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Comment by overthemoon | Hacker News Reader

This is very cool.

I looked up words that have always tripped me up, including banal, brood, indefatigable, preternatural, conch, niche. Indefatigable, banal, and conch had some conflicting ones but the "correct" one occurred enough times that I got the idea. ("Brood" probably isn't commonly mispronounced, I just got it mixed up early in life and never quite got it sorted it out. :)

The results for "niche" are consistently mixed up though, which means that word will continue to drive me insane. Neesh or nitch!? I mix it up when I use it without any rhyme or reason.

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Words which are derived or introduced from foreign languages (common in English) can have varying pronunciations. Some people tend to pronounce it close to how it sounds in the original language, others pronounce it with a more native English (be it American, Australian, British, etc.) accent. 'Croissant' 'Chic' 'Bouquet' 'Renaissance' etc.

Then other words which are more native English words (even if they have Latin, Old French, Greek or proto Germanic roots) will have regional variations.

For example 'Tuna' and 'Tuner' can have their pronunciations switched in some parts of the US.

I find it interesting that British English speakers are much more likely to pronounce the english sounding version rather than close to how it sounds in the original language.

For example, pretty much across the board I hear "filet" pronounced with the 't' in British English. But Americans almost always a silent 't' like the French.

Your comment led me to check: although there's just a few British persons saying filet, they all pronounce it the "English way", except when it precedes "mignon". Which makes sense, I guess.

The only place I've ever seen filet separated from mignon is McDonald's. Everything else is fillet.

as a brit, I would say 'tuna' and 'tuner' exactly the same

Hearing 'piano \tuna\' and '\tuna\ sandwich' is not odd.

Hearing 'piano \tuna\' and '\tuner\ sandwich' sounds different. It exists.

If by "it exists", you mean that there are dialects in which those are the pronunciations of "piano tuner" and "tuna sandwich" then I'd like to know more, but I've met many people who speak dialects without the so-called intrusive R and don't understand how it works (but think they do). With intrusive R you get "tuner and mayo" but not "tuner sandwich".

When english results are split in engish it is usually american english vs british english (which is often also spoken in australia and india)

I can't say if that is the case here, but that is what I would suspect. As a british person I have usually heard it and used it as 'neesh'

It only seems to be some Americans pronounce it nitch, so maybe regional there, though I couldn't guess where or which is most common. Here in the UK essentially always neesh.

It is from French after all.

Edit: American audiobooks on the other hand seem to go 100% with nitch for some unexplainable reason.

> It is from French after all.

This is funny to me because I often see people on the internet mentioning how strange it is that Americans leave off the 'h' when pronouncing 'herb'.

Kind of weird considering how often British speakers will drop h in other words:

“Allo, allo, what ave we ere,” said the stereotypical constable.

It is fairly unusual for American not to Anglicise pronunciations so it seems to stand as odd one out. Then again you kept the original "correct" pronunciation of herb - it was British English that changed for some reason.

Even the poshest Brit will put the H in herb now.

> It is fairly unusual for American not to Anglicise pronunciations

Anecdotal, but I think this is only true for French. For example, I think U.S. Americans (even those with no Latin American ethnic background) are much more likely to pronounce Spanish loanwords in a way that's closer to the original than Brits are.

If my anecdotal belief is correct, I suppose it's largely because of the very close contact between the U.K. and France on the one hand, and the U.S. and Latin America on the other.

Wait, some people pronounce herb with the 'h' not silent?

British: https://youglish.com/search/herb/uk?

Funnily enough the result I got is completely irrelevant: the sentence is "welcome her back to stage".

The sentence does make sense. Its actually:

"so please welcome Herb Kim back to stage."

Yeah, British people. Not sure about other English speaking nations.

To add to the irony, I have a British accent which often drops (initial) Hs but I cringe whenever I hear 'erbal'.

>It is from French after all.

And yet the British say "filet" with a hard 't'? I have never heard anything but the French pronunciation in the US.

I believe BEng distinguishes "fillet" (with a final t) from "filet" (without), the former having been borrowed from French when it still had a /t/ at the end, and the latter being a later re-borrowing (usually in phrases like filet mignon). Something like "filet of fish sandwich" comes across as a humourously fancy name for a pretty ordinary meal.

In mechanical drawing terminology, we pronounce it with a hard "t".

Fillets or rounds are placed features that round off or cap interior or exterior corners or features of a part.

I wonder if our French-Canadian friends to the north might be the reason Americans pronounce it the French way instead of the British way?

It's hard to say "filleted" with the french pronunciation.

it's like being skinned with an epenthetic vowel

That's about 50:50 - probably along regional lines.

According to the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary it is:

niche niːʃ nɪtʃ ǁ nɪtʃ — Preference poll, British English: niːʃ 95%, nɪtʃ 5%. In American English only nɪtʃ.

Hrm. American here. I always say "neesh," and I rarely hear "nitch" from other Americans. Wondering whether this is a regional thing.

I’m not familiar with that notation, can you provide some guidance on what those different pronunciations sound like in layman‘s terms?

niːʃ is "neesh". nɪtʃ is "nitch".

However, I'm American, and I anecdotally disagree that "nitch" is the only pronunciation. I exclusively use "neesh" and I regularly hear both pronunciations from other Americans.

When you get inconsistent answers, there might be a deeper reason.

Banal was pronounced like anal, but people got embarassed sometime in the 20th century and started starting saying canal. I like anal.

Variations of indefatigable and preternatural are probably from people who have read it but never heard it pronounced (a. The funny/common example is hyperbole/hyperbolic. It's the stress that is most butchered, which cascades into vowels being pronounced differently. Heurstics in this matter can be internalized and improved.

Niche is one possible outcome of anglicization, which is complex and has different results, mostly depending on how common the word ends up. The more foreign-like (French) is neesh. The more anglicized is nich. Neither are worthy of ridicule (which usually comes from the ignorant, and is another topic altogether). Just avoid mixing the two: Never "neech" (like Nietchze) or "nish", which will make me laugh.

The pronunciation of niche has to do with french not pronouncing ch differently from sh. This is somewhat problematic for french people pronouncing Asian words transliterated in Latin alphabets; they will consistently pronounce ch exactly like sh (« konishiwa », …) (Pikachu is mostly pronounced correctly though.)

GIF is another curiously undecided word. I'm also reminded of "gigawatt", which was widely mispronounced following "Back to the Future" in 1985, but is now generally pronounced correctly. I attribute the change to the introduction of gigabyte hard drives.

"Giga" can be pronounced both ways, AFAIK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga-#Pronunciation

Good catch! Among my friends, though, "1.21 jigawatts" is still a funny joke.

>Neesh or nitch!?

I only heard the latter pronunciation fairly recently via a YouTuber, who would say "There are riches in nitches" as a mantra. At first, I put it down to a form of colloquialism and it took me a while to figure out, that he meant 'niches'.