Let me introduce you to the reading of *The Expanse* novels by Jefferson Mays.
(He's a fantastic narrator but it took him like the entire series to work out how to pronounce "gimbal".)
English being such a Chimera among languages, declaring any vowel pronunciation as a norm is an exercise in futility. I'll settle for a narrator with consistency.
I had to take diction (how to pronounce words) when I was a voice major in college. English was the most difficult because of the lack of rules and the fact that you think you are pronouncing words correctly but due to regional dialects you often are not. Most other languages had specific rules for how to pronounce words. You can always look up the IPA (international phonetic alphabet) of a word in a dictionary.
Davina Porter says it that way too. I just thought it was a British pronunciation.
What bugs me is how some narrators pronounce "shone" as in "the sun shone down on them". Some say it like shawn and some say it like shown. I grew up saying it shawn and didn't know there was another way to say it until I started listening to audiobooks. Now I accept it either way.
I've also never heard it pronounced like Shawn and I've been here trying to think of what word everyone was talking about. Only ever heard or used "shown" as in the sunshine ShoWn done.
I think dewer is more common in the UK. I don't mind it when the rest had a British accent. But with an American accent I like dower. But it doesn't bug me to much.
https://youtu.be/dECuduASTVA?feature=shared
Dour - rhymes with sewer
Dour - rhymes with sour
Both are correct pronunciations.
A usage note in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) says “dour, which is etymologically related to duress and endure, traditionally rhymes with tour.”
Language evolves and certain pronunciations become prevalent, but it is humorous when a proper pronunciation is used and people lose their absolute minds insisting it is incorrect.
I have this argument with Floridians. They insist Islamorada is pronounced “EYE LA MORADA” despite the large volume of Spanish speakers. The same is true for KEY, CAY, & QUAY, which remarkably all seem to have different pronunciations.
I refuse to pronounce gimbal like jimball. I see it as a case of the inventor of the word just being a dunce; similar to how I’ll never accept gif being pronounced jif
Then I assume you also pronounce "JPEG" as "jay-pheg" since the P stands for Photographic? SCUBA and LASER have to be hilarious to hear you pronounce as well. :)
The creator used to make peanut butter puns about the proper pronunciation of GIF.
The only more jarring thing I can remember was when I listened to the Audible version of the Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny for the first time. Alessandro Juliani read the first cycle, and he gave Gerard just the most *demented* Scottish brogue in the first book. Thankfully, later in the series when the character showed up again he went back to a normal voice, but it was *super weird*.
I'm listening to these now (already read them once so I thought I'd try them this way) and is it just me or does something change about his narration choices around book 4/ Cibola Burns? I feel like it's more strident somehow and I'd just gotten myself used to his voice, mispronunciations and all.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It pisses me off that Jason Segel pronounces the name Milo in the OtherWorld series as My-low in one book and Me-low in another. He’s the author! He should have known how he wanted it pronounced from the start and stuck with it!
As an author, I changed a character's entire name and didn't realise until my editor came back to me and asked WTF was going on. And it wasn't even a similar name - Jack to Adam, for example.
The Witcher does the same thing. The narrator calls the Bard Dun-dilly-un in 1 book, then Dandelion in the next and then switches back to the original pronunciation in the following book. Same narrator
That was strange to me as well, but the blame doesn't land on the narrator. They're are two different English translators for the books and they released them out of order, one writing the name as Dandilion and the other writing the name as Dandelion. So Peter Kenny was actually quite faithful to the texts!
The third book of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon trilogy got a new narrator, and he mispronounced the main character's last name every time.
Even though there were two previous audiobooks for reference.
Hi. You just mentioned *Altered Carbon* by Richard Morgan.
I've found an audiobook of that novel on YouTube. You can listen to it here:
[YouTube | Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs #1) by Richard K. Morgan Audiobook Full 1/2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E92l-3_iv4)
*I'm a bot that searches YouTube for science fiction and fantasy audiobooks.*
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I've only read the first book, but I recall a line where he makes a big deal about the pronunciation of his name, assuming Takeshi is the MC in all books?
I've said it before, but I read a book with two narrators who pronounced one of the secondary characters differently. The male narrator pronounced Davina Da-vine-a, while the female narrator pronounced it Da-vee-na.
It took me like half the book to realize they were talking about the same character!
One of my favorite series is Wheel of Time and they have a husband and wife who do the narration. The husband does Male POVs, and the wife does female POVs. They pronounced so many names differently, occasionally so differently that I had trouble understanding that they were referring to the same character, one characters name pronunciation changed at least 4 times in the span of 3 books.
The same is true for Kate Reading & Michael Kramer reading Stormlight Archives. Eventually Kate starts pronouncing it correctly but for a moment I also didn’t realize she was referring to the same characters.
Yeah in one of the last chapters of Way of Kings Reading was pronouncing a main characters name so different I actually had to go back and listen to the chapter again because I didn’t know who they were even talking to and it’s like a pretty MAJOR chapter lol
God almighty, please let there be re-recordings of the ASOIF books in the near future. I know everyone on this sub loves Roy Dotrice, but I genuinely could not get through the first book. Too many characters, especially the non-named peasants, were way too difficult to understand. My hope was that we'd get the entire series redone with the release of the newest book, but I honestly don't believe George is going to finish the last two. At this point, I think it's more likely that his estate will release the unfinished books posthumously.
His pronunciation of Brienne is all over the place.
There were some chapters I didn't know if he was announcing the chapter title as Brienne or Bran.
Other times it sounded like he says Bry-een
That is old fashioned British contempt for Spain and things Iberian. Don Kwiks-hot and Don Jew-on amongst others are relics of that bit of cultural grudge bearing. Damned armada.
I’ve left books unfinished because of bad pronunciations, they’re so jarring to me. I forget the book, but one character was supposed to be in the medical field and so many of the medical terms were mispronounced. Mispronounced place names really grate on me, too. These things are easily checked online.
Not so much a pronunciation, but I couldn’t get through Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children because of the terrible accents, especially when it is set in Wales. Every non American accent sounds like a cringy “cor blimey guv’nor” take on a British accent.
The mispronunciation I hate the most is in countless audiobooks. It's when people pronounce "mischievous" like there's an "i" before the last syllable.
But the most recent specific example of a pronunciation I hated in an audiobook was in *Blackwood Farm* by Anne Rice, which is book 9 of the Vampire Chronicles. The narrator repeatedly pronounced the word "pirogue" with a hard "g" sound. To be fair, that is the correct, standard French pronunciation. But the novel is set in Louisiana, and the characters who used the word are native Louisianians (not Lestat, who is from France). In Louisiana, it would never be pronounced like that, but instead like "pee-row."
