Onomatopoeically difficult
19 September, 2008, 12:37
Try saying the following sentence out loud. 'The anaesthetist regularly uses a thesaurus to look up particularly interesting synonyms for remuneration for his phenomenally hospitable services.'
Pretty difficult, right? Well, there is no need to worry. Many of the above words were just placed on the list of the 20 most difficult English words to pronounce.
According to the study, carried out by British company Spinvox, 'phenomenon' claims first place as the most mispronounced English word. The letters 'M' and the 'N' regularly trip up most speakers. The tricky transition from the '-th' sound to the '-t' sound in the word 'anaesthetist' helped propel this word to second place on the list. Rounding out the top five were 'remuneration', 'ethnicity', and 'statistics'. Other words making the list were 'regularly' and 'particularly' whose transition from the second to last and the last syllables causes particular difficulty for speakers.
During the course of the study 3,000 participants were surveyed and over half admitted to correcting people who make these spoken errors. Moreover, a quarter of those surveyed believed that such mistakes showed a lack of intelligence and one-third said they regularly avoided using these words for fear of looking stupid.
Language is one of the most important and essential of cognitive functions. Since birth we learn our native language and after a few years are able to use it without paying the slightest attention to how we form our thoughts. Why, then, do we still make silly mistakes? Studies have been taking place for centuries in an attempt to understand the reason for this phenomenon.
The first known study goes as far back as the 8th century when Arab linguist Al-ki-sa-i wrote the book “Errors of the Populace.” While most of the book collected samples from non-native speakers of Arabic, it also studied how native speakers mispronounced, substituted or exchanged words and suggested that these mistakes were a result of historical changes.
At the end of the 19th century the Reverend William A. Spooner, Dean and President of New College, Oxford earned quite the reputation for his unintentional speech errors. His unfortunate habit helped to coin the term 'spoonerism', named after Reverend Spooner himself. He once said, “Work is the curse of the drinking classes”. While this very well might hold some truth, he meant to say “Drink is the curse of the working classes”. Poor Queen Victoria fell victim to his most famous of spoonerisms when he once referred to her as 'queer old dean'. Of course, what he meant to say was 'dear old Queen'.
These errors occur in number of other ways as well. Professor Victoria A. Fromkin of the University of California, Los Angeles writes that speech errors can take many different forms. 'Ad hoc' sometimes pronounced 'odd hack' is an example of vowel sounds being switched. 'Tend to turn out' becomes 'turn to tend out' where entire words are exchanged. Fromkin notes that these mistakes are not completely random. “It isn't just any word that is substituted, but one that is related in meaning.” she says. For example, the noun 'chair' will never be substituted for the preposition 'down'. This means that when we do make mistakes they are grammatically correct mistakes. That is to say, nouns are always substituted for nouns, prepositions for prepositions, adjectives for adjectives and so on. There are other examples when the word substituted is unrelated in meaning but similar in sound, 'persecuted' for 'prosecuted' as Fromkin points out. This shows us that we store words in our brain not only according to meaning but sound as well. So impressive is the mind's subconscious understanding of language that it never strays from the essential grammatical structure, even when a mistake is made.
And of course, let us not forget about Freud.
Everyone's favorite psychologist, Sigmund Freud, has another theory on the matter. Freud, who is most famous for his theories of the subconscious and how it uses repression as a defense mechanism, argues that such slips of the tongue, also known as Freudian Slips, are actually repressed thoughts or feelings. “A Freudian Slip is like saying one thing, but meaning your mother.” This famous pun gets right to the heart of Freud’s thoughts on speech errors. Freud would no doubt be proud of one slip up courtesy of U.S. President George W. Bush. "If you want to build a project and you can't get insurance because of what the terrorists have done for America, you can put the project aside.
However, no matter what Bush haters say, speech errors are a natural aspect of language and the brain, not an indicator of intelligence. The human thing to do would be to just simply laugh and move on.
Here is the complete list:
1. Phenomenon (fi-nom-uh-non)
2. Anaesthetist (uh-nes-thi-tist)
3. Remuneration (ri-myoo – nuh-reyshun)
4. Statistics (stuh-tis-tiks)
5. Ethnicity (eth-nis-i-tee)
6. Philosophical (fil-uh-sof-i-kuhl)
7. Provocatively (pruh-vok-uh-tiv)
8. Anonymous (uh-non-uh-muhs)
9. Thesaurus (thi-sawr-uhs)
10. Aluminium (al-yuh-min-ee-uhm)
11. Regularly (reg-yuh-ler-lee)
12. February (feb-roo-er-ee)
13. Particularly (per-tik-yuh-ler-lee)
14. Hereditary (huh-red-i-ter-ee)
15. Prioritising (prah-awr-i-tahyz-ing)
16. Pronunciation (pruh-nuhn-see-ey-shuhn)
17. Prejudice (prej-uh-dis)
18. Facilitate (fuh-sil-i-teyt)
19. Hospitable (hos-pi-tuh-buhl)
20. Onomatopoeia (on-uh-mat-uh-pee-uh)
From Telegraph.co.uk
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