyed and promptly corrected me with the proper pronunciation of the ñ.
Normally when I butcher the Spanish language like that the other party politely accepts my ignorance without complaint but this time I was quite rightly chastised.
All of these examples appear to predate standardized spelling and widespread literacy. I don’t see how similar changes in pronunciation could ever become widely accepted today.
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i usually believe that the local pronunciation is correct , however there are exceptions !! here in ohio , " moscow " is not ’ moss cow ’ as it should be , ’ trebien road ’ is pronounced ’ tree bine ’ instead of the obvious ’ tray be en ’ and , ’ versailles ’ is pronounced ’ ver sails ’ , instead of the again obvious ’ ver sigh ’ !! drives me insane and up the wall !! of course , it is a VERY short drive , eh ? ( and , i type ’ eh ’ in the canadian sense of ’ ey ’ , and do not use this in vocal communication )
The word funny originally meant “humorous”. The sense that you are using (meaning “odd”) originally came from regional sloppiness. I think you’d better choose your words more carefully if you’re trying to make the point that it’s not good to use newer forms of words.
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Excuse me, I’d like to ass you a few questions
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Well no. It actually mentions one such change in the article where your grandmother’s generation pronounced a set of words differently than we do.
My favorite example comes from Stephen Pinker.
“Nonstandard dialects are filled with double plurals such as oxens, dices, lices, and feets, and that is how we got the strangest plural in Standard English, children. Once it was childer, with the old plural suffix -er also seen in the German equivalent Kinder. But people stopped hearing it as a plural, and when they had to refer to more than one child, they added a second plural marker, -en. Today many rural and foreign speakers still don’t think of children as plural, and have added a third suffix, yielding the triply plural childrens.”
(Steven Pinker, Words and Rules, Basic Books, 1999)
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It’s one thing to say that language evolves naturally through mistakes, it’s another thing to simply surrender to it. It’s also perfectly natural for human beings to die in their late forties.
Standardization of language has immense benefits for a society, fragmentation can be devastating, especially for isolated or insular communities who now become heavily disadvantaged in their dealings with the majority and their ability to participate fully in their own society.
Lastly, and from personal experience growing up in a rural community in the deep south, “dialectization” almost always involves both reducing the available vocabulary of a language (and therefore reducing the space for thought), but also an increasing tendency to play with sound that results in words being harder and harder to discern, honestly for everyone involved, not just those outside of the dialect.
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Exactly; “aks” is wrong, at least for now.
You’re right about the spelling and pronunciation (and I’ve noticed the same thing happen to empanada → empañada), but the habanero pepper is not originally from Cuba, though it probably did reach the island before the Spanish so maybe there was a time when the pepper was closely associated with the city in people’s minds. (It’s originally from the Amazon.)
These days I’ll bet you won’t easily find habanero peppers in Habana. Not just because of the sorry state of Cuban agriculture, but because Cuban cuisine is generally on the mild side.
You Say Tomato, I say Tomato
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I’ve considered this to be a sort of a Survival of the Fittest for language. If you have a word that has unusual spelling or is awkward to say because it was imported from a different language, then it makes sense that over time the less confusing and easier to pronounce version would out-compete the traditional version, to the horror of language purists everywhere.
You even see this in geographically separated populations, where the languages pick up different random mutations and begin to diverge over time until it starts to become difficult for one population to understand what the other is saying.
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But those are penguins on that tape. Och my head is spinning…
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This book provides a pretty in depth look at how language has evolved… some sections are a bit convoluted, but overall a good read:
Growing up Canadian and hearing so many people, native English speakers all, have so much trouble trying to articulate every single letter of “Worcestershire” (sometimes adding a bunch of extra ones as a humorous way to underscore the difficulty), I eventually made a point of learning a more-or-less authentic way to refer to the sauce – “wusta-sheer sauce”. Eventually I dropped the “sheer”, resulting in “wustasauce”. Then, well, why bother with “sauce”? “Wusta” became my pronunciation of “Worcestershire sauce.”
Then I switched to Pickapeppa.
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Nobody I know ever uses the word quixotic in spoken (or written, for that matter) language, so it’s never an issue 
Except like @philipp said, toneless Chinese is not essentially proper. With the amount of work you’re putting into it, you couldn’t even tell the difference between 北京 (Běijīng, the city) and 背景 (bèijǐng, a backdrop). I bet you don’t call the country Zhōngguó, either.
And ḍ and d are not quite the same, so everyone I know is either saying it wrong in Riyāḍ or Baġdād. I guess the second was the example I should have used anyway, because I’ve never heard anyone try the ġ, which I understand is a bit more like a rolled R. I think; I don’t know Arabic very well.
But yeah, we’re saying them fine, if you ignore everything that’s different about those languages. I don’t know why someone who insisted everyone learn foreign pronunciation rules would be ok with that, though. You’re not just sticking to Spanish 'cause it’s easier, are you?
Because then you should excuse people who find Spanish orthography hard. That’s what I do; I’ve never once corrected somebody about what to call a llama. English spelling is difficult enough as it is.
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That’s easy. It’s Gaffer Tape!
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Unless it is used to patch a canoe… I believe that it acceptable to call it duck tape for such applications.
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