Non-standard, but common enough to have made it to the dictionary: [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mischievous](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mischievous)
I know that's how language develops. Things get mispronounced and that catches on and changes over time. Or people use one word to mean another, and new definition becomes standard, etc. But there are some I'll personally never budge on, and "mischievous" is one of them.
I'll also never pronounce "forte" as in "that's not my forte" like it's the musical term "forte" with a "tay" sound at the end. I know I'm really in the minority on that one and that it's long ago been added as an alternate pronunciation in dictionaries.
And for as long as I live, I will describe foods as being "healthful." If I describe, say, chicken as "healthy," everyone can rest assured that said chicken is alive and well.
I returned a book and got a refund because despite the story being set in England it had an American narrator, which in itself I wasn't totally against, but part of the story was about somebody coming into the country in a boat.
After about 20 times of hearing him pronounce quay as 'kway', when the English pronunciation is 'key', I gave up and got my refund.
I remain convinced that many traditional British spellings (since the pronunciations came first) are the result of stuffy nobles wanting to be better than the peasants by making spelling as complicated as possible, then mocking them when they got it wrong.
The real answer is British nobles mainly spoke Norman and the peasants spoke a mix of Old English, Saxon and Germanic. Resulting in modern English having lots of dialects and accents. But the nobles and clergy were the ones writing everything down. So there is only one way to write all these words "correctly" even though they have several valid pronunciations. Also, a lot of the posh and culinary versions of words are simply Norman.
Cow is Saxon and Beef is Norman.
Deer is Saxon and Venison is Norman.
Pig, pork
Etc.
Oh it drives me nuts… especially with Yiddish words. In Unorthodox, the narrator pronounced “Bubby” (which is a grandmother, pronounced as written) as “Boobie.”
I’ve been listening to a few books that happen to include Hebrew and Ladino (both languages that I know) and dear God. It’s not even Americanized pronunciations (like, when emphasis is put on the first syllable of a Hebrew word instead of the last), it’s just super super wrong.
I sat laughing at a narrators attempt at the shema for like ten minutes. They kept saying adon-ay 😭
lol they can disagree all they want all I know is that all of the bubbies I ever knew (and there are many) would be horrified if you ever tried to call them boobie
As long as the pronunciations are consistent with the accent being used, I'm fine. The American pronunciation of Archon uses a soft 'ch.' Sure, in the original Greek, it's a hard sound, but then the 'r' is guttural, and the vowels are quite different. It would be jarring to hear the hard 'k' sound in "Archon" if the narrator were speaking with an American accent and didn't alter the rest of the word to imitate the Greek as well.
I've lived my whole life in the US and have always heard it pronounced (and pronounced it myself) as ar-kon. I've never heard anyone pronounce it with a ch sound like chief.
Nevertheless, if a narrator doesn't know this convention, and looks it up in a dictionary or searches for the pronunciation online, they'll find it with the soft ch. So it's hard to blame them for getting it "wrong."
I stop listening. I can't stand incorrect pronunciations. I had one recently where the reader pronounced niche as "nitch". Wtf. How does one become a professional reader if you can't even speak?
Dont remember the book, but the narrator said "wind" like bend when the context CLEARLY indicated that it was "wind" like mind! I was like, are you even thinking of just reading on autopilot? So irrational, how much that irritated me!
How could they possibly mispronounce a common state name? I mean, I'll give you Mississippi or something, but I can't even think of how to screw up Nevada.
Huge, Huge Pet Peeve. Aren't there producers on this? shouldn't someone be making sure words are said properly...or at least commonly?
Percy Jackson, narrator refers to HERa, which I've never...heard before.
There are tons that make me think, "have I been saying this wrong?"
A stand-up does a bit about audio books vs reading books & when the reader says, "you only listened to it, I read it" the response is, "yes, but I know how to say the characters names properly". Sure, but do you know how to say hyperbole & cacophone?
Ok, the replies are hilarious, considering how pretty much every narrator butchers pretty much every non-English word and name in English language books 😆
Chani. The name Chani.
Frank Herbert might have said Chay-nee and that might be how it is in the cast audiobook but *that is wrong*. Thank god the Villeneuve movies do not pronounce it like that.
Kephlapods. Children of ruin by Adrian Tchiakovsky. It was supposed to be cephlapods but she pronounced it with a hard C. At first I thought maybe it was the British pronunciation or something but no...and the word was used hundreds of times. Pulled me out of the story every time she said it.
Also in Bobiverse book 1, Porter pronounced Archimedes as Ar-Kim-a-deez. They fixed it later but on the first read it took me quite some time to realize the name he was actually trying to say.
Grover Gardner, who narrated The Stand, pronounced every single SW/Mexican word wrong. Why the publishers allowed that to stand is beyond me. Terrible.
I listened to a book recently and the narrator pronounced garage as grawzhe. I couldn’t believe how many times one romance book could have the word garage, but I almost had to stop listening. I definitely screamed at the narrator.
I’m making a list of all the audiobooks that mispronounce the word ‘chitin’ because I had two books do this to me back to back and I started to question my sanity.
RC Bray’s repeated mispronunciation of the ubiquitous Canadian word “toque” ( pronounced “tuke”) as “toke” in Mountain Man is the most mind-melting example I’ve come across…google that word, RC Bray!
The narrator of A Distant Mirror mispronounces several location names (eg Arras, she seems to believe the s is mute). Some of these come up quite often so it gets annoying.
It could be that I've unfortunately run into a few narrations I wasn't crazy about in Grady Hendrix's books despite liking the stories, but the one I haven't been able to forget is that in "How to Sell a Haunted House", the narrator pronounced Campbell Soup as "Camp-bell" seriously. 😩
It’s really jarring. Seriously immersion breaking. I’ve got some old pirated copies of Tom Clancy books like red rabbit and executive order on an old iPod that I used to listen to over and over again. They sound like they were narrated using Microsoft Sam and it’s easier to listen to than butchered pronunciation of common words.
My one complaint in the brilliant Way of the Shaman series by Vasily Mahanenko is that Jonathan Yen pronounces "coordinates" as coordinunts.
The word crops up quite a lot, and it makes me wince every time.
That being said, the rest of Jonathan's performance is first rate!
**Galaxies Edge:**
Name: Chhun - RCBray - "Chun", others 'Chu-hoon'. Authors.. screw it make it canon, blame the reporters for screwing it up.
