I don’t remember when I first heard someone say never to judge someone for mispronouncing a word because they probably learned that word from reading. But it has stuck with me.
Here’s the thing – English is hard. It’s, quite honestly, a mistake. It’s what happens when you take German people and French Latin people and force them to live together. English falls out. Accidentally.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard someone speak German or someone speaking French – but these two languages sound nothing alike. And they follow (very) different rules.
And every word in the English language follows a specific rule for things like conjugation or pluralization. The issue is that they don’t all follow the same rules. Because they don’t all descend from the same language. (In cases of silent letters, shifts in pronunciation after the invention of the printing press are to blame. Yes, we used to pronounce the ‘k’ in knight and knife.)
Certain English words follow those German rules and others follow the Latin rules. Not to mention all the words we’ve absorbed from other languages (referred to as ‘loan words’). (And English is one of the languages with the most words. That’s saying something given there are over seven thousand languages spoken in the world today.)
Take the word mouse (or louse – but not house). This word descended from Germanic roots, where the ‘ou’ becomes ‘i’ (due to what is called strong declension – they pluralize irregularly rather than by adding an -s or -es suffix). (House is an outlier because while it used to follow this pattern, it no longer does – it got ‘regularized’.) The same happens with goose (or foot or tooth) where the ‘oo’ becomes ‘ee’ in pluralization.
So what about moose? What happened there? The ‘ou’ doesn’t become an ‘i’ when pluralized. Actually, nothing happens to it when it’s pluralized…? Well, it’s a loan word – it’s roots are Indigenous (from several Indigenous languages). It doesn’t follow the Germanic rules because it’s not Germanic. It follows the rules of its Indigenous roots. Thus, moose is both singular and plural.
Shifts in pronunciations post printing press are also to blame for words not always sounding like they look. Not to mention dialects/accents with different pronunciation rules. I mean, look no further than American vs British English. There are words we spell differently, and many that we pronounce differently. And it’s the same language. (Well, sorta. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
All this to say – no wonder if we’ve only read a word and never heard it out loud that we might pronounce it incorrectly.
We should really consider why we find it charming when someone with a different accent pronounces a word in a unusual (to us) way, but when someone mispronounces it from only having read it, we don’t. Instead, we should be applauding the attempt.
Ami Maxine 