Ar(c)ticulation

[undyingking]

Yow! I just came about an inch away from a deeply unpleasant experience, namely: walking my face right into a spider's web full of struggling winged ants.

To take me away from the thought of that, how do you pronounce the name of the area around the North Pole, and (perhaps as importantly) how do you think it should correctly be pronounced?

[Poll #1228169]

This was prompted by this interesting article in languagelog , but please fill out the poll before reading it...

Comments

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

You don't have a radio button for me. Clearly it used to be ark-tik, but ar-tik is now so common as to have reached acceptability, in the same way that we presumbably used to pronounce the b in subtle but don't any more (Damian was just ranting about that the other day), only that change was a longer time ago and so is no longer questionable.

And now I've read the article. How interesting.

My February is Feb-you-ree, though I appreciate that ought to annoy me as much as nuke-you-lar, which makes me want to tear my hair out.

[mr-malk.livejournal.com]

Acceptability for whom? I must admit, I wasn't even aware that the pronunciation of arctic was up for debate until I read this. I don't know if "ar-tik" started as a regional dialect (which is fair enough) or just sloppiness (which is not), but I (as a proud and unreconstructed linguistic pedant) have no truck with it.

(Artic... truck... no? Oh never mind)!

Oddly, I had a similar incident with a primary school teacher about the pronunciation of February as the anecdote in the article. I used to say Feb-yooery, but was so stung by her criticism that I mended my ways immediately and for good.

Mind you, where I grew up, Saturday was routinely pronounced "Sat-duh" (and even the "t" was only a glottal stop), so in some ways it's a wonder I can speak English at all.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

My word - you're not an East Anglian, are you? We also had Sa'duh, or in fact more commonly Sa'dee.

[mr-malk.livejournal.com]

Nope. Appen ah were born in Cheshire, an' brung up in Yorkshire. Whitby to be precise.
I never had a trace of Yorkshire accent till I left though, and then got all patriotic about it and developed one. (Not that they speak with a proper Yorkshire accent in Whitby; being a port town, it very much has its own accent with traces of everything between Yorkshire and Scotland.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I say Feb-you-ree too, always have. And Wensday. No amount of telling-off by primary-school teachers worked.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

And Wensday.

Wait... you mean that's not correct?!

Surely it can't be Wed-nez-day?

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I was told to say Wed'ns-day.

[thecesspit.livejournal.com]

It's "Wensday", as sung by Sheffield Wednesday supporters all over the world.