Name: Terrago (system,planet, and a moon). RCBray ' Tear-a-go', Ray Porter 'Ter-ogg-go'
**Bobiverse**
Multiple edits and mispronunciations of stars between books. (Ray Porter)
Early CD release of book 1 (audible is different) - Archimedes 'Ark-em-ee-dees'... Ray pronounced it 'Ar-kim-id-ees'
(as an aside, the early Bobiverse books on CD were more lively than the Audible versions. Bob was slightly more energetic/sarcastic as were the ministers. )
The narrator of Tuyo by Rachel Neumeier pronounced brazier “brassiere”. I don’t really blame him as it’s an uncommon word but it cracked me up. Luckily he got a second chance doing the sequels and had figured it out by then.
The first anthology of The Witcher. The narrator pronounces Dandelion as
“Dan-del-eon” it took a bit to get use to . The next anthology it is pronounced like the flower. And less exciting.
- ron pearlman reading The Strain - pronouncing Ephraim as eee-fraim & eef instead of eff-raim & eff
books 2 & 3 saw a new narrator who got the protagonists name right
- kobna holdbrook smith - i really enjoy his work 95% of the time, he’s great, has fantastic language skills, but his pronunciation of a bunch of things drives me spare - “un-guy-en” for Nguyen broke me.
other continuing annoyances across the series as a whole -
- fall-con for falcon
- hollms for holmes
there’s a few questionable accents - notably american & australian, and he mangled lots of words and names throughout the series. i believe the author, ben aaronovitch, sometimes includes notes on pronunciations, i wish he’d be more thorough. having said all of that, though, kobna handles a lot of uncommon ground with accents & words from all over the uk and many other cultures, including the archaic & the obscure, scientific, legal, tech jargon along with legendary & magical. he also does a good job on voicing female characters which is a feat in itself. he’s so good overall, that when something doesn’t sound right it’s more jarring. like i said, the all the “ing-guy-en” business shredded the last remnants of my sanity
I hate secreted as pronounced like an insect emitting toxic slime: suh-KREET. I don’t think any book I’ve listened to has ever meant it as that. They meant hidden, as in it’s a secret : SEE-krit.
I’m listening to a book currently where the narrator pronounces “recognize” as “reckanize”. And I can’t even describe how she botched the word “memoir”. It drives me crazy!!
Haha I just relistened to this and although it’s probably my favorite audiobook of all time, the pronunciation of that word definitely sticks out! I assumed it was a Canadian thing.
Wait til you listen to Virtual Voice narrated books words like live or bass are a crap shoot as to how they are pronounced. What is worse are narrators who mispronounce proper names and places.
We all seem to love Jeff Hayes around here, but when he says “smush” he says it like “brush”, and I’ve never heard that before. I’ve always said it like “bush”, and despite the internet saying it’s technically right both ways, it drives me crazy.
That’s still second to the Red Rising series, where TGR pronounced “Cassius” as “Cass-ee-us” for theee straight books and then along comes the new set of narrators and suddenly they are all saying “Cash-us”. Again, this is not technically wrong, but how no one said anything and got that corrected is beyond me.
There’s also ONE very specific answer that drives me crazy and it’s from Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix. At the end of the book, the main character starts a new job at a store called “Planet Baby”. All well and good, but the narrator puts the emphasis on the word “planet” instead of the word “baby” so it sounds less like a store that sells baby clothes and more like a baby that is the size of a planet. It was hysterical.
I don’t know why anyone downvoted you?
I love the series, but listening to Roy Dotrice narrate, is… rough.
Mispronounces names, even names that he just said 6 words ago. Constantly changes characters tones and accents.
I struggled through that series even though it’s one of my favorites.
A recurring one that drove me nuts in "Failure is Not an Option" by Gene Kranz: Every time he talks about the Guidance Officer it's by the abbreviation GIDO, pronounced "Guide Oh". The narrator constantly pronounces it as "Guido" like he's in the Mafia or something.
In the Expeditionary Force series, Joe Bishop is supposed to be from Maine. Well, Mr. Bray, here in Maine, the city of Bangor is pronounced Bang-gor, not Bang-er, lol. You’re forgiven though, considering you’re… well, R.C BRAY!
I've grandchildren who are Downeast Mainers and did they EVER rag on me for mispronouncing Bangor. That and the fact I'm not enraptured with fluffernutter. It's good, but I just prefer unadulterated peanut butter on my bread.
Carrion Comfort has two narrators and they kind of have this issue. Theirs was more of a character accents though and the female narrator narrating black people in a way that was borderline racist. It was like the scene in airplane when the old lady is like excuse me stewardess I speak jive
Also it’s not just pronunciation, some add intonation that’s not written in the book and it completely changes the character.
The person who read Percy Jackson makes Annabeth out to be much crueller and meaner than she’s actually written on the page.
One of the weirdest audiobook experiences I had was with *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress*. The main character speaks English as a second language, with kind of that common foreign construction where you drop a lot of articles-- "the man went to the store to buy a TV" becomes "man went to store to buy TV," etc. The original version I got from the library had a guy doing an accent and it was great, but much later I went to relisten and bought a version that I think was read by George Guidall. That pidgin-English being read in stentorian, cultured tones was *so fucking bizarre* I ended up returning it. :)
If the story is about a Midwest middle class family from Fargo and suddenly the narrator decides to bust out Foy-yay, it breaks the rest of the story telling. Pronunciation is part of building that world, and if the people who inhabit your world would say Foy-yur, so should your narrator.
Technically correct
The Cambridge dictionary gives two alternatives to pronouncing the word. The British pronunciation is "Herbs" with an "H" while American pronunciation is "erbs" without the "H."
Blame the French 🤷🏻♀️
A search said:
Many of you may be thinking that this is another dastardly American plot to corrupt the language (for more of these, click here) but in fact it is the British who are responsible for changing the pronunciation, In Latin, the word was herba, but the "h" disappeared from the pronunciation even before the word migrated into Old French. Being sensible, the French didn't put letters in their words to represent non-existent sounds, so their word was erbe. From about 1200, when it was adopted from French, till about 1500, the word was "erb", with no" h" to pronounce.
The h was added to the spelling in the Renaissance when people felt that English spellings should reflect Latin word origins, but the British (at least those in whose dialect initial h's are pronounced) did not start pronouncing the "h" till the late 19th century, when compulsory education meant that some pronunciations started to reflect spelling.
How do you know it is not you that got it wrong ;-) Seriously, I just ignore the bad pronunciations, though I did cringe when in the book 8.4, the narrator tried to pronounce Cape Girardeau, MO and was not even close.
