American English “invisible letters” include the t in pizza, the r in colonel, and the extra b in cummerbund. Maybe this is a Midwestern thing, but I recently noticed that I add an l to both: bolth. (My daughter does it too but not my son.)
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Discussion 13 comments
Not exactly the same, but has anyone else noticed that people tend to pronounce Ozempic with a hard B instead of a P?
Not exactly invisible, but the way better is pronounced with d's instead of t's. It's more like edda than bet-ter.
Still better than French.
(Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to include a very funny image that expresses this sentiment better than this text.)
I know French has the reputation for dropping half the word, but we actually do that a lot in conversational English, too. Really pay attention to how we blend words and phrases together when casually talking with someone.
https://xkcd.com/2942
My mother (who is mid-80's) has a ton of EXTRA letters in her pronunciation, hundrett (hundred), mehlk (milk), cousin't (cousin). I have no idea where her goofy pronunciation came from other than we are all from the mid-west (Wisconsin, go Badgers!).
FWIW, I pronounce very few of these invisible letters (I'm from NYC if that makes a difference), except for words with only a single agreed-upon pronunciation, like colonel or pizza.
A lot of the words mentioned in that thread surprise me, though. The other night on Jeopardy, a contestant pronounced it "ReesIE's Peanut Butter Cups" and I was like, "Wait, what?" Also "ClemPson"—not one I'd heard before.
Honestly, this just sounds like a really annoying NYT Connections category.....
A good friend pointed out that “orange juice” is rarely that, it’s usually “oranch juice”. Our theory was that the softer ending of orange paired with the start of juice was too inefficient to pronounce. The harder “ch” sound made it all easier.
That reminded me of the delightful spelling of food items in this meme:
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/1a/92/7f/1a927fb244fe9098ad41e88882fb7bdc.jpg
Both of my grandfathers (one from Iowa and one from Kentucky) used to say "warsh" for "wash". The federal goverment is in Warshington.
Oh yeah, this is a good one. I had relatives in MN and WI who said warsh.
In Oklahoma, you can hear "r" in wash, business is bidniss, and sometimes there's a little r in oil: the earl bidniss.
Sometimes you hear letters reversed. "Aks" for "ask". It's interesting how language is tied to race and status. Saying "aks" for "ask" is low status, but it's standard to say "iorn" for "iron". If you pronounce "iron" and "salmon" the way they're spelled, you won't sound like a native speaker.
My mom still adds an R to "Washington" (Warshington).
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