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Comment by dkdbejwi383 | Hacker News Reader

> It's happened again and again with other words. "often" (older pronunciation: "offen"), "Anthony" (older pronunciation: "Antony") and "tortoise" (older pronunciation: "tortuss") are examples where the spelling pronunciation still hasn't totally won out.

What are the "new" pronunciations for these? I'm a native speaker and I'd pronounce them the way you've indicated is "older".

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Yeah and my mom would even scold me, growing up, for pronouncing the t in often.

Follow-up shower thought: French kids must deal with that on steroids, since a) most terminal consonant letters are silent, and b) it's mandatory to contract <le> to <l'> before a word that stars with a vowel sound. (Used <> as quotation markers just because the other options make it hard to parse.)

You must be a posh RP speaker ;-)

The way I hear them here in the North (of England), from most common folks, is Of-Ten, An-th-ony (with TH from "the"), and Tor-Toy-s. The T in "often" can be very short but it's definitely there.

In Canadian English we use the "Antony" and "tortuss" pronunciations as well. For "often", I usually only pronounce the 't' if the word is stressed in the sentence.

> An-th-ony (with TH from "the")

Out of curiosity, is it definitely the voiced TH from "the," rather than the unvoiced TH from "thing?"

In the US the spelling pronunciation of Anthony is by far the more common (at least in my experience), but I've never heard it with a voiced TH.

I think they must have meant the unvoiced "th" from "thing" not the voiced "th from "the". I've only ever heard "Anþony". I can't imagine any native English speaker saying "Anðony" unless they're drunk or otherwise slurring their speech significantly.

off-ten An-thunny tor-toys

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