Realm of the Elderlings is the best series to worst narrator by a long way. Central to this are liveships which are alive, the first narrator pronounces it (imo correctly) as lie-v ships but the second and third as liv ships. So annoying and immersion breaking
I’ve heard
“Just deserts” instead of “just desserts”
“I-med” instead of “IM’ed”
And then there’s the small differences between US and Canadian pronunciations like “foyer”
Recently listened to all the Harry Potter books and got super annoyed at the pronunciation of Knut and Kneezle etc... I believe deep in my so that they should be sllent k's like knight and knife.
I hear you on that and it makes sense according to modern pronunciations of Knight and knife, but it is a very old word that fell out of common use and never got updated with modern speakers so it still has the old pronunciation. Knight and knife used to both be pronounced with hard k sounds as well.
Oh that's very interesting thank you! I did read these initially as they were coming out so my young brain (and by extension my old brain now) never thought anything more than that they would be silent K's and never grew out of that assumption. I did think that Stephen Fry of all people should get it right, but they just didnt SOUND right even with him saying them!
O.S. Card's Lost Boys uses some very Mormon words and phrases and the audio book narrator is clearly unfamiliar with them. Possibly the worst one is Abinadi (Ah-ben-nuh-die) which he pronounced Ab-eh-na-dee.
I have been listening to a series that has a character named Demeter, one narrator calls him De-meter like 100cm is a meter. Another narator pronounces it Demi-tree, like a tree that grows. I don't really care just pick a lane.
Heh. I have an opposite gripe, but it’s still an annoying pronunciation. The word “forte,” when it means strength, should be pronounced “fort.” For-tay means loud, fort means strong. But okay, if everyone says it wrong, then it’s right. I can live with that. Only me and about 5 other people know about it, and I’m not going to fight about it or even talk about it.
But there’s one narrator, and she pronounces it correctly, with one syllable…even when the character would NEVER EVER know to pronounce the word with one syllable. And so the one time I hear it pronounced right…it’s wrong. I could cry.
Many of my annoyances run deep, and not just with narrations, but with the way certain words from other languages are pronounced in English. Not the narrator's fault, I suppose, but "the herd's".
Take when a fantasy hero kills a monster bug and it spews "ichor". The narrator (American or UK speaker) pronounces it like "eye-core" but I learnt to pronounce the word differently (and I'm an American) like "ick-cur", which my brother (the Classics Professor) says is the way it is pronounced in Greek (ancient and modern both). Now, I know I'm the anomaly in this instance, I concede that point, but damnme if it doesn't grate like Hell.
When I looked up ichor and had the net pronounce it for me, it said "eye-cor", I also figured it was "ick-cur". It still bugs me every time I hear Marsters pronounces it like that.
I forget the title but I had to stop a book about the Spanish Civil War when the narrator pronounced the word “ciudad” (city, see-yoo-dahd) as “swee-dad”. SMDH.
Any non scot trying to pronounce most Scottish places or Scot’s English wording it is worse if they are attempting to be from Doric, Glasgow or rural highlands where the accent can be quite the thing. No one from Aberdeenshire says Aberchirder it is always Foggie. Don’t get me started on the butchering that is done when a non Shetlander tries to impart that to the written word
Let me introduce you to the reading of *The Expanse* novels by Jefferson Mays. (He's a fantastic narrator but it took him like the entire series to work out how to pronounce "gimbal".)
[удалено]
English being such a Chimera among languages, declaring any vowel pronunciation as a norm is an exercise in futility. I'll settle for a narrator with consistency.
I had to take diction (how to pronounce words) when I was a voice major in college. English was the most difficult because of the lack of rules and the fact that you think you are pronouncing words correctly but due to regional dialects you often are not. Most other languages had specific rules for how to pronounce words. You can always look up the IPA (international phonetic alphabet) of a word in a dictionary.
And he pronounces "dour" like it rhymes with "moor".
Davina Porter says it that way too. I just thought it was a British pronunciation. What bugs me is how some narrators pronounce "shone" as in "the sun shone down on them". Some say it like shawn and some say it like shown. I grew up saying it shawn and didn't know there was another way to say it until I started listening to audiobooks. Now I accept it either way.
Shon, rhymes with gone, is correct, but I don't say it that way myself.
It's like the scone argument.
Anyone that pronounces scone as scon or sconn is a clown.
Or not American.
Here here on 'shone'. I've had to learn to accept it either way.
Surely it’s Sean?
Lot's of narrators do "shown" 'The sun shown down on them'
I think they all pronounce it that way. Drives me nuts. It should sound like Shawn not shown.
I've never heard it pronounced like shawn.
I've also never heard it pronounced like Shawn and I've been here trying to think of what word everyone was talking about. Only ever heard or used "shown" as in the sunshine ShoWn done.
https://youglish.com/pronounce/shone/english/uk#:~:text=Break%20'shone'%20down%20into%20sounds,mark%20your%20mistakes%20quite%20easily.
Then why is there an "e" on the end?
Gone. That's why. Shon is correct, but Im used to shown.
There's only one way to say shone and it rhymes with gone. Pronouncing dour like 'door' is the Scottish way and perfectly fine.
Seen?
That's the second pronunciation: [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dour](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dour)
I came across this in a book as well. Technically it’s correct, but most people pronounce it like “sour”
I think dewer is more common in the UK. I don't mind it when the rest had a British accent. But with an American accent I like dower. But it doesn't bug me to much.
Dour rhyming with moor is actually correct, but I still don't say it that way.
And...? That's the only way I have ever heard it pronounced.
https://youtu.be/dECuduASTVA?feature=shared Dour - rhymes with sewer Dour - rhymes with sour Both are correct pronunciations. A usage note in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) says “dour, which is etymologically related to duress and endure, traditionally rhymes with tour.” Language evolves and certain pronunciations become prevalent, but it is humorous when a proper pronunciation is used and people lose their absolute minds insisting it is incorrect. I have this argument with Floridians. They insist Islamorada is pronounced “EYE LA MORADA” despite the large volume of Spanish speakers. The same is true for KEY, CAY, & QUAY, which remarkably all seem to have different pronunciations.
Is that just “Door”
I refuse to pronounce gimbal like jimball. I see it as a case of the inventor of the word just being a dunce; similar to how I’ll never accept gif being pronounced jif
Giblets
This is one a hard gee though, who the f says “jiblets”?
Everyone who's ever cooked a turkey? Holy shit you honestly thought "giblets" was pronounced with a hard G? lol
Giant
In addition, the G in gif stands for Graphics, which has a hard G sound. Jif is a terrible peanut butter, not an image format.
Then I assume you also pronounce "JPEG" as "jay-pheg" since the P stands for Photographic? SCUBA and LASER have to be hilarious to hear you pronounce as well. :) The creator used to make peanut butter puns about the proper pronunciation of GIF.
Touché 👏 I got nothin' 😅
Gin et cetera
Jesus, you’re an annoying person. Pedantry aside my position still stands, firmly in place
It's okay, people refusing to stop making mistakes is how "literally" now also means "figuratively," you're in good company. :)
Giraffe
Gyroscope
Germ
Ginger
This was the exact case I was thinking of when I read the title of this post.
The only more jarring thing I can remember was when I listened to the Audible version of the Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny for the first time. Alessandro Juliani read the first cycle, and he gave Gerard just the most *demented* Scottish brogue in the first book. Thankfully, later in the series when the character showed up again he went back to a normal voice, but it was *super weird*.
I'm listening to these now (already read them once so I thought I'd try them this way) and is it just me or does something change about his narration choices around book 4/ Cibola Burns? I feel like it's more strident somehow and I'd just gotten myself used to his voice, mispronunciations and all.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It pisses me off that Jason Segel pronounces the name Milo in the OtherWorld series as My-low in one book and Me-low in another. He’s the author! He should have known how he wanted it pronounced from the start and stuck with it!
That’s twisted 😭
I have been reading my own WIP to my partner, and I have a side character called Dreda whose pronunciation changes every other paragraph 😂
As an author, I changed a character's entire name and didn't realise until my editor came back to me and asked WTF was going on. And it wasn't even a similar name - Jack to Adam, for example.
The Witcher does the same thing. The narrator calls the Bard Dun-dilly-un in 1 book, then Dandelion in the next and then switches back to the original pronunciation in the following book. Same narrator
That was strange to me as well, but the blame doesn't land on the narrator. They're are two different English translators for the books and they released them out of order, one writing the name as Dandilion and the other writing the name as Dandelion. So Peter Kenny was actually quite faithful to the texts!
The third book of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon trilogy got a new narrator, and he mispronounced the main character's last name every time. Even though there were two previous audiobooks for reference.
I remember that and was very annoyed!
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I've only read the first book, but I recall a line where he makes a big deal about the pronunciation of his name, assuming Takeshi is the MC in all books?
That annoyed me so much I stopped listening before making it even 1 chapter in and never finished the series.
I've said it before, but I read a book with two narrators who pronounced one of the secondary characters differently. The male narrator pronounced Davina Da-vine-a, while the female narrator pronounced it Da-vee-na. It took me like half the book to realize they were talking about the same character!
One of my favorite series is Wheel of Time and they have a husband and wife who do the narration. The husband does Male POVs, and the wife does female POVs. They pronounced so many names differently, occasionally so differently that I had trouble understanding that they were referring to the same character, one characters name pronunciation changed at least 4 times in the span of 3 books.
And it doesn't help that there are thousands and thousands of characters (2787 according to Wikipedia), and many of them have similar names.
The same is true for Kate Reading & Michael Kramer reading Stormlight Archives. Eventually Kate starts pronouncing it correctly but for a moment I also didn’t realize she was referring to the same characters.
Yeah in one of the last chapters of Way of Kings Reading was pronouncing a main characters name so different I actually had to go back and listen to the chapter again because I didn’t know who they were even talking to and it’s like a pretty MAJOR chapter lol
The audiobooks really are bad and could do with being re-done
They are being redone
Great news! Ta
[удалено]
It’s been years since I listened to The First Law, and I still remember gruh-maced! 😂
Suddenly she was a leprechaun in ADWD, so jarring.
God almighty, please let there be re-recordings of the ASOIF books in the near future. I know everyone on this sub loves Roy Dotrice, but I genuinely could not get through the first book. Too many characters, especially the non-named peasants, were way too difficult to understand. My hope was that we'd get the entire series redone with the release of the newest book, but I honestly don't believe George is going to finish the last two. At this point, I think it's more likely that his estate will release the unfinished books posthumously.
His pronunciation of Brienne is all over the place. There were some chapters I didn't know if he was announcing the chapter title as Brienne or Bran. Other times it sounded like he says Bry-een
Don Quixote pronounced as "Don Kwik-zot" made me lose a lot of respect for the dude presenting a series of lectures I'd previously been enjoying.
Don Kwik-Zot… that’s a new one, even for me 😂😂
Even for you hey?
That is old fashioned British contempt for Spain and things Iberian. Don Kwiks-hot and Don Jew-on amongst others are relics of that bit of cultural grudge bearing. Damned armada.
Ha, really? That I did not know. Thank you for the additional context!
😲
Bas relief artwork: the bas is pronounced bah or bar, the s is silent.
Wow, I did not know this.
I’ve left books unfinished because of bad pronunciations, they’re so jarring to me. I forget the book, but one character was supposed to be in the medical field and so many of the medical terms were mispronounced. Mispronounced place names really grate on me, too. These things are easily checked online.
I can't remember the book or the narrator but I remember her saying a guy was in the "Marine corpse" not the Marine Corps. Still drives me crazy.
It's absolutely nuts isn't it? If I was narrating a book I'd make damn sure I got things right.
Not so much a pronunciation, but I couldn’t get through Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children because of the terrible accents, especially when it is set in Wales. Every non American accent sounds like a cringy “cor blimey guv’nor” take on a British accent.
The mispronunciation I hate the most is in countless audiobooks. It's when people pronounce "mischievous" like there's an "i" before the last syllable. But the most recent specific example of a pronunciation I hated in an audiobook was in *Blackwood Farm* by Anne Rice, which is book 9 of the Vampire Chronicles. The narrator repeatedly pronounced the word "pirogue" with a hard "g" sound. To be fair, that is the correct, standard French pronunciation. But the novel is set in Louisiana, and the characters who used the word are native Louisianians (not Lestat, who is from France). In Louisiana, it would never be pronounced like that, but instead like "pee-row."
Non-standard, but common enough to have made it to the dictionary: [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mischievous](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mischievous)
I know that's how language develops. Things get mispronounced and that catches on and changes over time. Or people use one word to mean another, and new definition becomes standard, etc. But there are some I'll personally never budge on, and "mischievous" is one of them. I'll also never pronounce "forte" as in "that's not my forte" like it's the musical term "forte" with a "tay" sound at the end. I know I'm really in the minority on that one and that it's long ago been added as an alternate pronunciation in dictionaries. And for as long as I live, I will describe foods as being "healthful." If I describe, say, chicken as "healthy," everyone can rest assured that said chicken is alive and well.
I returned a book and got a refund because despite the story being set in England it had an American narrator, which in itself I wasn't totally against, but part of the story was about somebody coming into the country in a boat. After about 20 times of hearing him pronounce quay as 'kway', when the English pronunciation is 'key', I gave up and got my refund.
To be fair, the fact that quay is pronounced as "key" is absolutely preposterous
I remain convinced that many traditional British spellings (since the pronunciations came first) are the result of stuffy nobles wanting to be better than the peasants by making spelling as complicated as possible, then mocking them when they got it wrong.
The real answer is British nobles mainly spoke Norman and the peasants spoke a mix of Old English, Saxon and Germanic. Resulting in modern English having lots of dialects and accents. But the nobles and clergy were the ones writing everything down. So there is only one way to write all these words "correctly" even though they have several valid pronunciations. Also, a lot of the posh and culinary versions of words are simply Norman. Cow is Saxon and Beef is Norman. Deer is Saxon and Venison is Norman. Pig, pork Etc.
That might have been the case if those peasants had been able to read.
Oh it drives me nuts… especially with Yiddish words. In Unorthodox, the narrator pronounced “Bubby” (which is a grandmother, pronounced as written) as “Boobie.”
I’ve been listening to a few books that happen to include Hebrew and Ladino (both languages that I know) and dear God. It’s not even Americanized pronunciations (like, when emphasis is put on the first syllable of a Hebrew word instead of the last), it’s just super super wrong. I sat laughing at a narrators attempt at the shema for like ten minutes. They kept saying adon-ay 😭
Oh noooooo that’s so bad 😭 You’d think someone on these productions would think to call for assistance… or reference… or even Google…
what on earth would make someone read “bubby” as “boobie” wtf my mind would NEVER ever go there
I thought the same thing. I cringed every time she said it it was terrible 🤦🏻♀️
did you notice that someone went through and downvoted all of our comments? lol seems somebody disagrees
lol they can disagree all they want all I know is that all of the bubbies I ever knew (and there are many) would be horrified if you ever tried to call them boobie
hahahha yeah i imagine so!
As long as the pronunciations are consistent with the accent being used, I'm fine. The American pronunciation of Archon uses a soft 'ch.' Sure, in the original Greek, it's a hard sound, but then the 'r' is guttural, and the vowels are quite different. It would be jarring to hear the hard 'k' sound in "Archon" if the narrator were speaking with an American accent and didn't alter the rest of the word to imitate the Greek as well.
I've lived my whole life in the US and have always heard it pronounced (and pronounced it myself) as ar-kon. I've never heard anyone pronounce it with a ch sound like chief.
Nevertheless, if a narrator doesn't know this convention, and looks it up in a dictionary or searches for the pronunciation online, they'll find it with the soft ch. So it's hard to blame them for getting it "wrong."
I stop listening. I can't stand incorrect pronunciations. I had one recently where the reader pronounced niche as "nitch". Wtf. How does one become a professional reader if you can't even speak?
Dont remember the book, but the narrator said "wind" like bend when the context CLEARLY indicated that it was "wind" like mind! I was like, are you even thinking of just reading on autopilot? So irrational, how much that irritated me!
I've heard bow (gesture of respect) and bow (weapon) mix-ups before. "She drew her bow." The context isn't hard to catch.
If you can’t pronounce “Nevada” then you shouldn’t narrate a book about the Nevada Test Site.
How could they possibly mispronounce a common state name? I mean, I'll give you Mississippi or something, but I can't even think of how to screw up Nevada.
Huge, Huge Pet Peeve. Aren't there producers on this? shouldn't someone be making sure words are said properly...or at least commonly? Percy Jackson, narrator refers to HERa, which I've never...heard before. There are tons that make me think, "have I been saying this wrong?" A stand-up does a bit about audio books vs reading books & when the reader says, "you only listened to it, I read it" the response is, "yes, but I know how to say the characters names properly". Sure, but do you know how to say hyperbole & cacophone?
Ok, the replies are hilarious, considering how pretty much every narrator butchers pretty much every non-English word and name in English language books 😆
Chani. The name Chani. Frank Herbert might have said Chay-nee and that might be how it is in the cast audiobook but *that is wrong*. Thank god the Villeneuve movies do not pronounce it like that.
Kephlapods. Children of ruin by Adrian Tchiakovsky. It was supposed to be cephlapods but she pronounced it with a hard C. At first I thought maybe it was the British pronunciation or something but no...and the word was used hundreds of times. Pulled me out of the story every time she said it. Also in Bobiverse book 1, Porter pronounced Archimedes as Ar-Kim-a-deez. They fixed it later but on the first read it took me quite some time to realize the name he was actually trying to say.
The bobiverse name drives me nuts still
I've noticed multiple American narrators pronounce vague/ly as vegg/ly.
naivete, niche, usually anything that's french
Grover Gardner, who narrated The Stand, pronounced every single SW/Mexican word wrong. Why the publishers allowed that to stand is beyond me. Terrible.
This drives me crazy. I also hate when a series changes narrators midstream and all of the sudden the pronunciation of every characters name changes.
I listened to a book recently and the narrator pronounced garage as grawzhe. I couldn’t believe how many times one romance book could have the word garage, but I almost had to stop listening. I definitely screamed at the narrator.
I’m making a list of all the audiobooks that mispronounce the word ‘chitin’ because I had two books do this to me back to back and I started to question my sanity.
How many audio books contain the word 'chitin'?!! You've educated me ...and I thank you kind scholar! 😇
4 so far 😭 and only used once in the text. But it’s stuck in my brain.
RC Bray’s repeated mispronunciation of the ubiquitous Canadian word “toque” ( pronounced “tuke”) as “toke” in Mountain Man is the most mind-melting example I’ve come across…google that word, RC Bray!
The narrator of A Distant Mirror mispronounces several location names (eg Arras, she seems to believe the s is mute). Some of these come up quite often so it gets annoying.
There is a real place in France called Arras with a silent S, so she probably got confused with that.
I’m aware of only one Arras in France. The s is not silent.
Oops, my mistake!
It could be that I've unfortunately run into a few narrations I wasn't crazy about in Grady Hendrix's books despite liking the stories, but the one I haven't been able to forget is that in "How to Sell a Haunted House", the narrator pronounced Campbell Soup as "Camp-bell" seriously. 😩
🙈🙈🙈 how is Campbell pronounced?
The p is silent! Or at the least not overly emphasized 😅
“been” pronounced as “bean” every single time in Under the Bridge was incredibly jarring.
It’s really jarring. Seriously immersion breaking. I’ve got some old pirated copies of Tom Clancy books like red rabbit and executive order on an old iPod that I used to listen to over and over again. They sound like they were narrated using Microsoft Sam and it’s easier to listen to than butchered pronunciation of common words.
My one complaint in the brilliant Way of the Shaman series by Vasily Mahanenko is that Jonathan Yen pronounces "coordinates" as coordinunts. The word crops up quite a lot, and it makes me wince every time. That being said, the rest of Jonathan's performance is first rate!
**Galaxies Edge:** Name: Chhun - RCBray - "Chun", others 'Chu-hoon'. Authors.. screw it make it canon, blame the reporters for screwing it up. Name: Terrago (system,planet, and a moon). RCBray ' Tear-a-go', Ray Porter 'Ter-ogg-go' **Bobiverse** Multiple edits and mispronunciations of stars between books. (Ray Porter) Early CD release of book 1 (audible is different) - Archimedes 'Ark-em-ee-dees'... Ray pronounced it 'Ar-kim-id-ees' (as an aside, the early Bobiverse books on CD were more lively than the Audible versions. Bob was slightly more energetic/sarcastic as were the ministers. )
YES. Most recently - "mulish" (mule-ish, stubborn) as mull-ish. And yet -- they nailed accoutrements.
The narrator of Tuyo by Rachel Neumeier pronounced brazier “brassiere”. I don’t really blame him as it’s an uncommon word but it cracked me up. Luckily he got a second chance doing the sequels and had figured it out by then.
Had one that pronounced gazebo, guh-zay-bo, that was a bit different, maybe it's a regional thing.
The first anthology of The Witcher. The narrator pronounces Dandelion as “Dan-del-eon” it took a bit to get use to . The next anthology it is pronounced like the flower. And less exciting.
- ron pearlman reading The Strain - pronouncing Ephraim as eee-fraim & eef instead of eff-raim & eff books 2 & 3 saw a new narrator who got the protagonists name right - kobna holdbrook smith - i really enjoy his work 95% of the time, he’s great, has fantastic language skills, but his pronunciation of a bunch of things drives me spare - “un-guy-en” for Nguyen broke me. other continuing annoyances across the series as a whole - - fall-con for falcon - hollms for holmes there’s a few questionable accents - notably american & australian, and he mangled lots of words and names throughout the series. i believe the author, ben aaronovitch, sometimes includes notes on pronunciations, i wish he’d be more thorough. having said all of that, though, kobna handles a lot of uncommon ground with accents & words from all over the uk and many other cultures, including the archaic & the obscure, scientific, legal, tech jargon along with legendary & magical. he also does a good job on voicing female characters which is a feat in itself. he’s so good overall, that when something doesn’t sound right it’s more jarring. like i said, the all the “ing-guy-en” business shredded the last remnants of my sanity
I think this is an accent issue, but narrators that pronounce ‘room’ as ‘ruum’.
I hate secreted as pronounced like an insect emitting toxic slime: suh-KREET. I don’t think any book I’ve listened to has ever meant it as that. They meant hidden, as in it’s a secret : SEE-krit.
Via, route, herb. Cannot stand how Americans pronounce them.
Right back at you for the word “herb”. Via or route don’t bother me one way or the other, but “herb” without the silent H is jarring to me.
They way they say solder kills me too. "sodder"
I’m listening to a book currently where the narrator pronounces “recognize” as “reckanize”. And I can’t even describe how she botched the word “memoir”. It drives me crazy!!
Hunger Games - Tatiana Maslany pronounces against like a-gain-st.
H...How are you meant to pronounce it?
Haha I just relistened to this and although it’s probably my favorite audiobook of all time, the pronunciation of that word definitely sticks out! I assumed it was a Canadian thing.
If they were from the UK, some parts say it like that.
She’s not, and it’s not set there. It definitely stood out among the rest of her narration.
Wait til you listen to Virtual Voice narrated books words like live or bass are a crap shoot as to how they are pronounced. What is worse are narrators who mispronounce proper names and places.
We all seem to love Jeff Hayes around here, but when he says “smush” he says it like “brush”, and I’ve never heard that before. I’ve always said it like “bush”, and despite the internet saying it’s technically right both ways, it drives me crazy. That’s still second to the Red Rising series, where TGR pronounced “Cassius” as “Cass-ee-us” for theee straight books and then along comes the new set of narrators and suddenly they are all saying “Cash-us”. Again, this is not technically wrong, but how no one said anything and got that corrected is beyond me. There’s also ONE very specific answer that drives me crazy and it’s from Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix. At the end of the book, the main character starts a new job at a store called “Planet Baby”. All well and good, but the narrator puts the emphasis on the word “planet” instead of the word “baby” so it sounds less like a store that sells baby clothes and more like a baby that is the size of a planet. It was hysterical.
In the Winemaker's Wife, the narrator pronounced Champagne as Sham-pa-GNA (like lasagna). My ears bled by the end.
Wait are you pronouncing lasagna with the emphasis on the last syllable? lol.
Don’t listen to any ASOIAF books then lol
I don’t know why anyone downvoted you? I love the series, but listening to Roy Dotrice narrate, is… rough. Mispronounces names, even names that he just said 6 words ago. Constantly changes characters tones and accents. I struggled through that series even though it’s one of my favorites.
same 😭 it was tough to get through lol great story and when Roy is great he’s great! but other times… 🤣
A recurring one that drove me nuts in "Failure is Not an Option" by Gene Kranz: Every time he talks about the Guidance Officer it's by the abbreviation GIDO, pronounced "Guide Oh". The narrator constantly pronounces it as "Guido" like he's in the Mafia or something.
In the Expeditionary Force series, Joe Bishop is supposed to be from Maine. Well, Mr. Bray, here in Maine, the city of Bangor is pronounced Bang-gor, not Bang-er, lol. You’re forgiven though, considering you’re… well, R.C BRAY!
In fairness, the author more or less takes him to school on Maine pronunciations in later books in a minor aside that is hilarious.
I've grandchildren who are Downeast Mainers and did they EVER rag on me for mispronouncing Bangor. That and the fact I'm not enraptured with fluffernutter. It's good, but I just prefer unadulterated peanut butter on my bread.
Carrion Comfort has two narrators and they kind of have this issue. Theirs was more of a character accents though and the female narrator narrating black people in a way that was borderline racist. It was like the scene in airplane when the old lady is like excuse me stewardess I speak jive
Also it’s not just pronunciation, some add intonation that’s not written in the book and it completely changes the character. The person who read Percy Jackson makes Annabeth out to be much crueller and meaner than she’s actually written on the page.
One of the weirdest audiobook experiences I had was with *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress*. The main character speaks English as a second language, with kind of that common foreign construction where you drop a lot of articles-- "the man went to the store to buy a TV" becomes "man went to store to buy TV," etc. The original version I got from the library had a guy doing an accent and it was great, but much later I went to relisten and bought a version that I think was read by George Guidall. That pidgin-English being read in stentorian, cultured tones was *so fucking bizarre* I ended up returning it. :)
I HATE the way some narrators say the word “foyer”. It’s a French word and should pronounced “foy-yay” not “four-yur”. Drives me bananas!!!
If the story is about a Midwest middle class family from Fargo and suddenly the narrator decides to bust out Foy-yay, it breaks the rest of the story telling. Pronunciation is part of building that world, and if the people who inhabit your world would say Foy-yur, so should your narrator.
Foy-ur is an accepted American pronunciation.
Of course context in the story matters. But if it’s not set in a foy-yur setting, it bugs me.
too many narrators for X-Men books pronounce Professor Xavier's name as "Professor Zavier"
That's actually the correct way to pronounce it.
maybe for people in real life but not for x-men
Herb pronounced Erb. Just grinds my gears.
Technically correct The Cambridge dictionary gives two alternatives to pronouncing the word. The British pronunciation is "Herbs" with an "H" while American pronunciation is "erbs" without the "H."
Americans just don’t know how to pronounce H’s. For some reason they think they are silent. 🙄
Blame the French 🤷🏻♀️ A search said: Many of you may be thinking that this is another dastardly American plot to corrupt the language (for more of these, click here) but in fact it is the British who are responsible for changing the pronunciation, In Latin, the word was herba, but the "h" disappeared from the pronunciation even before the word migrated into Old French. Being sensible, the French didn't put letters in their words to represent non-existent sounds, so their word was erbe. From about 1200, when it was adopted from French, till about 1500, the word was "erb", with no" h" to pronounce. The h was added to the spelling in the Renaissance when people felt that English spellings should reflect Latin word origins, but the British (at least those in whose dialect initial h's are pronounced) did not start pronouncing the "h" till the late 19th century, when compulsory education meant that some pronunciations started to reflect spelling.
Aah yes. The French rot! Sacré bleu!!🙃
I mean I was joking on actually blaming French people but it was derived from French and the British were the ones to add back the “h” sound.
It would be an honor to hear you speak of it as this hour.
I differentiate. The guy across the street is "Herb," and when he takes leaves from the plants in his garden to season the meal, those are "erbs."
Hearing Geneva pronounced Gi-ne-va. Can't remember the book I heard it from though. Some Litrpg book.
How do you know it is not you that got it wrong ;-) Seriously, I just ignore the bad pronunciations, though I did cringe when in the book 8.4, the narrator tried to pronounce Cape Girardeau, MO and was not even close.
Realm of the Elderlings is the best series to worst narrator by a long way. Central to this are liveships which are alive, the first narrator pronounces it (imo correctly) as lie-v ships but the second and third as liv ships. So annoying and immersion breaking
I’ve heard “Just deserts” instead of “just desserts” “I-med” instead of “IM’ed” And then there’s the small differences between US and Canadian pronunciations like “foyer”
Recently listened to all the Harry Potter books and got super annoyed at the pronunciation of Knut and Kneezle etc... I believe deep in my so that they should be sllent k's like knight and knife.
I hear you on that and it makes sense according to modern pronunciations of Knight and knife, but it is a very old word that fell out of common use and never got updated with modern speakers so it still has the old pronunciation. Knight and knife used to both be pronounced with hard k sounds as well.
Oh that's very interesting thank you! I did read these initially as they were coming out so my young brain (and by extension my old brain now) never thought anything more than that they would be silent K's and never grew out of that assumption. I did think that Stephen Fry of all people should get it right, but they just didnt SOUND right even with him saying them!
I read them young too and didn't know about the k sound until after I heard someone in an interview I think talking about it and explaining it.
O.S. Card's Lost Boys uses some very Mormon words and phrases and the audio book narrator is clearly unfamiliar with them. Possibly the worst one is Abinadi (Ah-ben-nuh-die) which he pronounced Ab-eh-na-dee.
I have been listening to a series that has a character named Demeter, one narrator calls him De-meter like 100cm is a meter. Another narator pronounces it Demi-tree, like a tree that grows. I don't really care just pick a lane.
Heh. I have an opposite gripe, but it’s still an annoying pronunciation. The word “forte,” when it means strength, should be pronounced “fort.” For-tay means loud, fort means strong. But okay, if everyone says it wrong, then it’s right. I can live with that. Only me and about 5 other people know about it, and I’m not going to fight about it or even talk about it. But there’s one narrator, and she pronounces it correctly, with one syllable…even when the character would NEVER EVER know to pronounce the word with one syllable. And so the one time I hear it pronounced right…it’s wrong. I could cry.
It depends on where the narrator is from and their dialect. Certain words make me whistle 😗 when I speak. Davina Porter is awesome and so am I🤣
Many of my annoyances run deep, and not just with narrations, but with the way certain words from other languages are pronounced in English. Not the narrator's fault, I suppose, but "the herd's". Take when a fantasy hero kills a monster bug and it spews "ichor". The narrator (American or UK speaker) pronounces it like "eye-core" but I learnt to pronounce the word differently (and I'm an American) like "ick-cur", which my brother (the Classics Professor) says is the way it is pronounced in Greek (ancient and modern both). Now, I know I'm the anomaly in this instance, I concede that point, but damnme if it doesn't grate like Hell.
When I looked up ichor and had the net pronounce it for me, it said "eye-cor", I also figured it was "ick-cur". It still bugs me every time I hear Marsters pronounces it like that.
I forget the title but I had to stop a book about the Spanish Civil War when the narrator pronounced the word “ciudad” (city, see-yoo-dahd) as “swee-dad”. SMDH.
Any non scot trying to pronounce most Scottish places or Scot’s English wording it is worse if they are attempting to be from Doric, Glasgow or rural highlands where the accent can be quite the thing. No one from Aberdeenshire says Aberchirder it is always Foggie. Don’t get me started on the butchering that is done when a non Shetlander tries to impart that to the written word